Law, Violence, History (original) (raw)
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In his essay entitled Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Walter Benjamin has developed a theoretical discourse around the historical meaning of violence, trying to define its essence by isolating the term from the particular circumstances in which Gewalt is applied within the symbolic order of justice. The theoretical construction (or de-construnction, following the analysis made by Derrida in The mystical foundation of authority) of Benjamin's Gewalt opposes simultaneously two historical approaches to the definition of violence: the first one, strictly juridical, claims against the traditions of natural law and positive law; the second, largely hermeneutical, attempts to distinguish the decadent system of mythical violence from the possibility of what is called 'divine violence'. Although this essay will pay particular attention to the problematic dimension in which mythical and divine violence constitute themselves, a brief analysis of the critique against positive and natural law is nevertheless required in order to establish the fundamental relation between Gewalt and justice. According to Benjamin, " natural law that regards violence as a natural datum is diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history. If natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing its ends, so positive law can judge all evolving law only in criticizing its means ". Even though this opposition is presented as 1 evident, the antinomy is inherently solved in the possibility, given by both the approaches, to evaluate violence exclusively within an order of legitimacy. Wherein positive law assumes violence to be legitimate or illegitimate according to historical assumption, natural law presumes violence to be illegitimate a-priori: legal power becomes for both the tool to resist and contrast the illegitimate violence of the individual. It follows that " the surprising possibility that the law's interest in a monopoly of violence visa -vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law
boundary 2, 2017
This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...
In his “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin seeks to rethink justice as the interruption of the juridical temporality, which is characterized by the relationship between means and ends. Benjamin imagines a form of violence that finds in itself its own criterion of rightness: divine violence emerges as a third kind of violence beyond both the state’s monopoly of violence and the binary opposition between violence and non-violence. I will read Benjamin in the historical-political context of the crisis of the state, democracy and paliamentarism in order to develop the idea of divine violence as a practice that interrupts the means-end relation and defends new forms of togetherness that are anticipated in the moment of a struggle.
The Creature Before the Law: Notes on Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence
Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, 2008
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony. Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes COLLOQUY text theory critique 16 (2008).
Contexto Internacional
Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. Melany Cruz, Kaveh Ghoreishi and Sara Minelli engage Benjamin on ‘divine violence.’ As Cruz notes, lynching in contemporary Mexico has become a recurrent phenomenon in nota roja outlets. Due to its brutality, perceptions of lynching have been reduced to a form of uncivilised and irrational crime. In opposition to this perspective, Cruz theorises the political dimension of the violence of lynching by drawing from Benjamin and argues that such violence symbolically and affectively dramatises the suspension of ‘mere life’ in which the communities enacting the lynchings are immersed in the current cond...
Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence: Politics, Violence and Language
Theory & Event, 2009
Interrupting Mythological Politics? On the Possibility of a Literary Intervention’, What I will try in this essay is to connect the logic underlying democracy’s attitude towards violence with a theory of language. More precisely, I will argue that the structure underlying this attitude is a mythological structure. In doing this, I will, to a certain extent, follow Benjamin’s analysis in his Critique of Violence, and, more implicitly, those of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe concerning the concept of myth. In the second part of this analysis, I will focus on a specific moment in Benjamin’s text, a moment where he points out a possible interruption of the mythological structure, an interruption, nevertheless, that is another one than the one explained in terms of divine violence. In the third part, at last, I will further examine this possible interruption and indicate that it corresponds to an alternative use of language. More precisely, I will argue that one of the ways to interrupt mythological politics – or, better still, one of the ways in which mythological politics can interrupt itself – is by means of a literary use of language. The central argument of this essay will be that we can engage in a daily resistance to mythological politics via what I will call a literary intervention. I will explore the nature of this literary intervention by examining the work of Maurice Blanchot who has extensively analyzed the political force of literature. Open access via: 10.1353/tae.0.0051