Towards the Critique of Violence

Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben

Brendan Moran, Carlo Salzani

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781474241892
• eBook ISBN: 9781472533494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' (1921) has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay continues to be a fundamental reference in Agamben's work. Written by internationally recognized scholars, Towards the Critique of Violence is the first book to explore politico-philosophic implications of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' and correlative implications of Benjamin's resonance in Agamben's writings. Topics of this collection include mythic violence, the techniques of non-violent conflict resolution, ambiguity, destiny or fate, decision and nature, and the relation between justice and thinking. The volume explores Agamben's usage of certain Benjaminian themes, such as Judaism and law, bare life, sacrifice, and Kantian experience, culminating with the English translation of Agamben's 'On the Limits of Violence'.

Part One

Benjamin’s Critique of Violence

1

Techniques of Agreement, Diplomacy, Lying

Bettine Menke

(trans. Carlo Salzani and Brendan Moran)1

Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ has gained, in the past ten or fifteen years, decisive importance for the discussion of the Benjaminian concept of the political in relation to right and justice and their reliance on the other instance, that of a striking God.2 I would like here to concern myself, however, with the techniques of agreement (or the ‘pure means’ which these techniques are an instance of), with language and technique, lying and diplomacy, which have gone somewhat unnoticed in the analysis of Benjamin’s essay.

While Benjamin’s analysis, like Derrida’s, of the concept of the sovereign decision for developing the concept of the positing and foundation of the law was conducted with reference to Carl Schmitt,3 for the perspective on the ‘techniques of agreement’ another name might be mentioned: that of Helmuth Plessner. In the years 1920–1, when Benjamin wrote and published ‘Critique of Violence’, Plessner addressed the art of politics and (among other things) of diplomacy in a series of short publications.

In his 1924 eponymous book (Grenzen der Gemeinschaft), Plessner deals with the Limits of Community, whereby the ‘community’ is limited from outside and the demarcation of the community is distinguished in the sense of a ‘culture of distance’.4 This happens in the inversion of the order of values proposed, for instance, by Ferdinand Tönnies in Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887):5 so Plessner recognizes and values artifact over organism, contract over comprehension [Verständnis], statecraft, diplomacy and form over humaneness. In the years 1920 and 1921, Plessner published a series of little contributions6 in which he addresses statecraft and diplomacy, inter alia ‘Staatskunst und Menschlichkeit’ (‘Statecraft and humanity’, 1920), ‘Politische Kultur’ and ‘Politische Erziehung in Deutschland’ (‘Political culture’, and ‘Political education in Germany’, both 1921).7 A contiguity of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Plessner’s above-mentioned texts can be recognized in their respective praise of diplomacy.8 It is the last of the works by Plessner that we have mentioned, ‘Politische Erziehung in Deutschland’, with its programme of ‘education to politics’ as a teaching in the art of government [Staats-Kunst-Lehre], which shows the closest and at times literal parallels to Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (published a few months earlier), namely with regard to the ‘pure means’ themselves, and not only to one of them, ‘diplomacy’. With his ‘project of a school for political thinking’, Plessner wants to counter the ‘opposition between power-politics and politics of understanding [Verständigung]’.9 Politics should adopt the form of an ‘art of government’ [Staats-Kunst]10 in order to counteract its degradation, which it has suffered since the eighteenth century under the postulate of the priority of goals or ideals, and under the postulate of the overcoming of politics through community.11 The ‘opposition between power-politics and politics of understanding’ would found the proviso that such a ‘school’ would be an institute that serves ‘the interests of power-politics in contrast to the interests of a sincere politics of understanding and reconciliation’.12 Hence Plessner turns against this failed opposition by giving the contrast a different form:

The opposition between power-politics and the politics of understanding has a definite meaning only when it names the difference between a politics of pure means and one of impure means. Impure means are those which originate in violence and flow into violence, the police and the army. They characterize a politics of threat.13

In contrast to the so-characterized ‘impure means, which originate in violence and flow into violence’, Plessner defines the ‘politics of pure means’ as a ‘politics of persuasive arguments and voluntary agreement’. However, this politics and its determination are established only indirectly, from the outside, as a necessity imposed ‘anyway’ on Germany:

Bereft of military means, Germany is anyway forced to avow a politics of pure means, a politics of persuasive arguments and voluntary agreement, based on the natural interests of the countries and on an accurate self-assessment of one’s own country, and whose supreme tenet is no longer the development of the spirit of military capability, but rather the respect for peace.14

This argument, however, does not address the dissolution of the ‘threat’ whose inside instrument is the police; after naming it, Plessner forgets about it – and it remains forgotten also in the text that follows. In contrast, Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ is not concerned with the ‘politics of threat’, but rather with the ‘indeterminate’ threatening by law [des Rechts], an ‘indeterminacy’ in which the law shows itself as partaking of the mythical cohesion or of fate. It is these traits of the law that Benjamin identifies in the specific function of police in the modern state. Benjamin’s argument is that this ‘indefinite’ threat belongs systematically to the law, which thus shows itself as an ‘order which imposes itself as fate’ [schicksalhafte Ordnung]: all and every possible infringment of the legal regulations stands, in each particular case, under this threat, which aims essentially at the protection of law as such; and vice versa, critique would be insufficient if it only directed itself against ‘particular laws or legal practices’,

that the law, in fact, takes under the protection of its power, which resides in the fact that there is only one fate and that the existing [das Bestehende], and in particular the threatening [das Drohende], belongs indissolubly [unverbrüchlich] to its order. For law-preserving violence is a threatening violence. (GS 2.1:187–8/SW 1:242, translation modified)

The systematically indefinite ‘threatening’ of the law [das ‘Drohende’ des Rechts] is what makes the power of law [Recht] as such and aims at the protection of the legal order as a whole.15 The ‘indeterminateness’ that constitutes the threatening [das Drohende] originates, according to Benjamin, in the ‘sphere of fate’. Into this sphere has lapsed the law-preserving violence, and with it the law as such, which, as power, manifests itself in the ‘indeterminateness of the legal threat’ [‘Unbestimmtheit der Rechtsdrohung’] (GS 2.1:188/SW 1:242, translation modified). Therefore, with the indeterminate ‘legal threat’ [Rechtsdrohung] is announced ‘something rotten in the law’ (GS 2.1:188/SW 1:242). For instance, capital punishment does not so much have the purpose to ‘punish the infringement of law’; rather, in capital punishment the law itself as ‘violence over life and death’ is ‘reaffirmed’. It is not only because in the formulation ‘something rotten in the law’ – as in Benjamin’s formula of the ghostly presence of the police – one can read an allusion to Hamlet, that the definition of law as cohesion of fate stands in the closest relation to Benjamin’s rejection of the police as an ‘abominable’ institution of the modern state. For the police show themselves to be the institution of a ‘kind of spectral mixture’ [gleichsam gespenstische … Vermischung] of the ‘two kinds of violence’ (a ‘far more unnatural combination’ [weit widernatürlicheren Verbindung] than the death penalty) (GS 2.1:189/SW 1:242, translation modified):

The ignominy of such an institution [Behörde] … lies in the fact that in it the separation of law-positing [rechtsetzender] and law-preserving [rechtserhaltender] violence is suspended. If the first is required to prove itself in victory [daß sie im Siege sich ausweise], the second is subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends. Police violence is emancipated from both conditions. … True, this is a violence for legal ends [Gewalt zu Rechtszwecken] (it includes the right of disposition [mit Verfügungsrecht]), but with the simultaneous authority [Befugnis] to posit these ends itself within wide limits...

Table of contents

• Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
• Title
• Contents 
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Introduction: On the Actuality of ‘Critique of Violence’ Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani
• Part 1 Benjamin’s Critique of Violence
• 1 Techniques of Agreement, Diplomacy, Lying Bettine Menke
• 2 The Ambiguity of Ambiguity in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ Alison Ross
• 3 Benjamin’s Niobe Amir Ahmadi
• 4 Nature, Decision and Muteness Brendan Moran
• 5 Variations of Fate Antonia Birnbaum
• Part 2 Agamben’s Readings of Benjamin
• 6 From Benjamin’s bloßes Leben to Agamben’s Nuda Vita: A Genealogy Carlo Salzani
• 7 Agamben’s Critique of Sacrificial Violence J. Colin McQuillan
• 8 Agamben, Benjamin and the Indifference of Violence William Watkin
• 9 Suchness and the Threshold between Possession and Violence Paolo Bartoloni
• 10 Violence Without Law? On Pure Violence as a Destituent Power Thanos Zartaloudis
• 11 The Anarchist Life we are Already Living: Benjamin and Agamben on Bare Life and the Resistance to Sovereignty James R. Martel
• 12 Benjamin and Agamben on Kafka, Judaism and the Law Vivian Liska
• 13 Expropriated Experience: Agamben Reading Benjamin, Reading Kant Alex Murray
• Appendix: On the Limits of Violence (1970) Giorgio Agamben
• Index
• Copyright