Benjamin, geWalt

Walter Benjamin was - for reasons which are not so clear, but likely shaped by the circumstances of his death - buried under the name of Benjamin Walter. This thereby ensured that he was not registered as a Jew, and so was not buried on the outside of the proper cemetary, with all that this implied in 1940.

At one level, this introduction might open out onto a discussion of recognition and misrecognition, of the play between the one and the other, of the border and law, of death and monumentalisation, and more besides, which is no doubt possible, salient and would take more than a few remarks to unpack. But I wanted instead to offer a simpler set of comments that run, likely all too hastily and headlong, from the permutations of inside/outside to that of the contract. In some ways, I wanted to respond to Ken's questions about alchemy or, perhaps more directly, what might be put at stake in reading this particular essay, in the here and now that might open onto an elsewhere and otherwise.

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As Marc Lombardo notes following Derrida, it is not simply that even the most patient reader cannot 'do justice' to Benjamin's essay, it is that it refuses the notions of justice that travel the route of translation, counters "the possibility of assimilation within any kind of economy". To be sure, there are all sorts of economies and investments, all manner of ways in which to 'do justice' to the essay through recourse to law, which is to say, to turn it over to myth - not least, that of a canonical law as it operates within the university, publishing and niche-markets. That said, the essay is hardly without force. And it is by no means indifferent - which, perhaps, is what canonisation, assimilation and a particular kind of circulation in a particular kind of economy would require.

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On the contrary, Benjamin insists that it is necessary to reflect on "meaning in action, and beyond this on any meaning in reality itself". In this, and despite all that might be evoked by Benjamin's messianic politics, it is not political decision which is suspended, but the very reduction of decision to its sovereign instances. Benjamin insists that such reflection, the very possibility of a critique of violence rests on a "historico-philosophical view of law". In this sense, his essay is far less a critique of violence than might be assumed by translations of its title, particularly not as this might be accomplished by the instatement of formal or abstract rules.

Rather, it is an examination of the dispositions of critique and violence as they appeared in the specific conjuncture of early 1920s Germany, with all that this might imply about the political-philosophical weight of categorical imperatives and dialectics; the commotion of general strikes, coup d'etats, and assassinations; the conflicts between council communists and socialists; the devastations that followed WWI and the Versailles Treaty; and so on.

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Politics and language. Gewalt does not simply translate as violence, or force, or violation, but also as the maintenance and possession of power, its workings, administration (verwaltung), and so on. And, it is the play between all these varied senses of walt - the very oscillation between them, the schwankungsgesetz, as he will say - that Benjamin seeks to examine and, ultimately, to displace. That is, the constant cycling through (the dialectic) of a law-making and law-preserving violence that characterises not only the state of emergency, but also its normative inclination.

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Derrida may well have evinced horror at Benjamin’s discussion of 'divine' and 'pure' violence, and there are good reasons to reiterate the discussion, if only to insist that Benjamin refuses to justify violence on the grounds of either ends or means, either a teleology or a proceduralism. But it seems to me that the weight of Derrida's reading tends to elide the sense in which Benjamin’s 'pure violence' is not simply a detemporalising violence, even less is it the kind of violence that might be associated with solutions, whether substantively final or formally empty.

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To put that another way: it is not I think economy that Benjamin writes up against, in any anthropological or psychoanalytic sense in which 'economy' might be understood. It is capitalism, the intersections of law, justice, the state and, in particular, the contract and the wage contract as it may or may not be suspended by the strike (hence the discussion of Sorel's distinction between kinds of strikes), among other things. Indeed, the prerogative sway of the ends-and-means model, what Benjamin will call the "law of oscillation" is precisely the predicament of the contract as it plays itself out in the historical "dialectic" of the law, within the law, and, not least, as the law of value. In important respects, Benjamin's critique of violence parallels later reckonings with the oscillation between use- and exchange-values, the form of law and the form of labour - but I will merely leave this as a remark and move on.

*

There are currently a series of laws being introduced in Australia under the merry heading of 'Workchoices'. Among other things, it has been claimed that the laws remove the right to strike. This is not quite the case. Rather, the laws even more firmly affix the strike (through criminalisation, penalties and procedures) to the temporal rythmn of employment contracts and ministerial prerogative. That is, strikes are illegal for the duration of the employment contract. Which, to be sure, effectively removes the possibility of striking where strikes continue to have some force, but in such a stringent and peculiar way that (as has been the case in the state of Victoria where such laws have been effective for some time), the end of contracts opens up a 'season of strikes and lockouts', as it were.

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Benjamin writes that the "possibility of military law rests on exactly the same situation as does that of strike law". In other words, they are both instances of exception, although the latter is not obliged to turn to positing, even if it (and the abovementioned laws seeks to accomplish this also) oftentimes does. Nevertheless, it is by no means coincidental that the routinisation and administration of the strike in the temporalities of the wage contract occurs in tandem with the emergence of a seemingly permanent state of war. And it is in this context that Benjamin's argument for a pre-positional, pre-temporal, unrepresentable, afformative act, one that exceeds the oscillation of law-making and law-preserving violence, is crucial. A politics that refuses both the sacrificial teleologies of martyrdom and the mythical violence of the state, both natural law and positivism.

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The wage contract (like the social contract) is the "law of oscillation", that is: it involves both the state and capital, beyond any formal or courteous distinctions that liberalism or social democracy have sought to erect between law and labour, politics and economy, global capital and national state, and so on. The swing between law-preserving and law-making violence is the very condition upon which democracy is founded as both the individuation of citizens as proprietors of potentiality (Benjamin will note the Spinozian vitalism in this moment) and the naturalisation of 'man' as this is evoked in social contract theory. It is not perhaps surprising that the official trade union campaign against 'Workchoices' is conducted under the slogan of 'workers' rights' and 'human rights'. Such is the exhaustion of the horizon politics.

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And, it is against the closure of this horizon that Benjamin's essay works. 'Divine' or 'pure' violence, for him, is that which breaks with politics as calculation, that is to say, the contract, its temporalities and norms. Hence, his interest in the strike. It is, as Werner Hamacher would say, an afformative politics.

The afformative is distinguished from the performative in that it does not posit a rule or norm that would simply relaunch the oscillation between law-making and law-preserving violence. Or, to put it another way, Benjamin's politics is a politics without a program. Less sloganistically, it is a politics of the elliptical that, while this attends each and every politics, each performative act as its very condition, might nevertheless suspend the temporal compulsion toward positing and actualisation, economy and assimilation, the calculation of values and the proposition of value, and hence the 'cycle of violence' that attends them.

{meta}

Comments

[Marc Lombardo]

re:it is not I think economy that Benjamin >>writes up against, in any anthropological >>or psychoanalytic sense in >>which 'economy' might be understood. It >>is capitalism, the intersections of law, >>justice, the state and, in particular, >>the contract and the wage contract as it >>may or may not be suspended by the strike >>(hence the discussion of Sorel's >>distinction between kinds of strikes), >>among other things.

It is my contention that if we take the idea of the "historico-philosophical view of law" seriously then we must strive not only for an analysis of the contingent historical facts as they appear to us, but also the "thatness" of those contingent facts in that they appear to us as more than simply contingent. Concerning the question cited above this would mean acknowledging that the economy of capitalism etc, _is_ both anthropological and psychoanalytic.

[s0metim3s]

Is there, then, a specificity regarding the anthropologies and psychoses of capitalism?

[Nate]

heya,
I quite like this piece. While I think I probably agree with you on rights and all that, I think maybe I don't feel it as strongly.
And I wonder, because in the "Right to Use Force" piece WB asserts a right for every individual for exercise gewalt, and denies such a right to states. This may be one of the functions of the religious motifs in his work that I like - it can be an attempt to pull the rug out from under the state and sovereignty as guarantor of rights. That is, it breaks any kind of contract (and so you might argue that in that register there aren't really rights at all, but that's kind of the point I'm trying to make - maybe some utterances of the term 'right' are contradictory and explosively so in that if they were acted upon they would threaten the whole edifice of statist rights).
On that, the union right to strike seems to be something of a compromise between two kinds of (differently underwritten, at least for WB) rights, and is part of the conceptual conflict between the two (a la when WB talks about the state's supposing it illegitmate to use rights to strike in order to destroy the state). To my mind, at least here in the US, the erosion of official labor rights like the right to strike is essentially a re-upping of the ante against worker organizing, predicated on - aiming to further a tedency toward - an inability (deriving from a host of reasons that are worth exploring) to effectively do the various things involved in conducting a strike in many instances.
On that same note, I'm not sure I follow you on Benjamin being anti-programmatic. I don't know Hamacher so afformativity is a bit beyond me, but surely divine violence still requires organizing to bring about, right? (Unless it's to be taken literally as divine.)
all the best,
Nate

[s0metim3s]

Hey Nate,

If you mean the passages on natural law and the transfer of the individual's right to exercise violence to the state, I read it quite differently.

Not as an insistence that the individual has a right to use force, but that natural law (which he rejects) must naturalise violence - and, I would add, the individual - so as to present the state as simply the aggregation of this transfered right.

I think that's much more powerful a critique than simply insisting that individuals retain the right to use force.

And, yes, I think I am much more critical about rights claims. I've no doubt they can be contradictory, but also no doubts at all that it is more important to begin from the acknowledgement that one does not have any rights. In any case, who or what would recognise one's rights on those occasions when claims to rights are made? And it's here that the state (or some idealised variant of such) usually gets smuggled back in, however anti-statist a politics might puport to be.

Also, I don't think either afformative or non-programmatic politics means a lack of organisation. Indeed, to the extent that programmatic and performative politics is something of a default position, it takes a lot of organisation, as well as rethinking models of organisation, to not fall into that.

[old]

s0metim3s, that last comment is much appreciated. I haven't read Right to Use Force and wasn't inclined to after Nate's comment, but your follow up is making me think more and more that I will soon have to work through more of Benjamin. Whether it is Benjamin or your take on Benjamin, the bit about how natural law must naturalise violence is sheer brilliance. I very much share your anti-statist views and agree that statism is often smuggled in the backdoor through rights rhetoric.

[Nate]

hey there,

Thanks for the clarification. I think I agree w/ you on program - in my mind the term tends to conjure up commissars with orders to give, which is not an organizational model that accomplishs much I'm interested in. And most of the frustrated would be commissars I know are almost entirely incompetent and useless anyway. So I'm on board with the anti-programmatic program. :)

As for the natural law stuff, I was unclear. I was talking about a different short piece, called "The Right To Use Force". It's in v1 of the selected works, and is a commentary on someone else's article by the same name. In that piece Benjamin claims that the right to use force resides solely in individuals, not states. I think that that kind of right may not be recognizable in a certain sense (because one either does or does not, can or can not, exercise force, and I don't know how any kind of rights and recognition regime as I understand them could exist that recognize that idea), and so may not be a right at all in the way you're using the term. It may be more like a synonym for 'capacity'or simply 'something I might agree with'. If I'm missing something here I'd love to be corrected.

I think perhaps our difference on this might be something like this: to my mind, if people use an absent and impossible figure as guarantor/foundation of something (god, essential nature, etc) then I think a social organization based on that might be able to look a good deal like one based on not having a basis or foundation at all (which I'd certainly prefer, that we all be antifoundationalists who don't crave guarantors). If some person or institution comes to stand in for that figure, that's another story, of course, as that replays all the shit we hate.
I get the impression that you think talking and thinking in terms of guarantors of rights is likely to lead to (or already contributes to) institutions that claim to act in the name of the guarantor in order to help wield a type of social power. Is that a fair characterization? If so, I'm sympathetic but don't feel as strongly about it perhaps in part because I've thought less about all this rights stuff.
take care,
Nate

[s0metim3s]

Oh, ok. I missed the "Right to Use Force" reference - but I'm a bit exhausted at the moment.

I thought Nate that you meant the passages in "Critique of Violence" - which, I agree Old, are quite a brilliant way of approaching the question. Though, to be fair, in some ways I read beyond what are fleeting comments of WB's.

And on that note, it seems that the "Right to Use Force" piece may not be as interesting, but I should re-read it. When was it written?

[Nate]

hey there,
You're right, it's definitely not as interesting, I think it's mainly worth a glance in reference to Critique of Violence. It was written in 1920, it's in vol 1 of the Selected Writings. It's a three page commentary on an article from a journal for religios socialism, said article also entitled "The Right to Use Force".

What struck me as interesting in this piece was the he says that only individuals have a right to use force, and says "[a]n exposition of this standpoint is one of the tasks of my moral philosophy, and in that connection the term 'anarchism' may well be used to describe a theory that denies a moral right not to force as such but to every human institution, community, or individuality that either claims a monopoly over it or in any way claims that right for itself from any point of view, even if only as a general principle, instead of respecting it in specific cases as a gift bestowd by a divine power, by an absolute power." I'm not entirely sure what to make of that, but I think I like it.

take care,
Nate