To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.
(Karl Marx)
Abstract
In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence (Gewalt) to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice (Gerechtigkeit), not power (Macht), that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era.
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Notes
The German term Gewalt signifies violence, force, power, might and authority. It can also be used to signify brute violence as the legislative, executive and judiciary force and parental authority. Staatsgewalt signifies governmental power and state authority. Walter Benjamin‘s ‘Critique of Violence’ was completed in January 1921 and published the same year in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.
Translations are modified. See also ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (Benjamin 1977).
About similarities and differences between law and myth, see McCall (1996, p. 199).
According to Hannah Arendt, Sorel’s general strike belongs to the arsenal of non-violent politics (Arendt 1970, p. 12).
Benjamin’s first political activities were in the Free Student Association, which opposed the reactionary power of the dueling fraternities, but did not manage to take ‘the role of champion and liberator of the life of the university’ (Benjamin 2004a, pp. 41, 46).
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Ari Hirvonen is a member of the Centre for Excellence in the Foundations of European Law and Polity Research, Academy of Finland.
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Hirvonen, A. The Politics of Revolt: On Benjamin and Critique of Law. Law Critique 22, 101–118 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9084-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9084-3