From Critique of Violence to Autotelic Violence: Rereading Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Reflections on violence usually turn out to be more focused on class struggles, on a ‘diagnosis of the times’, than on violence. They sooner speak about causes of violence than about violence itself. Or they turn their attention towards violence as evil, thus sliding off to ‘the problem of evil’, this being rather ‘the problem of God’. They reflect upon the issues of morality raised by violence, but not on violence itself. Or, as is the case in Walter Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt, they reflect more on law and justice than on violence. Though I will no doubt fail to do so, I want to approach a fundamental understanding of violence by taking Benjamin’s text as a point of departure. Why this text, and why not any other that is supposedly about violence?