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Elective affinity, for Johann Goethe, meant a classical, mimetic balance between humanity and nature (as natural elements and rational compositions, natural affective gravities) and within human society (as romance or sex-friendship affects). Insofar as Walter Benjamin's justly famous essay on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities refers to the idea of affinity as "love-friendship," it is in exclusively rational/intellectual terms,. represented as nonmarital or unconventional rational relations of heterosexual love.1 Regardless of its conservative or even "conservative revolutionary" implications in Benjamin's essay, its theoretical features-the physical, chemical, and biological facets-are striking: the essay offers examples of a mimetic or artistic/aesthetic "image" or "picture," a Bild, of nature fallen and resurrected. The image-content of resurrected nature implies the human-affinity project, but as understood in merely intellectual (sublimated) or ascetic terms.2
Affinity breaks repressive convention originating in natural limits (family life, love, marriage, reproduction); it is tied to the odd (apparently theologic-toned) idea of resurrected nature in Benjamin, but as reception of classical themes.3 The term "affinity" has both a psychological and a physical sense (just as "attraction" has a personal and a gravitational meaning). It is effectively microcosmic (human) and macrocosmic (natural). But Benjamin's early interest in the George Circle notwithstanding, mature elective affinity, with the love component so central to Goethe's model, never developed. Instead, Benjamin formed intellectual affinities (with classical resonances) during his I920S sojourns in Italy, where he became part of a distinct, if informal, milieu that included others who would play an important role in the formation of critical theory: Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. This group of culture critics, in forging friendships with one another, formed an intellectual and conceptual network of relations "
While this milieu was highly cosmopolitan, it actually reached its apogee in a provincial Italian fishing village. During the I920s, the members also met up with one another in various major cities-Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris-but they tended to convene as a group in vacation spots such as Garmisch or, especially, in the Southern Italian locales of Naples, Positano, and Capri, where the inflated Imperial German mark went further. Such refuges-by bourgeois standards cheap as well as beautifuldrew these impoverished radicals who espoused a romantic anticapitalism and shared an interest in relating this kind of...