Deconstruction of Violence

Howard Eiland

Abbau der Gewalt. This was the projected title of a chapter in the
never-completed book on political theory with which Walter Benjamin was
occupied in the chaotic postwar years 191921, and which was to focus on
the problem of violence, Gewalt, in relation to the idea of justice. We have
today one prime textual witness to the character of this unrealized Politics,
namely, the enigmatic but much discussed essay of 1921, Zur Kritik der
Gewalt (Critique of Violence), which may or may not be identical with the
chapter proposed under the title Abbau der Gewalt.1 Additionally, there

I have occasionally modified previously published translations of Walter Benjamins writ-

ings in this article to bring them closer to the original German. Unless otherwise indi-
cated, all other translations are my own.
1. Zur Kritik der Gewalt was first published in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik (formerly edited by Max Weber) in August 1921; now in Benjamin 1977a (179
203), trans. Edmund Jephcott in Benjamin 1996b (23652). The book on politics was evi-
dently to consist of three parts, of which the first, Der wahre Politiker (The True Politi-
cian), was written but never published during Benjamins lifetime and is now considered
lost. The second part, Die wahre Politik (True Politics), was to consist of two chapters,
Abbau der Gewalt (Deconstruction of Violencepossibly identical with Critique of

boundary 2 44:4 (2017)DOI 10.1215/01903659-4206349 2017 by Duke University Press

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are several fragmentary writings from this period constellated about the
central remnant and shedding light on some of its thematic and terminologi-
cal mysteries. With its invocation of an explicitly revolutionary imperative in
the face of manifest historical crisis, Benjamins essay, we can say, mounts
a simultaneously destructive and constructive critique of both militarism
and pacifism in its pursuit of a just alternative to legal violence or force of
law. At stake in the essay for us today, I shall suggest, is not only recogni-
tion of the often unapparent militarizing of knowledgewhat in every case
presupposes the concept of knowledge as possession that Benjamin rig-
orously distinguishes from the idea of truth.2 Also at stake is the reawak-
ening of a certain countervailing militancythe challenge, if you will, of
conceiving a higher nonviolent and expiatory violence. This is an educa-
tional challenge essentially, calling for a kind of educational violenceone
directed first of all, as is evident, against the very principle of noncontradic-
tion and the complacencies stemming from it. For there is a Benjaminian
logic of contradiction: truth has to do with what he famously once called a
contradictory and mobile whole (Benjamin and Scholem 1989: 1089).
As he puts it in one of the related fragments from the postwar period, you
cannot fight violence with violenceeven though violence is never com-
pletely absent from life and is even present in original ways as ursprng-
liche Gewalt, the originary violence exemplified, he says, in acts of defense;
in the end, it becomes a matter of finding the right kind of violence with
which to fight violence. He goes on to ask about the possibility of security
without legal constraint: The question arises: how then are people living
in a free community to be secure in their lives? In such a community, it is
inclination alone that disarms the evil deed, although originary violence as

Violence) and Teleologie ohne Endzweck (Teleology without Goal), the latter pre-
sumably unwritten, while the third part, which likewise remained unwritten, was supposed
to comprise a philosophical analysis of Paul Scheerbarts 1913 asteroid novel Lesabn-
dio. See Benjamin 1996a (101, 102n, 109, 111n, 119, 131). Further, in 1920, Benjamin refers
to an essay of his entitled alternately Gewalt und Leben (Violence and Life, Benjamin
1996a [90]) and Leben und Gewalt (Benjamin 1996b [232]); it too is lost, although the
fragment printed in Benjamin 1989 (791), and discussed below in the text, may have
formed part of it. Not surviving either is Benjamins long, unpublished review of Ernst
Blochs Spirit of Utopia (1918). Benjamins conversations with Bloch, beginning in 1918,
helped shape his political thinking.
2. As formulated in Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Ursprung des deutschen Trau-
erspiels, written 192325, published 1928): Truth is not an unveiling that destroys the
mystery [Geheimnis] but rather revelation that does justice to it [die ihm gerecht wird ]
(Benjamin 1977b: 31). Concerning the distinction between knowledge and truth, see in
particular sections 3, 4, and 6. See also Benjamin 1996b (27879).

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such is not at all impugned (Benjamin 1989: 791). Education, then, would
be the key to free communitythe community of awakened individual con-
sciences. The freethinking moral education of inclination would be presup-
posed as political action: that is its constructive critical violence and trans-
formative potential; for criticism is a moral affair [moralische Sache] and
only one who can destroy can criticize (Benjamin 1996b: 460). Thus, in
the postwar fragment Benjamin can ask rhetorically Where does violence
ever stop? and can refer coolly to the salutary terrorist praxis of a certain
theological-political anarchism in its abrogation (Abschaffung) of adminis-
trative violence (Benjamin 1989: 791). In Critique of Violence, it is the myth
of possession that, in the name of justice, would be liquidated through what
he formally designates educative violence (erzieherische Gewalt). The
latter, in its expiating moment, is regarded as a manifestation of divine
violence (gttliche Gewalt) or, in other words, as a giftand therefore a
problem, a task.
The experimental nature of this project should be emphasized at the
outset, so as to counter any impression of willful paradox or worse. It was a
matter of political action without political goals in the usual sensepolitical
action as an end in itself and a corrective to political goals. A well-known
letter of May 29, 1926, from Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, illuminates
or at least touches onthis notion of pure immediate action that, as will be
shown, informs the political thinking of five years earlier: I am not ashamed
of my early anarchism but consider anarchist methods to be useless,
Communist goals to be nonsense and nonexistent. This does not dimin-
ish the value of Communist action [Aktion] one iota, because it is the cor-
rective to its goals and because there are no meaningfully political goals
(Benjamin 1994: 301).3 Earlier in the letter, he posits a singular unstable
identity between religious and political Observanzan identity that mani-
fests itself only in the sudden paradoxical changeover [Umschlag] of one
form of observance into the other (regardless of which direction), given the
indispensable prerequisite that every consideration of action proceed ruth-
lessly enough, and radically in its own terms. Precisely for this reason, the
task is not to decide once and for all, but to decide at every moment (300).
In light of the immediate, moment-to-moment destabilizing occa-
sioned by this simultaneously groundless and sacralizingundogmatically
sacralizingpolitical observance, what, then, would it mean to speak of

3. This might be compared to the young Benjamins more pragmatic definition of poli-
tics, at one point, as the art of choosing the lesser evil (Benjamin 1995: 8283 [letter of
January 7, 1913]).

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the deconstruction of violence (a formula which must be taken as both sub-

jective and objective genitive, a doing to violence and a doing by violence)?
Is there a sense in which, with his sufficiently ruthless propagation of apo-
rias, Benjamin plays the unlikely role of intellectual terroristassuming
that intellectual here means radically open and nonfundamentalist? Let
me start, less sensationally, with the term Abbau, which literally suggests
building down and is commonly used to signify demolition or decompo-
sition as well as mining work. As applied to the work of criticism, it has its
philosophical precursor in Edmund Husserls phenomenology, where it is
associated with the dismantling of the idealizations that are understood to
veil the lifeworld, with the mining of the accumulated deposit of apprehen-
sions and intentions in habits of thought and behavior, and with the uncon-
cealment and articulation of relations of foundation within perception. The
sense of the experiential world, for a phenomenologist, is always a sedi-
mented sense.4 The term has, of course, a momentous afterlife: not only in
Benjamin and in Martin Heidegger (where it is similarly associated with a
philosophical-historical unpacking, rooting-up, and transvaluation of tradi-
tional attitudes) but above all in its French translation by Jacques Derrida,
in the 1960s, into dconstruction, with everything that followed thereupon,
including Derridas own critique of Critique of Violence in the 1989 essay
Force of Law, in which he defines the main theme of this disconcerting
and terribly equivocal text as precisely terror.5

4. See Evans (1990) on Husserls idea of deconstruction. The use of the term Abbau in
the analysis of perception by Husserl and his assistants goes back to seminar work in
1907, if not earlier, according to Chernavin 2011 (23n26). Heidegger makes pointed use
of the term in a lecture course of 1927 on phenomenology: Construction in philosophy
is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts [Abbau
des berlieferten] carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a
negation of the tradition . . . ; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropria-
tion of tradition (1982: 23). The reciprocity of Abbauen and Vorbauen (building forth, pro-
viding for, guarding against) is formulated by Heidegger 2016 (42) in connection with the
new beginning in the early thirties. The term Abbau, signifying deconstruction of the
successively overlaid epochal structures disguising originary being, is found in texts of
later Heidegger as well.
5. I believe this uneasy, enigmatic, terribly equivocal text is haunted in advance (but can
one say in advance here?) by the theme of radical destruction, extermination, total anni-
hilation . . . (Derrida 2002: 258). One must underscore two of [the essays] traits: on the
one hand, a terrible ethico-political ambiguity, which at bottom reflects the terror that con-
stitutes, in fact, the theme of this text; and on the other hand . . . this heart or courage of
a thinking that knows there is no justesse, no justice, no responsibility except in exposing
oneself to all risks, beyond certainty and good conscience (287).

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When Benjamin proposes the Abbau and Abschaffung of Gewalt,

he evidently intends both an exploratory unbuilding of historically sedi-
mented conceptions (such as law, state, life) and a correspond-
ing de- constructive practice. In this regard, the Critique of Violence
represents a culmination of the metapolitical radicalism that motivated
Benjamins participation in the antebellum German youth movement and
his high-minded protest against the conformism of school and family, that
is, against the philistine rule of his own social class. But in place of the Tol-
stoyan ethic informing the earlier program of educational reform and philo-
sophical community,6 Critique of Violence employs a more sophisticated
arsenal of juridical, sociological, and theological categories in its sweeping
indictment of legally administered institutional violence and in its appeal to
a politics of pure means (Benjamin 1996b: 245), a dimension of solitary
and collective experience, at once ontological and ethical, that would tran-
scend the instrumentalizing distinction between means and ends (a dis-
tinction basic to the traditions of both natural law and positive law) and that
would lay the threshold to a new historical epoch (252).
Most discussions of Benjamins essay note its virtual two-part struc-
ture revolving around two main distinctions: on the one hand, that between
lawmaking (rechtsetzende) violence, the violence that founds a legal sys-
tem, and the law-preserving (rechtserhaltende) violence that administers
the system, and, on the other hand, that between the mythic violence that
infuses the guilt-charged mechanisms of law and the divine violence that
singularly calls a halt to mythic violence and its bloody rule (Blutgewalt).
About two-thirds of the way through the essay, it shifts gears with the at first
discouraging recognition of the undecidability of all legal problems (Unent-
schiedbarkeit aller Rechtsprobleme) and with the question, What kinds of
violence might there be other than those envisaged by legal theory (247)?
The prospect of a suspension of blood violence in the emergence of a form
of life no longer tied to the dogma of means-ends leads, then, to the expo-
sition of divine violenceand the whole essay turns, as Giorgio Agam-
ben has remarked, on the interpretation of this figure.7 Benjamin begins

6. See especially The Life of Students (191415) in Benjamin 2011 (197210).

7. Agamben writes, The definition of this third figure, which Benjamin calls divine vio-
lence [after discussing lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence], constitutes the
central problem of every interpretation of the essay (1998: 63). In a conversation with
Werner Kraft in 1934, Benjamin is supposed to have referred to the concept of divine vio-
lence in the essay as a blind spot [ein leerer Fleck], a limit concept, a regulative idea.
See Kahmen 1992 (47); cited in Khatib 2015 (95).

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the essay by postulating the juridical essence of violence: a motive or act

becomes violent only in the context of moral relations (sittliche Verhlt-
nisse), only as violation or transgression. He will also refer to this context
as moral-historical. Strictly speaking, there is no natural violence.8 The
sphere of [moral] relations, writes Benjamin, is defined by the concepts of
law and justice (236). Thus the critique of violence has as its principal task
the presentation (Darstellung)9 of the sphere of relations between violence
and these concepts of law and justice, which are by no means synonymous
concepts. It is worth repeating that critique here, as in the Kantian tradi-
tion, is not something simply negative.
The difference between law and justice emerges gradually in the
course of the essay, as Benjamin develops his philosophical-historical view
of law from a standpoint outside that of positive legal philosophy and of
the idea of natural law. The historical oscillation of lawmaking and law-
preserving forms of violencea process whereby law- preserving vio-
lence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence it repre-
sents, by suppressing hostile counterviolence . . . until either new forces
or those earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence
and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay (251)this cycli-
cal interaction and mutual contamination of the two forms of violence as
means is said to be attested most prominently in the military and police
institutions (specifically, in military conscription and emergency decrees).
But all the contractual arrangements of modern parliamentary democra-
cies, all forms of political compromise, involve a measure of violence or
coercion, insists Benjamin. And he does not hide his scorn for uninformed
liberal theorists (242) who attribute a beneficial deterrent power to the
threat of official punishment, a threat which is actually promulgated by the
law, he says, for very different reasons, namely, to shore up and reaffirm
(bekrftigen) its own authority (Gewalt). In fact, it is precisely in such sanc-
tioned practices as capital punishment that the fearsome demonic origins
of the lawviolence crowned by fate (242)come to light. The real pur-
pose of the death penalty, Benjamin argues, is not to punish the infringe-
ment of law but, through self-empowerment, to establish new law, just as
police decrees effectively establish new laws, thereby resulting in a spec-

8. See Arendt 1969 (3556) on violence as distinguished from power, force, strength,
and authority. On violence as violation, see Weber 1991 (1182).
9. The question of Darstellung is posed at the very beginning of Benjamins Origin of the
German Trauerspiel: It is peculiar to philosophical writing to be confronted anew at every
turn with the question of presentation [Frage der Darstellung] (Benjamin 1977b: 27).

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tral mixture of lawmaking and law-preserving powers. The institution of the

police is accordingly characterized as an all-pervasive ghostly presence in
the life of civilized states, a presence in which nothing essential at all is
to be encountered beneath the armor (243). Benjamin highlights the igno-
miny of such self-abdicating authority, buttressed as it is by a building-up of
the faceless, calculatedly indeterminate threat (including the threat of sur-
veillance, berwachung), and he goes so far as to suggest that police are
worse in modern democracies than in monarchies, for in the latter they at
least do not pretend to be anything other than what they are. It is in the vari-
able forms of this equivocal power over life and death that something rot-
ten in the law is most fully revealedat least to a finer sensibility (242).
Under the circumstances of the modern state, therefore, the law
appears in so ambiguous a moral light that the question poses itself
whether there are no other than violent [gewaltsame] means for regulating
conflicting human interests (243). Benjamins answer to this basic ques-
tion is, in the long run, hedged. On the one hand, he points without hesi-
tation to the many examples of nonviolent resolution of conflict in what
is called private life and to the prevalence of a culture of the heart (Kul-
tur des Herzens, the Kantian echo missing in the translation civilized out-
look [244]10) wherever pure means (reine Mittel ) of agreement are in use,
as opposed to legally and illegally constraining means. Following on the
discussion of means of political agreement that are in principle nonvio-
lent [gewaltlos], the concept of pure means will be developed in the sec-
ond part of the essay. On the other hand, he criticizes the quite childish
anarchism of a certain pleasure-seeking pacifism that refuses to acknowl-
edge any sort of need for constraint (Zwang) in regard to persons, for
such a maxim excludes the possibility of reflection on the moral-historical
[sittlich-historische] sphere, and thereby on any meaning in action [Hand-
lung], and beyond this on any meaning in reality itself (241). And he fol-
lows this unsentimental assessment of the short-sightedness of pacifism
with a condemnation of every formless freedom that remains oblivious
to a higher order of freedom (242), one that is presumably more disci-
plined and severe. (This brief and peremptory pronouncement, at any rate,
is in keeping with the sober moral skepticism that can be seen to shadow
the messianicity throughout Benjamins career.) Further on in the essay, he

10. Kant refers to the sublime yet never wholly attainable idea of the ethical common-
wealth as a union of hearts, wherein reigns the free duty of virtue as opposed to the
coercive duty of law ([1934] 1960: 9093). Duty as such is required in view of the wicked-
ness of the human heart (50).

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adduces the unscrupulous use of violence by striking German doctors in

the postwar period (247), evidently raising the possibility of a scrupulous, a
principled, violence.
Among the forms of nonviolent resolution of conflictwhose subjec-
tive preconditions include such things as courtesy, sympathy, peaceable-
ness, trust (242)Benjamin focuses on those pertaining to conflicts over
goods, for it is in this area, as contrasted with the realm of conflict between
persons, that the sphere of pure means most readily opens up. And it is
here, he adds, that technique (Technik) in the widest sense has a place.
He mentions the conference as a technique of civil agreement in which
coercive violence is excluded on principle (244), and he singles out the
practice of diplomats who, at least in earlier, less formalized times, would
resolve conflicts, in analogy with private persons, on a case-by-case basis,
peacefully and without contracts, in a skillfully improvised manner unfold-
ing beyond all legal order and therefore beyond violence (247; compare
28485, on nonviolent guidance in the education of children). He men-
tions even more briefly the crucial matter of language (Sprache), what he
calls the proper sphere of understanding (eigentliche Sphre der Ver-
stndigung ): the uniquely powerful and vulnerable sovereign medium of
language is in its mediacy wholly inaccessible to actual violence (eigent-
liche Gewalt), although in modern times it comes under the long arm of
the law with the prohibition of fraud (245). But the greater part of the dis-
cussion of nonviolent resolutions is devoted to the role of labor strikes in
class struggles, and, as is well known, he cites approvingly Georges Sorels
1908 revolutionary polemic in favor of the proletarian general strikeits
enlightened violence mobilized and directed against the plutocratic
democraciesin Reflections on Violence ([1950] 1961: 249, 285). Sorel,
who himself cites Friedrich Nietzsches paean to the warlike spirit of ancient
races in The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (23031), and who
invokes the passionate individualism of the artist as a model for the worker
(24243), raises the prospect of manufactories without masters (237), as
the expected fruit of the proletarian general strike. Benjamin likewise dis-
tinguishes between the political general strike, which seeks only external
modifications to labor conditions while leaving the apparatus of state power
in place (and this, he comments, seems to have been the significance of
the abortive German revolution [of 1919]), and the proletarian general
strike, which seeks a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the
state (Benjamin 1996b: 246), indeed seeks the destruction of state power
altogether (Vernichtung der Staatsgewalt). The first form of work interrup-

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tion is said to be violent, while the secondthis pure means of destruc-

tionis said to be nonviolent; the first is lawmaking, the second anarchis-
tic. In view of the striking ambiguity surrounding the nature and actuality
of violence as means in both Sorel and Benjamin, pointing as it does to the
inadequacy of the term violence, it should be emphasized that anarchism
here denotes an emancipatory but not formless reconception of work. Ben-
jaminian anarchism, one can say, entails an inner systematic.
The connection between the proletarian general strike and Benja
mins idea of language as pure means or pure mediacy was first elabo-
rated by Werner Hamacher in an influential essay of 1991.11 His analysis,
which situates Benjamins thinking at a remove from Sorels ethics of vio-
lence, follows on Derridas comparison, in Force of Law, of the two sorts
of general strike to the two temptations of deconstruction, since decon-
struction likewise works to suspend the legitimating authority and all its
norms of reading . . . in order to found another order of reading (Der-
rida 2002: 271). Hamacher extracts from one of Benjamins fragmentary
writings of the period, On Semblance, the difficult concept of the expres-
sionless (das Ausdruckslose), soon to play a key role in the great essay
of 192122 on Goethes Elective Affinities. At issue is an expressionless
power within all artistic media (Benjamin 1996b: 341), a power that holds
quivering life relatively stillthis is a charged and dynamic, rhythmic stand-
stillin order to define its truth; it is thus a critical power or critical violence
(kritische Gewalt) in the service of the sublime violence of the true (erha-
bene Gewalt des Wahren [224]something reminiscent perhaps of the
force of truth that compels the learner to leave the cave in Platos parable).
Just as the aesthetic totality is shattered into pliable piece-work by the
expressionless (here a portent of Benjamins turn to literary montage a few
years hence), so the mendacious political totality of legal institutions, along
with the illusion of reconciliation they promote, is shattered in the moment
of the proletarian general strike. In suspending the order of positing and
self-positing atomistic subjectivity instrumental to legal power, the strike
severs exploitative relations, opening up the sheer mediacy of all social
relations and thereby demonstrating the superiority of an active moral com-
munity to the rigid political order of statutory law. Beyond the exclusive con-
cern with productivity, the proletarian general strike, Hamacher concludes,

11. See Hamacher 2000. Hamachers title Afformative, Strike is derived from speech-
act theory: the proletarian general strike is neither a performative nor a constative but an
afformative, in the sense of a nonaction and nonpositing in which nothing is produced or
projected. Lawmaking violence, on the other hand, is per formative.

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can be said to adumbrate the inexpressible state of justice and to exemplify

Benjamins theological-political notion of teleology without goal, a form of
comportmenta rhythm, Benjamin likes to sayin which the end is imma-
nent to the unfolding means. The phenomenon of language as the given
if inexpressible condition of intelligibility, of the immediacy of intelligibility
and the intelligibility of immediacy, language as eventuating collective dif-
ferential, thus opens the way to thinking the meaning of a purely nonvio-
lent immediate violence, a revolutionary ethical deposing of the objectifying
means-end schematism at the basis of the state.
It is at this point in Benjamins essayhaving interrogated the dogma
of justified means to just ends that is basic to both unwritten natural law and
written statutes, and having indicted the police thinking he finds surrepti-
tiously at work in almost all sectors of modern society, in its institutions and
administered bodiesthat he turns more directly to the problem of justice as
a principle of divine agency. Since, as indicated earlier, no degree of deliv-
erance (Erlsung) from the paralyzing mythic spell (Bannkreis) of the world-
historical inheritance, with its constant horizon of war, can possibly be carried
out if violence is totally excluded in principle (247), the unending road to
justice must be paved with violence of another kind (eine Gewalt anderer
Art): This very task [of the destruction of legal violence] poses again, ulti-
mately, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call
a halt [Einhalt zu gebieten] to mythic violence. Just as in all spheres God
opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine (249).
In his risky and decidedly monitory reading of the essay, Derrida
has commented on the sudden appearance of the figure of God here
something holding sway above the forces of reason and law, the forces of
enlightenmentas signaling the idea of singularity, specifically the depen-
dence of the principle of justice on the singularity of the situation (Derrida
2002: 286).12 For ends that are just in one situation, observes Benjamin,

12. Derridas Force of Law was instrumental in reawakening attention to Benjamins

Critique of Violence and has itself been the subject of analyses and critiques. I would
single out three of his points for questioning, all of them suggesting a certain proximity of
Benjamins thinking to modes of fascism. Derrida writes, this revolutionary essay (revo-
lutionary in a style that is at once Marxist and messianic) belongs, in 1921, to the great
antiparliamentary and anti-Aufklrung wave upon which Nazism will have, as it were,
surfaced. . . . Carl Schmitt, whom Benjamin admired and with whom he maintained a cor-
respondence, congratulated him for this essay (Derrida 2002: 259). There is no evidence
that the conservative jurist Schmitt ever congratulated Benjamin for the essay, though it
is true that Benjamin made use of Schmitts idea of sovereignty in the Trauerspiel book,
a copy of which he sent to Schmitt with an admiring letter in 1930; Derrida is evidently

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are not necessarily so in another (Benjamin 1996b: 247); the exercise of

justice, insofar as one can speak of it without betraying it, demands a case-
by-case consideration. As Derrida puts it, the decision between just and
unjust is never insured by a rule (2002: 244).13 Benjamin goes on, in a
kind of brief litany (with distinctly Pauline strains), to discriminate mythic
violence from divine. If the former, by setting up boundaries, is lawmak-
ing, the latter, in dissolving boundaries, is law-destroying (rechtsvernicht-
end ). If the former, inexorable as fate, brings both guilt and expiation, the
latter only expiatesthat is, absolves the living not of guilt but of indebted-
ness to law. If the former threatens and is bloody (blutig), the latter strikes
without warning and without bloodshed (is unblutig). Their opposition is
expressed accordingly: Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for
its own sake [Blutgewalt ber das bloe Leben um ihrer selbst ]; divine vio-
lence is pure power [reine Gewalt ] over all life for the sake of the living [um
des Lebendigen willen]. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it
[nimmt sie an] (Benjamin 1996b: 250).
Regarding this distinction between mythic and divine orders, a num-
ber of commentators, beginning with Anselm Haverkamp,14 have noted

basing himself on an erroneous claim made by Jrgen Habermas in a 1987 essay, The
Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English. See Moran and Salzani 2015 (4, 11n18).
Secondly, at the end of Force of Law, Derrida writes in regard to the bloodless expia-
tory violence that Benjamin associates with Gods destruction of the company of Korah
in Numbers 16: When one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this
allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause one
to shudder (Derrida 2002: 298). His view of Benjamins idea of divine violence as pos-
sibly prefiguring the Final Solution, whereby the concentration camps would be seen as
the instrument of Gods holy wrath, was quickly labeled a peculiar misunderstanding
(Agamben 1998: 64); as discussed in the text below, it surely remains a provocation.
Finally, in connection with the idea of the mystical foundation of authority, which he
takes from Michel de Montaigne, Derrida refers (2002: 280) to a passage in Benjamins
1928 Origin of the German Trauerspiel, section 33: spirit is the capacity to exercise dic-
tatorship (Benjamin 1977b: 98). This is a thesis expounded in connection with the figure
of the courtier in the baroque age; it seems misleading to associate this notion of spirit, as
though directly expressive of Benjamins own position, with Critique of Violencewhich
is not to deny the profound connections between the essay and the Trauerspiel book.
13. Is it ever possible to say that an action is not only legal but just . . . , [t]hat such a per-
son is just, a decision is just? Is it ever possible to say, I know that I am just? I would want
to show that such confidence is essentially impossible (Derrida 2002: 245). From this
point of view, justice would be the experience of what we are unable to experience. . . .
Justice is an experience of the impossible (244). Compare redemption of the unredeem-
able (Benjamin 1994: 34 [June 23, 1913]).
14. See Haverkamp 1991 (116971) and 1994 (178, 18384n37) on Benjamins use of

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Benjamins debt to Hermann Cohen. The debt to Cohen is in fact exten-

sive all during the postwar, prematerialist period of Benjamins career (the
period culminating with the Goethe essay), far more extensive than the
debt to Sorel, whose idea of the strategic importance of largely imaginary
myths was of little use to him. We know that Benjamin was reading Cohens
Ethics of the Pure Will (1st ed. 1904) during the composition of Critique
of Violence, and not without reservations (see Benjamin 1996a: 130), and
there are indications he was reading with admiration Cohens magisterial
last work, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), a gene-
alogical study of Jewish messianism, around this time as well (107). Of
course, in reading this preeminent neo-Kantian, Benjamin encountered a
sensibility radically different from his own. It is enough to mention Cohens
critique of aphorism, of ambiguity, of skepticism,15 tied as this always was
to a classically lucid writing style, to get a sense of the difference. Born two
years before Nietzsche, Cohen remained immune to all modernist alien-
ation and nihilism, though he was capable of ending his philosophic ethics
with a paean to the humanity of genuine art. But it is his ethico-theological
doctrinepurged of all dogmatic tendencies, including those pertaining to
law and statethat spoke to Benjamin. For religion and morals, Cohen
holds, belong together in a problem-philosophical perspective.
Benjamin took from Cohen the distinction between mythic might
and divine but transformed it entirely by dissociating divinity from law and
connecting law to myth. When Benjamin writes, in Critique of Violence,
Justice is the principle of all divine endmaking [gttlichen Zwecksetzung],
power [Macht ] the principle of all mythic lawmaking (1996b: 248), he is
appropriating Cohens concept of myth for his own purposes: The myth
celebrates power [Macht ] in gods as well as in heroes. Religion cannot be
the worship of power (Cohen 1995: 246). Myth is for Cohen, much as for
Nietzsche, an Urkraft (primal force) whose great emblem is the misty sea
(Cohen 1995: 57, 61). Myth pervades human life and is always returning
to threaten and swallow what resists it: just so, the tribe of Israelites was
continually regressing to the pagan cult in the face of their prophets stern
monotheistic teachings. The idea of God arises to combat the chaos
Benjamin, weve seen, prefers to say the spellof myth; God is truth,

Hermann Cohen in Critique of Violence. Cohen mentions the biblical band of Korah,
cited by Benjamin in the essay, in his chapter Justice, in Religion of Reason (Cohen
1995: 431).
15. See Cohen 1904 on aphorism (506), on ambiguity (511), and on freedom from skep-
ticism (599).

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stipulates Cohen, and truth is realized for the human being as an ascent
out of myththat is, as the gradually achieved rational correlation of logic
and ethics, nature and human will. In Religion of Reason, Cohen traces
the painful process by which ancient Israel moved from ritual sacrifice to
prayer and repentance, and thus to a sense of inwardness and individu-
ality. (It is basically the reverse of the Nietzschean view of postexilic Juda-
ism as representing cultural decline from the age of kings.) Myth originates
in the notion of fate, Cohen argues, and fate turns on the mechanisms of
guilt.16 If awareness of guilt individuates the living, one can say that ethical
motives are already slumbering in myth (Cohen 1904: 55556). Neverthe-
less, purification of the mythic precipitatethe concept of purity signaling
an uneasy convergence of the Jewish and the Kantian (the phenomeno-
logical)is a never-ending task, because the rudiments of myth remain in
all idealization. The idea of God, then, is for Cohen an originative principle,
a principle of actualization and continuous renewal. Such is also the prin-
ciple of selfhood.
The ego, Kant had argued, is no elementary particle that preexists
the act of thinking but is always already constituted in and through that
act. The self is essentially process, task, ordeal; we are ever on the way to
ourselves. The fixing of the self in identity philosophy, and in its practical
consequences, becomes the great danger for ethics; authentic selfhood
must somehow defend against armed self-interest (Cohen 1904: 1112,
582). In his Ethics, Cohen distinguishes various stages in this destructive-
constructive penetration of the individual, the cosmopolitan realization of
self beyond egological or atomistic autonomy, and these include the stages
of self-lawgiving and self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung). Here, very likely,
is the immediate cue to Benjamins binary in Critique of Violence, that of
law-instating and law-preserving, constituent and constituted, powers; the
concepts are transposed from the ethical-psychological to a juridical and

16. Benjamin cites Cohens Ethik (chap. 7, sec. 3) in bringing together myth with the
intrinsic ambiguity of fate (Benjamin 1996b: 249). Cohen argues there that myth has
its origin in the concept of fate, and at the core of fate is the concept of guilt (Cohen
1904: 343). In Fate and Character (1919), Benjamin similarly associates the befalling
of fate with misfortune and guilt (Unglck und Schuld ): the order of fate, which can be
apprehended only through signs, not in itself, is the guilt context of the living [Schuld-
zusammenhang des Lebendigen]. . . . It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather,
the subject of fate is indeterminable. . . . It is never man but only the life [das bloe Leben]
in him that [fate] strikes. . . . [Time in fate] is not an autonomous time, but is parasitically
dependent on the time of a higher, less natural life (Benjamin 1996b: 201, 204). Compare
Benjamin 1977b (12930 [sec. 47]).

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historical realm, where they become vehicles of mythic force rather than
stages of ethical edification. There is no pure will in Benjamin and therefore
no ideal Rechtsstaat, as there is in Cohen, although there is a pure vio-
lence. But the latter is divine. In a fragment written in 1920, concerning The
Right to Use Force,17 Benjamin speaks of my moral philosophy:

And in that connection the term anarchism may very well be used
to describe a theory that denies a moral right [das sittliche Recht ]
not to force as such [Gewalt als solcher] but to every human institu-
tion, community, or individuality that either claims a monopoly over it
or in any way claims that right for itself . . . , even if only as a general
principle, instead of respecting it in specific cases as a gift bestowed
by divine power [Gabe der gttlichen Macht], as consummation of
power. (Benjamin 1996b: 233)

So pure immediate Gewaltthe usage of the term here seems to

encompass its whole ambiguous semantic range, including ideas of vio-
lence, force, and authoritysuch Gewalt is not to be possessed but only
respected and venerated (verehrt) when it happens to appear in our midst.
And feared: Where divine power [gttliche Gewalt] enters into the terres-
trial world, it breathes destruction. That is why in this world nothing constant
and no organization can be based on divine power (226). The unqualified
rejection of theocracy here chimes with the opening paragraph of the (prob-
ably) contemporaneous Theological-Political Fragment; but this is not to
say there is no human use of the divine. Although pure immediate power
and potential cannot be fixed in any social organization (227), it mani-
fests itself, Benjamin says once again (unspecifically enough), in revolution-
ary praxis and in community (Gemeinschaft), in perception oriented toward
revelation (offenbarenden Wahrnehmung), and, first and last, in the event
of language (227). These are the profane parameters of his anarchism. The
question of manifestation, he adds, is central, for it harbors the question of
meaning as construed in the field of the given.
The scope of divine manifestation is somewhat narrowed in Critique
of Violence.18 After broaching the issue of a pure immediate violence that

17. Benjamins fragment concerns an article by Herbert Vorwerk, Das Recht zur
Gewaltanwendung, which appeared September 1920 in a Protestant Social-Democratic
journal; Vorwerks article specifically opposes what he calls ethical anarchism. See
Jacobson 2003 (308n56) and Fenves 2011 (21517).
18. On the question of manifestation in Critique of Violence, see Friedlander 2015
(16566).

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might be able to call a halt to mythic violence, Benjamin states that the
former, the gttliche Gewalt, is not only attested by religious tradition but is
also found in present-day life in at least one hallowed manifestation [geheil-
igten Manifestation] (24950). This is the educative power or educative
violence I spoke of earlier, and which in its perfected form stands outside
the law (250). Benjamin does not at all linger on the perhaps surprising
proposition of a divinely mediated erzieherische GewaltCohen speaks,
in Religion of Reason, of the divine work of education (gttliche Erzie-
hungswerk [Cohen 1995: 340])and the essays commentators for the
most part have scarcely noted it.19 In Benjamins youth writings, education,
as the lever of social change, is associated with a broadly conceived mes-
sianic (if not yet Marxist) revolution in thinking and doing, one that begins
in philosophical reorientation of academic curricula while gesturing toward
the coming humanity of a new historical epoch, such as will be invoked at
the end of Critique of Violence.20 At every point, the education of con-
science is understood, not altogether at variance with classical precedents,
as a shock to the whole system. It is initiation, individual and collective, into
what cannot be possessed. Hence the ground is laid for conceiving the
eruptive antipositivist thrust of an educating violenceSorel had referred
to the educative force of revolutionary syndicalism ([1950] 1961: 242)21
in excess of the mechanism of the law. It is evidently a matter, to recall the
1926 letter to Scholem cited above, of fostering decision at every moment,
a certain open vigilance. Manifesting the discharge (Vollzug) and even
consummation of an emergent power of the divine, educative violence
instantiates moments of [that] unbloody, expiating discharge as it strikes
(Benjamin 1996b: 250). At stake in this intimate expiation, defined finally
by the absence of all lawmaking (250), is clearly not a course of education
accredited through any known institution, nor some programmatic or utili-
tarian pedagogy, but rather, we have to assume, something like life learn-
ing, inconspicuous and intermittentwhat I am calling force of conscience
as vital to historical consciousness. In fact, in a perhaps unconscious, and
at any rate oblique, recollection of Romans 8:25 on the subject of hope,

19. An exception is the article by Geulen 2005, which discusses the relevance of
Benjamins early student writings on education to his idea of pedagogical violence in
Critique of Violence. See also Honneth 2011 (2089), where Benjamin is judged to be
fomenting cultural revolution, and Friedlander 2015 (17576n21).
20. See Benjamin 2011 for the early writings on educational reform and youth philosophy.
21. See also Sorel (1950) 1961 (13839) on the educational value of the proletarian gen-
eral strike.

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Benjamin writes at the essays end that the expiatory power of violence
(entshnende Kraft der Gewalt) is invisible, or at least not visible with cer-
tainty, to humans. For only mythic violence, not divine, will be recogniz-
able as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because
the expiatory power of violence is for humans invisible [nicht zutage liegt ]
(252). This, of course, makes it very difficult to understand how divine vio-
lenceas simultaneously destructive and expiatorycan be both attested
in religious tradition and manifested in everyday life. In Edmund Jephcotts
translation: it strikes without bloodshed. . . . To this extent it is justifiable
to call this [divine] violence, too, annihilating; but it is so only relatively, with
regard to goods, right, life, and suchlike, never absolutely, with regard to the
soul of the living [die Seele des Lebendigen] (250). The last phrase echoes
another passage in Religion of Reason, one which itself this time quotes
the Book of Job, [Link] In Gods hand is the soul of every living thing.22
The souloriginally soul of blood, soul of smoke (from spilled blood)
becomes in biblical antiquity the principle of life (Cohen 1995: 296, 247). It
will be recalled that, in chapter 2 of Job, God grants to Satan power over all
Job thinks by right to possess, including his bodily health, reserving to him-
self only Jobs breath of life. Benjamin likewise distinguishes here between
life and the soul of what is alive.
Something of the ancient Jewish spiritualityCohen speaks of a
Jewish disdain for nature (47)23may thus be felt in what is surely the
most controversial aspect of Critique of Violence: its treatment of the
motif mere life or bare life (bloes Leben). The passage on the rela-
tively annihilating power of divine violence is followed by a short discussion
of the commandment Thou shalt not kill (which, he says, exists not as
a criterion of judgment but as a guiding principle, one that, in exceptional
[ungeheuere: monstrous] circumstances, might be disregarded) and of
Judaisms express rejection of the condemnation of killing in self-defense.
Weve seen that acts of defense may be taken to exemplify an originary vio-
lence. At issue now is the question of the sanctity of life (Benjamin 1996b:
250), something invoked by those who, like a former comrade in the youth
movement, Kurt Hiller, in his Activist tract Anti-Cain (1919), reject even

22. See Cohen 1995 (303). Cohens translation is Seele alles Lebendigen.
23. Cohen goes on, in this context, to emphasize one fundamental idea: that nature, that
man himself, has no original worth. . . . If nature and man should be able to attain any
worth at all, it could only be derived from the unique worth of Gods being (1995: 48). On
Benjaminian gnosis as a transvaluation of nature, as opposed to the Gnostics under-
valuation, see Agamben 2004 (8182).

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the revolutionary killing of an oppressor: If I do not kill, I shall never estab-

lish the world dominion of justice . . . : that is the argument of the intellec-
tual terrorist [so denkt der geistige Terrorist ]. . . . We, however, profess that
higher even than the happiness and justice of existence stands existence
itself (quoted 251). In a much-cited passage toward the end of Critique of
Violence, Benjamin pronounces this elevation of existence per se over a
just existence to be false and ignoble (unedel ): Man cannot, at any price,
be said to coincide with the mere life in him. . . . However sacred man is (or
however sacred that life in him which is identically present in earthly life,
death, and afterlife [Fortleben]), there is no sacredness in his condition,
in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow man. . . . [W]hat is here
pronounced sacred was, according to ancient mythic thought, the marked
bearer of guilt: mere life [das bloe Leben] (251).
There is once again an echo of Hermann Cohen at this crucial junc-
ture of Benjamins essay. In Religion of Reason, we read that, in the ethical
perspective of the Book of Psalms, the individual is understood from the
beginning to be separate from, and elevated over, mere existence (bloen
Existenz);24 this is because the concept of man consists in his spirit, and
this spirit, its continuous renewal, is holy (Cohen 1995: 306; 1023). Kant,
in his Lectures on Pedagogy in 1803, had already maintained that the
human being becomes human solely through education and is nothing but
what the process of education makes of him or her (Kant 2007: 439).25
The issue is, of course, a venerable one, going back at least to Socra-
tess dictum, in Platos Apology (38a), that the unexamined life is not worth
living. Benjamins recourse here to the standard of nobility, closely asso-
ciated as it is with the idea of sacrifice, may also recall the words of Hamlet,
who figures recurrently in his writings from the early student days through
the Trauerspiel book. Even before he explicitly invokes this standard in the
famed soliloquy (whether tis nobler . . .), Hamlet tells his friend Horatio at
a critical moment that he does not set [his own] life at a pins fee ([Link].65).
He chooses knowledge (as conveyed by a supernatural apparition) over
relative security of present existence. In Critique of Violence, Benjamin
refers summarily to two distinct spheres that must be kept in mind if words
like life and freedom are to be used with any precision. We recall his dis-
tinction earlier in the essay between formless freedom (raw spontaneity

24. Benjamin would have encountered the term bloes Leben, as deprecatingly applied
to philosophy of life, in Heinrich Rickerts lecture course Logic at the University of Frei-
burg, summer 1913 (Fenves 2016: 57).
25. Cited in Geulen 2005 (94950).

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or freedom from) and a higher freedom (freedom for), and now we have
an analogous distinction between naked creaturely life, the pulsing corpo-
real life we imagine we share with animals and plants, and the irreducible
total condition [unverrckbaren Aggregatzustand ] that is human being
(1996b: 251).26 In The Task of the Translator, composed in 1921, Benjamin
writes similarly, Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was
an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality (25455).27 But
neither is it a matter finally of the soul of the living. In the final analysis, he
continues, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of his-
tory rather than that of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sen-
sation and soul. The philosophers task consists in comprehending all of
natural life through the more encompassing life of history (255). At issue
in what will be called the natural-historical afterlife of works of art, in their
translation, critical reception, and fame, is, then, the unfolding of a special
and high form of life [eines eigentmlichen und hohen Lebens] (255). The
critique of militarism and of pacifism thus conjoins a critique of biologism;
in each case, what is criticized is a mode of thought and action premised
on the reduction of the historical life-aggregate, whether to mere survival
or to biometrics.
Here Benjamin ventures formulations we cannot very well accept
so wrote Herbert Marcuse in his afterword to a German reprint of Critique
of Violence, specifically in reference to the sentence quoted above, the
claim that our vulnerable bodily condition has nothing sacred about it (Mar-
cuse 1965: 103).28 This claim must seem objectionable especially to a cul-
ture in which bodily health is among the highest of values, but also to
any appreciation of the moral or spiritual advantages of vulnerability. To
be sure, Marcuse emphasizes the fact that Benjamins messianism has
little in common with traditional religiosity, and that fate, guilt, and expia-
tion here are in part social categoriesaspects of Benjamins theological-
political critique of postwar German Social Democracy at a time when belief

26. In The Right to Use Force, there is a differentiation of two distinct spheres in terms
of the violent rhythm of impatience in which the law exists and has its temporal order,
as opposed to the good (? [WB]) rhythm of expectation in which messianic events unfold
[das messianische Geschehen verluft] (Benjamin 1996b: 231). See also Benjamin
1996b (230) on the most noble (fragment written in 1920).
27. Compare Heideggers question as to whether the organism could ever determine
or even broach the essence of what is alive [Wesen des Lebendigen] (Heidegger 2016:
346 [translation modified]).
28. Marcuse suggests that Benjamins denial here of anything sacred to bodily life should
be understood in relation to his critique of myth.

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in the possibility of social revolution was still vibrant. Fate, in this sense,
is society historicized, social relations posited as power relations, as law:
The Establishment. And revolution has become messianic now that the
process of history appears to have closed again. As other interpreters will
do after him, Marcuse links Benjamins essay, particularly its concluding
call for a suspension or deposing of the law (Entsetzung des Rechts), with
the celebrated theses On the Concept of History (1940), Benjamins last
known work, where revolutionary struggle has in view a messianic Stillstell-
ung, the arrest and transformative deactivation of positive goal setting
reorientation of inclination on a grand scale. The vigilance of social justice
presupposes the experience of what Benjamin in that text names now-time
(Jetztzeit), the paradoxical breaking open of the homogeneous continuum
of history by means of a singular bodily and historical crystallization, a
destabilizing tigers leap into the past whereby past and present moments
(tradition and the individual talent) violently converge in a new and higher,
tension- filled constellation of meaning (Benjamin 2003: 39596). Such
historical encapsulation each time occasions the awakening and distilla-
tion of a creative (divine) potential in human life. For the living being, even
in destitute condition, is never simply there like the rock in its mere exis-
tence. There is no bare life. Its concept makes sense only as opposed to
that of nothingness. Marcuse, in effect, quotes Benjamin against himself in
order to suggest that the human beings primal vulnerability may actually
be the condition for any messianic bearing. From such a realization, in fact,
derives Benjamins tragic conception of happiness.
Five years after the appearance of Marcuses afterword, the young
Giorgio Agambenwho would later devote his Homo Sacer series to pur-
suing Benjamins pointed query concerning the origins of the dogma of the
sacredness of life (1996b: 251)published an interpretation of Benjamins
essay that likewise addresses the theme of divine violence in terms of
transformed temporality. A violence divorced from the assertion of power
one that deliberately refrains from imposing or enforcing law and instead
breaks apart the established continuity of time to found a new erais not,
Agamben contends, as inconceivable as it first appears to be. In a move
that foreshadows subsequent preoccupations,29 he turns to the example
of primitive rituals that were designed to rupture the homogeneous flux of
profane time through acts of violence and thereby resurrect a primordial
temporality; it was only through such a regeneration of time that a new

29. See, for example, The Unspeakable Girl of 2010, a meditation on the Eleusinian ritu-
als of ancient Athens.

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era (a new revolution of time) could become possible (Agamben 2015:

235). He adduces the unsettlinglet us say, deconstructivepower of the
figure of Dionysus, of the god who dies and is reborn, in expounding the
regenerative significance of a certain divine violence, the sudden irruption
of which occurs where humans intuit the essential proximity of life and
death, violence and creation; [sacred violence] emerges when humans dis-
cover that the experience of this proximity is rebirth and the generation
of new time (236). By the same token, Agamben concludes, an authen-
tic revolutionary violenceone that uproots received cultural knowledge
and allows words and deeds to adumbrate a new beginningpresupposes
an elation and dispossession of the self such as to enable an initiatory
immersion in the unsayable (237). This generative violence would have
nothing in common with the executive violence (236) promoted in the
society of the spectacle.
It may seem surprising, even given the time frame (late sixties), that
Agamben invokes instances of mythic violence in order to illuminate the
redemptive capacity of divine violencethat which, according to Benjamin,
works in secret, if not altogether invisibly, to break the spell of myth. As we
have noted, the field of mythic energy is always gathering and reconstitut-
ing itself and always infiltrating the very media that would resist and dis-
possess it30taking root even in the transcendental medium of language
itself, namely, in the ineluctable metaphoricity of con-cepts. Like the dead
metaphors haunting the interior of words, operative assumptions of power
condition social relations at every level; these potent mythic directives
embedded within bodies of history are there to be recognized and, if nec-
essary, dismantled. Having asserted, at the end of Critique of Violence,
the virtual unrecognizability of any expiatory power for humans, however,
Benjamin follows with what is probably the most mysterious formulation in
the whole essay, having to do with the hybridizing function of myth: Even-
tuating anew are all eternal forms of pure divine violence [the violence said,
in the next sentence, to be capable of appearing in true war, as much as
in the crowds divine judgment on a criminal] which myth bastardized with
law (1996b: 252).31 It seems that myth is understood to effect the cross-
30. See Fenves 2011 (219) on Benjamins transvaluation of Gewalt in terms of the good
to which no possession-character accrues.
31. Benjamin writes, Von neuem stehen der reinen gttlichen Gewalt alle ewigen Formen
frei, die der Mythos mit dem Recht bastardierte. Adapting Jephcotts translation: Once
again all eternal forms are open to pure divine violence, forms which [or: the divine vio-
lence which] myth has bastardized with law. The translation I offer in the text is influenced
by Derridas reading (2002: 292).

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breeding of eternal forms of divine violence with the contingent nexus of

law, engendering adulterate or hybrid forms of violence. Serving the inter-
ests of boundary setting, of threat and bloody retribution, the generation
of myth would fuel the bastard structures of law and state, where what is
always more or less covertly at stakethere to be deconstructedis the
dogma of property and possession, the reifying myth at work in all knowl-
edge of objects and, doubly so, in the mathematized strategic militarization
of this knowledge. It is not clear whether Benjamin allows here for the laws
at least occasionally serving the cause of justice. What is clearly affirmed
is that law, in its origin and effectivity, is bound to mythic imperatives; and it
is the all too real dominion of myth (Herrschaft des Mythos) that institutes
the fatal cycle of guilt, war, and sacrifice. That this pernicious and repre-
hensible (verwerflichen) cycle of arrogation and destruction, bespeaking
what Benjamin will call mythic rigidity,32 is here and there already bro-
ken in the present age, is reason enough, moreover, for risking a word
against the law (252) and thereby renewing the possibility of a union of
hearts foundedgroundlesslyin mutual solitude and the ordeal of the
inexpressible.
For justice, in Benjamins reckoning, is a good that cannot be a pos-
session. In his earlier Notes for a Work on the Category of Justice, which
Scholem copied out of Benjamins notebook into his own diary on Octo-
ber 89, 1916, he had written:

To every good [Jedem Gute], as delimited in the order of time and

space, there attaches the character of possession [Besitzcharakter],
as an expression of its transience. Possession, however, as encom-
passed in the same finitude, is always unjust. Hence no system
based on possession or property [keine wie immer geartete Besitz-
ordnung: no possession-order, of whatever sort] . . . can lead to
justice.
Rather, justice resides in the condition of a good that cannot be a
possession. This alone is the good through which other goods are
divested of ownership [besitzlos werden]. . . .
Justice is the endeavor [Streben] to make the world into the high-
est good. . . .
Virtue can be demanded, whereas justice, in the end, can only

32. See Benjamin 2003 (108 [letter of December 9, 1938, to T. W. Adorno]), concerning
mythic rigidity [Starre] (thanks to Brendan Moran for this reference). Petrified unrest
(erstarrte Unruhe) is a motif of The Arcades Project.

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beas a state of the world [Zustand der Welt] or state of God. . . .

The immense gulf separating law and justice . . . is something indi-
cated in other languages as well. (Scholem 1995: 4012)33

Justice is not the doing of duty as a means to the achievement of

virtue but is in essence a consummate statein what degree worldly or
transcendental is left undecided here. It is a dynamic state, in any case, a
way of being and of meaning; and in its autotelic momentum the doing of
justice, however provisional, is each time imbued with a sense of univer-
sal transience. No more than the event of language, therefore, is it some-
thing to be objectified or owned, since it dissolves the central juridical myth
of ownership: that is its divine violence. It is the good as a way of striving
without instrumentalizing. Like the expansion of despair, with Nietzsches
superman, into a religious state of the world (Benjamin 1996b: 289),34 this
self-possessed freedom from possession, this dispossession, has every-
thing to do with what Derrida has called, in the wake of Benjamins own
sounding of the theme, the divine character of solitude. . . . [For] each time
we are alone, we begin to resemble [God] a little, he who is himself abso-
lutely alone . . . in his absolute uniqueness. . . . A just one is always more
alone than any other (Derrida 2005a: 241).35
The idea of an immense gulf separating law and justice, enunciated
in the note on justice and already at the basis of early reformist writings
like Moral Education of 1913, becomes an ethical constant in Benjamins
work, playing a determinate role in the philosophical-political material sur-
rounding Critique of Violence. In a fragment of 1921 (that essays date of
publication), The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe, he again differ-
entiates the world of law from the moral world (moralischen Welt), asso-
ciating the former with retribution and the latter with the uniquely vexed
phenomenon of forgiveness (Benjamin 1996b: 286). In the perspective of
the moral world, time is not a relentless chronological mechanism of cause
and effect but rather the tempestuous storm of forgiveness [Sturm der Ver-

33. It is not exactly clear, in this entry, where Benjamins sentences end and Scholems
might begin.
34. Benjamins term here, in the 1921 fragment Capitalism as Religion, is religisen Welt-
zustand. He writes, This passage of the planet Human through the house of despair
in the absolute solitude of its trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defines (Benjamin
1996b: 289).
35. Compare Benjamins hypothesis in Moral Education that all morality and religiosity
originates in solitude with God (2011: 110). See also, on solitude (Einsamkeit) in commu-
nity, Benjamin 1994 (5051 [letter of August 4, 1913, to Carla Seligson]). The uniqueness
of God is of course a central theme in Cohen.

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gebung] that precedes the ever-nearing Last Judgment (286). Evidently

at work in this messianic storm of forgiveness, expressing the constant
proximity of a judgment day in the moral construction of time, is divine jus-
tice in the form of divine violence or heavenly wrath; and here one should
no doubt recall the primitive origins of the biblical Yahweh as a storm god,
origins variously reflected in the imagery of fire, cloud, whirlwind, and the
like.36 Benjamin goes on to invoke the purifying obliterating process of
this divinity storm in history: As the purifying hurricane speeds ahead of
the thunder and lightning, Gods fury roars [so braust Gottes Zorn] through
history in the storm of forgiveness in order to sweep away everything that
would be consumed forever in the lightning bolts of divine wrath [in den
Blitzen des gttlichen Wetters] (287).37 If the above-cited note of 1916
seems to distinguish between justice as a state of the world and jus-
tice as a state of God, now, with the notion of divine weather, the osten-
sible opposition has given way to a kind of transcendence in immanence.38
Thus the concluding sentence of Critique of Violence, which, with striking
mythic coloration, characterizes divine violence as sign and seal (Insignium
und Siegel 39) of sacred dispatch (heilige Vollstreckung), as markinglike
a signaturethe process of divinitys sovereign, incalculable, and singu-
larly ambiguous actualization in historical time and space: in us. It is a pro-
cess in which fury and forgiveness, destruction and purification, war and
peace seem ultimately indistinguishableas happiness and downfall are
eschatologically indistinguishable in the world of the Theological-Political
Fragment: For in happiness all that is earthly seeks [erstrebt] its down-
fall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined [bestimmt ] to find it. . . .
The . . . rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence . . . is happiness
(Benjamin 2002: 3056).
It was just this theological-political paradoxy, amenable as it is to the

36. In her chapter Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Violence, Butler (2012: 92) asso-
ciates this fragment with Critique of Violence, emphasizing the contravention of teleo-
logical time. She argues that Benjamins God here is not a vengeful God (96), though the
phrase Gottes Zorn, in the fragment, might suggest otherwise. The association of fury
and forgiveness, inverting the traditional motif (storm of wrath), points in this case beyond
the opposition of mercy and vengeance.
37. In the well-known Denkbild from the theses On the Concept of History, the angel of
history is similarly blown into the future by a storm from Paradise (Benjamin 2003: 392).
Compare the storm of eventuation (Sturm des Ereignisses) in Heidegger 2016 (312).
38. The expression is borrowed from Husserl (1931) 2012 (112) (Transzendenz in der
Immanenz).
39. Cohen cites a saying from the Talmud: The seal of the Holy One [Das Siegel des
Heiligen] . . . is truth (1995: 412).

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mystical foundation of authority, that so disturbed Derrida, who registered

with infinite qualification, and with unequivocal acknowledgment of the cour-
age involved, something strangely forbidding in the Benjamin of this essay
and this epoch, something in his dark poetic theology reminiscent of the
German Lutheran baroque with which he had been engaged since at least
1916, or of the more savage moments of Charles Baudelaires Fleurs du mal,
sections of which he was translating at this time (Derrida stresses the con-
nection with Heidegger40): One is terrified at the idea of an interpretation
that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an indecipherable signa-
ture of the just and violent anger of God (Derrida 2002: 298). The motif of
an incommensurable divine violence intervening in the destiny of man, the
critique of mere survival and mere corporeal life in the interests of some-
thing nobler, the assumed ethic of sacrifice, not to mention the reference to
true war, all have reactionary or conservative (conservative-revolutionary)
resonances that, from a political perspective, set this essay apart in some
degree from many of Benjamins other writings. Derrida, it might be said,
criticizes the essay in the name of a yet unrealized democracy. In contrast to
the antinomian and antiparliamentary Benjamin of the early Weimar period,
he can argue for both the irreducibility of justice to law and its essential link
to law.41 In this world, he seems to imply, or at this world-historical juncture,
with all the spiritual and even moral failings of democracy (such as dema-
goguery), it is too dangerous to seek the destruction of the principle of law,
however deficient in justice its practice may be and however far removed
from the classical Platonic idea of law as essentially educative.
Derrida acknowledges that the obsessive thematic of destruc-
tion in Benjamin, as in Heidegger (outwardly different as these two cases
remain), always was meant to enable an authentic, historically inspired
mode of experience (2002: 261). Like all Benjaminian themes, that of
Destruktion has to be seen in the context of that complex set of convictions
comprising, in the end, a contradictory and mobile whole. In the exemplary
feuilleton piece of 1931, The Destructive Character, we find intimated not
only a form of life beyond obedience to external rule but a kind of secular,
indeed metropolitan incarnation of divine violence and its deconstruction of
myth. We hear of a character whose need for fresh air and open space is

40. This text, like many others by Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian, too messianico-
Marxist or archeo-eschatological for me (Derrida 2002: 298).
41. See Derrida 2005a (254). See also the concluding propositions on this issue of the
heterogeneity and inseparability of law and justice, and on reason as the wager of a
transaction between . . . calculation and the incalculable, in Derrida 2005b (15051).

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stronger than any hatred, one who uses this space without possessing it
and is thus an enemy (Feind ) of the etui-man who looks for comfort and
encasement; we hear of one who, in clearing away and obliterating even
the traces of destruction, is always blithely at work, passing on situations
by making them practicable and thus liquidating them (Benjamin 1999:
54142). With his fundamentally historical consciousness, his bitter aware-
ness of the still irremediable Trauerspiel of history, the destructive charac-
ter, for all his metaphysical insouciance, retains an insuperable mistrust
of the course of things and a keen appreciation of eternal transience. He
sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways every-
where (542). And because he is oriented ever anew to a manifold contin-
gency of possible paths or thresholds, so as to be continually in danger of
losing the way himself, he always stands at a crossroads, not knowing what
the next moment will bring but remaining ready for the untoward at every
turn. Such militantly open and exposed readiness in this unprepossessing
character bespeaks the Benjaminian policy of pure means, that teleology
without goal that defies the logic of instrumentality. It is a question not of
a set final goal but of an immediately recurring task, the telos of which is
immanent to the actual unfolding of the problem with its historical burden.
From the unfixed position of his anticlassical traditionalism, the
destructive character works to mortify phenomena, disaggregating the
sedimented and oncoming thingsBenjamins version of phenomenologi-
cal reductionso as, through excavation and reappropriation of traditional
material, to e-ducate in the literal sense, beyond all positivity: What exists
he reduces to rubblenot for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way
leading through it (542 [my emphasis]). Although the destructive character
himself or herself has no interest in communication, per se, in being under-
stood, and even, for the sake of making room and leading out, may, we
are told, ruthlessly provoke misunderstanding, this simultaneously destruc-
tive and constructive ethos of reading perhaps provides a key to the avow-
edly nihilist method of the task of world politics announced at the end
of the Theological-Political Fragment and implicitly at stake in Critique
of Violence. As we have been suggesting, it is most plausibly viewed as
the essentially educational task of fostering a historically saturated atmo-
sphere of revolutionary freedomone thinks of the educator Nietzsches
divine nihilism42a task demanding, for individual and collective humanity,
continual self-transcendence and the overcoming or expiation of those

42. Concerning nihilism as a divine way of thinking (gttliche Denkweise), see Nietz-
sche 1968 (15 [note of 1887]).

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stages of human being [Stufen des Menschen] that are nature (Benjamin
2002: 306). Such a historical overcoming would not dissolve the natural
tension in things,43 any more than does, say, the overcoming of nature in
dance. A mobile and contradictory set of imperatives, at any rate, would
again be in question: the liquidation of mythic reifications together with the
redemption of mythic energies, the assumption and articulation of the mes-
sianic rhythm of transience in everyday free fall, and the transformation of
all forms of work into rites of study. But we can start by undoing the com-
modification of education.

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