Introduction

Cynthia Haven is an intellectual biographer who has written about René Girard and Joseph Brodsky. She started off as a journalist, which I think deepens the way that she comes to these thinkers from a more life-oriented point of view. Zohar: What does it mean for you to write the lives of your subjects rather than just treat their ideas? Cynthia Haven: Whatever we have in the form of the newspaper or modern literature doesn't really qualify as a story in this sort of Benjamin Sense.