Howard Eiland

Early in his life, Walter Benjamin committed himself to a typically paradoxical idea: Die Freundschaft der fremden Freunde—the friendship of friends who remain strange to each other even in their closeness. Such strangeness in the midst of intimacy forms the heart of this foray into the lives and friendships of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. Drawing on archival letters (some of which are translated here for the first time), Howard Eiland reconfigures these enduring 20th thinkers in the context of their mutual entanglement – tracing their intellectual interdependence from the 1920s to the late 1960s. From Benjamin's individual friendships with Scholem and Adorno to the brotherly relationship born of their shared concern with preserving Benjamin's post-humous legacy, Eiland’s rendering of this relational triangle moves deftly between its moments of strain, reconciliation and ambivalence. Political and theoretical tensions provide fascinating insights into the characters of these men, and the threads of other connections are spun out: from the presence of Benjamin’s first wife, Dora – instrumental in the friendship between Benjamin and Scholem, to the enduring influence of Hannah Arendt. Hovering between biography, theory and love letter, Strange Friends is a meditation on the weird affinities, ruptures and collaborations that constitute a friendship.

Howard Eiland's Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. It addresses a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works--elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland's eloquent writing itself exemplifies this "aesthetic," if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz. Brendan Moran

Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings—mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology—defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike.