"Menke's reconstruction of Benjamin's law, his tragic aporia and Recognition". Philosophy and Social Criticism, Sage. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Law without violence (response to Christoph Menke's essay "Law And Violence", MUP 2018)
Th e aim of my essay is to question Christoph Menke's basic assumption that there can be no law without violence. While it is certainly true that the history of occidental legal forms was a history of torture and cruelty, of discipline and punishment, of police, prisons, and border control, there are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called “legal orders” even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. Th e first one is international law, as most prominently conceptualized by Kant himself (thereby contradicting his own defi nition of law): International legal norms are binding, but have no distinct coercive forces at their disposal. Th e second one is Jewish law, developed and practiced over centuries under conditions of the diaspora, thus lacking any state- based means of enforcement. Both legal orders already informed the agenda laid out by Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1920/ 21) which can therefore guide a critical interrogation of Menke’s hidden premises. Benjamin’s notion of deposing the law ( Entsetzung des Rechts ), I argue, should not be interpreted as a “self- refl ection of law,” as Menke suggests, but rather as the idea of a law without violence.
Walter Benjamin's Concept of Law
The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 2018
This essay aims to clarify the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s concept of law for contemporary sociolegal theory by providing an exegetical account of the text ‘Critique of Violence’ (1978) and an assessment of its secondary interpretation by Jacques Derrida (2002), Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005), Judith Butler (2006, 2012), and Slavoj Zizek (2008, 2016).
Philosophy Kitchen, 2017
This article aims at proposing some reflections on law, power and violence in contemporary political philosophy. My attention will be devoted to a critical analysis of some relevant contribution on such matters by eminent scholars and authors such as Alessandro Ferrara, Christoph Menke, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt. The first part offers a brief introduction in which Alessandro Ferrara’s reading of Menke’s "Law and Violence" will be presented. The second part focuses its attention on the philosophical backgrounds of violence, especially in its relation to liberty, power and government. In this case, the main focus is devoted to some of the classics in political philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli; Thomas Hobbes; Hannah Arendt. The last two sections are finally devoted to a further reflection on law and violence. On the one hand, giving a deeper description of Ferrara’s remarks on Menke’s work, especially in its connection to the Rawlsian political liberalism. The last section, on the other hand, proposes afurther brief and final reflections on the core issue of the whole paper.
Towards a politics of "pure means" : Walter Benjamin and the question of violence
Conflicto armado, justicia y memoria, Tomo 1: “Teoría crítica de la violencia y prácticas de memoria y resistencia,” ed. Enan Enrique Arrieta Burgos, Medellín: Editorial de la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2016, pp. 41-65., 2016
For Benjamin, it was clear that there was something fundamentally “rotten in the law” – be it the law of monarchy, western democracy or autocratic regimes. The violence inherent to the law contradicts itself since law enforcement – e.g. the police – always blurs the line between lawpreserving and law-making or law-constituting (rechtsetzende) violence. Conversely, most attempts to break the law and its supporting powers lead to the establishment of a new law. But how are we to conceive a realm of revolutionary politics outside and beyond of the law – a sphere of justice and non-legal violence?
Critical Times, 2019
This article offers a reading of the concluding paragraph of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” It discusses Benjamin's assertion that only a philosophical-historical approach can provide the key to a critique of violence in light of his essay's discussion of legal violence, and in light of his discovery of radically different types of violence. Benjamin argues that the legal order remains enclosed in a cycle of law-positing and law-preserving violence. Moreover, the legal order inherits the essential trait of myth and of mythic violence: ambiguity. This article shows that guilt is the destiny of those subjected to mythic (and legal) forms of violence. The fateful cycle of legal violence can be undone only by the irruption of an absolutely heterogeneous type of violence, which Benjamin calls divine violence. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that, in deposing legal violence (and the legal order as a whole), divine violence also deposes itself as viol...
Theodicies of Violence: From Benjamin to Žižek
article in Stasis nr 15 (1/2023), 2023
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the theodicy of violence in its two different forms: the antinomian and the hypernomian. The theodicy of violence deliberately blurs the lines between the messianic idiom of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence (2021), with its stark contrast between mythic and divine violence, and the Lacanian idiom of various subjective positions toward the symbolic order. While the antinomian line turns out to be close to the discursive strategies of the Hysteric, the hypernomian line resembles those of the Pervert. My goal is to present them in purely descriptive and value-free terms. I will thus begin with the close reading of the Critique of Violence, which is, in fact, an apology of a certain form of political violence, and then juxtapose it with another praise of violence, originating in Slavoj Žižek's deliberately "perverse" reading of both Paul and Benjamin. The difference between them will be revealed by the Benjaminian phrase: for the sake of the living. I will try to prove that while violence for the antinomian/hysterical line can be justified only with regard to life conceived as survival, for the hypernomian/perverse line violence becomes a goal in itself.
Crisis, Justice, Messianism: Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence'
Cogito 12:4, 2020
This essay dwells on Walter Benjamin s early and important essay Critique of Violence (1921). I begin by examining the significance and multivalence of crisis for Benjamin s work. I proceed by outlining the significance of Weimar crisis not only for Benjamin s essay, but for Carl Schmitt s work. Further, I outline the significance of an internalization of crisis by the Critique of Violence , particularly as regards its method of exposition. I subsequently examine Benjamin s analysis of the significance for justice of the proletarian general strike, especially as regards its similarities and differences from Georges Sorel s Reflections on Violence (1909). In the last section of the essay, which focuses on Messianism, I dwell on one of the key differences between Benjamin and Sorel, namely the importance of the theological for the former. I conclude with a brief reflection on the surprising affinities between Benjamin s Messianism and Lenin s uncharacteristic lapse into utopianism in State and Revolution (1917).