Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence: Politics, Violence and Language (original) (raw)

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