Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Benjamin

Benjamin’s line lands like a blade wrapped in lace: polemics, he suggests, can feel intimate, even “loving,” while remaining fundamentally predatory. The cannibal simile is deliberately obscene, not for shock’s sake but to expose a cultural alibi. Criticism likes to imagine itself as devotion to the text, a careful attention, a kind of stewardship. Benjamin punctures that self-image by insisting that the polemicist’s intimacy is instrumental. The seasoning is refinement: style, quotation, erudition, the little courtesies of close reading. The baby is the book: helpless before the adult appetite of ideology.

The intent is not anti-criticism; it’s anti-bad-faith criticism. “Genuine” is the tell. He’s distinguishing the true polemicist from the neutral reviewer. A genuine polemic doesn’t merely disagree; it needs the book as raw material, something to ingest and metabolize into a larger campaign. That’s why the metaphor turns on “approach”: the moment of contact is already contaminated by desire. The polemicist doesn’t enter with questions but with hunger.

Context matters. Writing in a Europe where aesthetic debates were proxy wars for politics, Benjamin watched culture become a battlefield - and criticism become an extension of party line, nationalism, or fashionable contempt. The cruelty in the image also anticipates his wider anxiety about modernity’s ability to aestheticize violence. If you can make cannibalism sound like cuisine, you can make intellectual destruction look like care. That’s the real accusation: polemics don’t just kill a book; they make the killing tasteful.