Horkheimer’s unpredictable funding pattern read as sadistic to Benjamin

Evidence

Horkheimer displayed both caution and openmindedness, just as he had done when Fromm joined the Institute, by recognizing Benjamin’s project as an enrichment of materialist theory and having the Institute support it financiallyeven if he did this in an indecisive and unpredictable way characteristic of the Institute’s directors. (The fact that this attitude appears almost sadistic in Benjamin’s letters to Scholem was largely due to the difficulty of Benjamin’s character. Benjamin still thought that the world was obliged to provide for him, so that he could devote himself to his intellectual work completely.) In Benjamin, Horkheimer was supporting the man who, when the dialectics project became a reality, was to turn out to be virtually its guiding star. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 774

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s sense of entitlement connects to the broader portrait of intellectual patronage dependency in the Weimar/exile milieu, and to Adorno’s later friction with Benjamin over commodification and aura.