Abstract
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. 2 In suggesting to approach the interface between the two authors through the concept of elective affinities, the objective is to explore the dialogue between their thought. Elective affinity is defined as a particular type of relationship between ideas, social or cultural configurations, not reducible to causal determination directly or to the influence in the traditional sense.
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