Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin: Eros of Friendship and Elective Affinities in Dark Times

When we talk about the relationship between Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940) the friendship between the two authors is always remembered. The philosopher Hans Jonas -
Arendt's friend since they were classmates at the University in Marburg – in the tributes paid on the
occasion of her death, highlighted her vocation for friendship. According to him, what moved her was the
Eros of friendship (Eros der Freundschaft).
Among her closest friends, there was Walter Benjamin, with whom she was familiar during the exile in
Paris, in the years from 1936 to 1940. What I would like to show is that friendship as conceived and grown
in practice by the two thinkers would be in the center of their life as a moral trace. This paper aims to
broaden the relationship between Arendt and Benjamin in two areas here interrelated: friendship, built in
the situation of Jewish-German refugees philosophers in Paris, and the elective affinities in relation to the
vision of modernity and to the concept of history.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.