Colonial Reminiscences, Colonial Remains: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ at Its Centenary, Part II (original) (raw)
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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...
Contexto Internacional, 2023
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. In this opening to the Forum, the guest editors Gabriela Azevedo and Ludmila Franca-Lipke introduce the Forum as a whole. Then in the following piece, James Martel argues that Benjamin helps us to better understand our current moment than almost any other thinker. Benjamin explains the nature of authoritarianism, the link between liberalism (and neoliberalism) and fascism and how such forces can be resisted. In his essay, Martel updates the concept of mythic violence to take into account the resilience of the liberal/fascist connection (even as it ap pears to be a node of struggle and mutual incompatibility). He shows that 'Critique of Violence' doesn't just diagnose our time but it also shows a way out of the abyss that we are in. Martel lists seven key points from Benjamin's essay and adds one other point from José Carlos Mariátegui to think concretely about how to apply their lessons from 100 years ago to our own time.
Between Niobe and Edward Colston Statues: On Profane Contagion of Colonialism
Contexto Internacional, 2023
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. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin's notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order-which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence-divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is 'lethal without spilling blood'. Because the exercise of such 'power over all life' is exercised 'for the sake of living, ' Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the 'God's-eye view' inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin's text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing-at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence-a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele's reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy's role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin's contributions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political struggles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city’s harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory.
In light of the rejuvenation of the anti-capitalist movement in the 21st century, particularly in the emergence of the global Occupy movement in 2011, as well as the event of the Arab Spring and even more recent movements such as Euromaiden in the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, several notable critical theorists such as Agamben (1998) , Žižek (2008), and Martel (2011) , have made special reference when discussing this new epoch of social protest against neoliberalism and authoritarian governance to the theory of divine violence (or “violence without violence”), first described by the early 20th century German-Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin in his 1921 essay Critique of Violence. Although often invoked, Benjamin’s original conception of divine violence, and the exact parameters and limits of its application, is rarely examined in-and-of itself. The intent of this work is to provide a closer, more in-depth and novel analysis of Benjamin’s original work than previously undertaken; to see how Benjamin’s idea has been developed in the work of later thinkers; and examine how divine violence connects to the idea of the Messianic he explores and develops in both his early and later works. [I apologise for any textual errors; dissertation as presented here is as originally submitted for review.]
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
2017
Transforming as it does from an exemplar of meticulous philosophical analysis into an allusive political/messianic tract, Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" is representative of all that is most difficult about his work. Against those critics who find the eschatological dimensions of Benjamin's texts unpalatable and/or philosophically bankrupt, however, the wager of this paper is that it is possible to extract a philosophically sophisticated and politically interesting concept of the messianic from Benjamin. For it remains the case that the mortification of law carried out in "<i>Zur Kritik der Gewalt</i>" does not simply boil down to a naive antinomianism; that Benjamin's argument is far more subtle than any simple call for "a radical destruction of the legal order." Indeed, if we read the text in conjunction with certain others in the Benjaminian oeuvre it becomes clear that it engages lucidly with a set of crucial, diffi...
Concerning Violence: A Post-Colonial Reading of the Debate on the Use of Force
This article examines the debate on the use of force 'from the periphery', both in the geographical sense and outside the mainstream discourse. It offers an alternative reading of the evolution of the law on the use of force, starting not with the end of the Cold War, but with the process of decolonization. My argument is that this reading is missing from the debate framed as an opposition between a restrictivist and an expansionist camp. Yet it is crucial if one wants to understand the normative pull that is left of legal concepts such as non-intervention, aggression, and self-determination.