In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory TO READ WALTER BENJAMIN's autobiographical writings is to engage with much more, and much less, than the story of his life. What they might lack in coherent detail, especially in regard to Benjamin's adult life, is an absence indicative of the many questions they articulate about the identity of the self, the nature of experience, and the possibility of giving expression to both within modernity. While the figure of Benjamin has assumed numerous guises in the now nearly seventy years since his death in 1940 — among them, the Marxist critic, the Jewish mystic, the “last European” — the image he presents of himself in his own writings is too variegated to allow for any single designation to be adequate. The task confronting the reader is to engage with the image Benjamin constructs of himself as carefully and critically as when approaching one of his own enigmatic constellations or “thought-images.” This is a challenge complicated by what is perhaps an ironic twist in the course of Benjamin's reception, as his image has become imbued with a certain cult value in recent decades, at times generating an overly reverent aura around the same thinker who famously diagnosed its demise.

How then to picture Benjamin today? His autobiographical writings seem a good place to start. First, however, it is important to realize that in sketching Benjamin, or for that matter sketching Benjamin sketching Benjamin, we are also portraying ourselves at a given moment: our critical categories, theoretical assumptions, and modes of representation. It should probably come as no surprise that, in addition to an ever-growing literature on Benjamin's life and work, with each study showing traces of its own intellectual, disciplinary or political agenda, there are now Benjamin pages on Facebook and MySpace, lending such Web sites dubious confirmation as one of the most prominent stages for our own acts of early twenty-first-century “self”-portraiture.