Dancing on Walter Benjamin’s grave, in this book, Michael Taussig is in some ways his reincarnation; born in Sydney in 1940, the same year that Benjamin, trying to escape the Nazis, died in Port Bou, on the edge of the Pyrenees. The dance that Taussig performs is of course a homage to the great intellectual: the most inspired thinker coming out of the Frankfurt school, the most uncompromising, and the most writerly and experimental. Benjamin was a broad thinker, in the best sense. He did not think and write for the benefit of a discipline, but he taught his readers to weave together understandings of contemporary culture, coupled with a Nietzschian sense of history shot through with the ‘profane illumination’ of ancient myths whose impulses always throb in human dreams.

Thus Taussig tells us how culture works, no less, in this series of essays about the legacy of Benjamin, about how the sun gives without receiving, the creative liminal space of the beach, the New York police post-9/11, a pact with the devil, and the complicity of magic and the body, flowers and death. If only more writers could have the courage of their insights, the loyalty to their own history, even to their own friends. Other writers, longing for recognition, type (with one eye on the prize) into the generic frames for the saleable novel. Such writers would have believed the lies and clichés of commodity capitalism. Taussig offers more than one way to remember that this was not always the way, and need not always be the way.