Long Sunday

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.

The Auratic Economy of a Critique of Violence

[For those who don't know me, my name is Kenneth Rufo, and I post primarily at Ghost in the Wire.  My training is actually in rhetoric (from a speech-communication perspective) and media ecology, thus the content and style of the following post.]

Why are we here?  Why is the ever growing list of Long Sunday contributors spending this week discussing Walter Benjamin and his Critique of Violence?  The answer is at once both banal and incisive: we wanted a reading group that began with a relatively brief and accessible text, and this particular work of Benjamin was the primary suggestion.  But why?  Why is it that 85 years after its initial publication this particular essay still holds such fascination?  What is it about the appeal of messianic violence, the institutional critique of the police and of the death penalty, or the timeliness/timelessness of this critique?  What is it about Benjamin that draws us to him on this, of all issues?

Debates over author-function aside, let's face it, for all the fame that Benjamin earned, much of it posthumously, his real reputation was made on essays penned in the 30s, not at the start of the 20s or before.  This "Critique" is not an essay he returns to with any seriousness in his later work, so when we think the name Benjamin, whatever the appeal of this particular essay, this isn't really the work that defines the proper name of the author.  This is a Benjamin in his infancy, a Benjamin who still ardently believed in a Jewish work for Europe, who believed that Judaism held within it a spiritual essence necessary for cultural redemption.  Three years before the Critique would be published, Benjamin had sketched a "Program of the Coming Philosophy," a program that (following Kant) hoped to search for objective/empirical means for a "higher concept of experience... the sole embodiment of which, for philosophy, can and must be God."  The Critique also coincides with his failed struggle to start a new journal, Angelus Novus, inspired by the same angel picture that would be referenced 20 years later in his "Theses" on history.  The journal catered to a fairly esoteric crowd of religious thinkers, who gathered from a shared desire to reclaim a spiritual imaginary from the violence with which the 20th century had begun.  Between a limited audience (the journal's mission statement went so far as to dismiss the general public as readers) and the financial burdens of 1921, the journal never saw the light of day.  This is also a Benjamin concerned first and foremost with formulating a concept of the work of art (his works on this subject, both explicit and implict, dominate the late 10s and early 20s), and does so with a metaphor that hints a bit at the flaming Geist of Heidegger, comparing the critic to an alchemist who, confronted with the "work as a flaming pile," believes "the flame itself remains a mystery, that of the living being.  Thus the critical thinker asks about the truth, whose living flame burns above the massive logs of what once existed and the light ashes of what has been experienced."

“Critique of Violence” and Deconstruction

[The following is exerpted from a longer paper I wrote on Force of Law. The part on "Declarations of Independence" in particular has been quite brutally cut, hopefully not beyond comprehensibility. For those who don't know, my name is Adam Kotsko, and I normally blog at The Weblog.]

Introducing his reading of “Critique of Violence” in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Derrida goes to great lengths to distance himself from any sense that Benjamin’s text is some kind of unique key: “One will not dare say that this text is exemplary. We are in a realm where, in the end, there are only singular examples. Nothing is absolutely exemplary. I will not attempt to justify absolutely the choice of this text. But it is not, for all that, the worst example of what could be exemplary in a relatively determined context such as ours” (263). What is the context here? First of all, of course, the context is an academic conference on Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, where “Critique of Violence” presents itself as a particularly well-suited “exercise in deconstructive reading” (264), for reasons of both structure and content. Already, though, the “complete” text in Acts of Religion contains materials adapted for a second conference on the Final Solution, materials in which, according to Agamben, Derrida “guards against [Benjamin’s concept of divine violence], approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’” (64). Finally, Derrida explicitly widens the context to include the whole political situation of his time: “In the Western Democracies of 1989, with work and a certain number of precautions, lessons can still be drawn from it” (“Force,” 264). And although we can’t know for sure that he knew it at the time—any more than we can know for sure that Benjamin knew the Shoah was coming—Derrida is writing just as “the European model of bourgeois, liberal, parliamentary democracy” (263) is about to experience what will seem to have been its greatest triumph, that is, the fall of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. Once again, the internal contradictions of Actually Existing Democracy, its self-deconstructive properties, so apparent to Benjamin and others in the wake of the Great War, become all too visible.

Divine Violence

What is divine violence? How can we understand it? I begin with these questions because I do not know the answers. But, I will suggest in what follows that divine violence is an extra-temporal violence that purifies the community of the mere life that provides the law with a body for its inscription. In so doing, it produces a piety in excess of life, a piety necessary for community.

Benjamin sets out divine violence in opposition to mythical violence. Divine violence destroys laws and boundaries. Moreover,

if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

Benjamin draws on the example of God’s judgment on the company of Korah:

It strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, and a deep connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatory character of this violence is unmistakable. For blood is the symbol of mere life. The dissolution of legal violence stems, as cannot be shown here, from the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law. For with mere life the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living.

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Thank you for reading,
Long Sunday Management

Pure Means

Benjamin's essay Critique of Violence was written in the aftermath of the First World War. It attempts to formulate a poetics of violence in order to come to terms with the devastation and economic crisis that faced Europe. It expresses Benjamin's conviction that the political institutions of parliamentary democracy had failed to live up to expectations. Ironically, it's apocalyptic conclusion foreshadows the rise to power of extreme right-wing reactionary forces and the "pure violence" unleashed as the final solution of the Holocaust. (Derrida, among others, has commented on Benjamin’s imagery of bloodless expiatory violence as eerily close to the sinister gas chambers of Auschwitz.) The basic problem he addresses is the relation between law and justice as it hinges on violence. More specifically, his essay addresses the question of whether violence in the social and political realms can be justified as pure means in itself, independent of whether it is applied to just or unjust ends. That includes a consideration of the violence represented by the general and the partial strike—whether treated as political or proletarian in origin—against the power of the state.  This is what I would like to briefly discuss.

Marc Lombardo on Benjamin: Language, Jurisprudence, and the Divine

Marc Lombardo provided me with the following contribution to our discussion of Bejamin and "Critique of Violence."

In the over 80 years which have passed since the writing of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” despite the numerous important interpretations which it has received from redoubtable commentators, the text never seems to have been done justice. To say this is neither to call previous interpretations into question nor to propose that the text can be seen in a new, wholly illuminating light. Rather, I would submit that Benjamin’s text can never be done justice, precisely because of what his very notion of justice requires. This is not entirely accurate: justice is that which can never be done by men. Even in harnessing a power which is beyond his capacities as mere man, Benjamin as auteur becomes still only mythical, that is one who can demand sacrifices but not one who can accept them. The sacrifice is always, first and foremost, the sacrifice of the reader. Benjamin’s text, if it is ever to come into its own, can only be read by a higher mind; one capable of hearing prayer, that is devouring those bodies and minds which offer themselves. This is why we see that “even Derrida” (that is to say, one of those proper names which could only be said to denote another mythic auteur like Benjamin) could not “equal” the text: “for lack of time but not only time, I cannot claim to do it justice.”

[1]

[1] Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"," Cardozo Law Review 11, no. 5-6 (1990): 1025.

A Propaedeutic

"Power no longer has today any form of legitimation other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as well as labouring secretly to produce it".  Giorgio Agamben from Means Without End

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.  Walter Benjamin, VIII Thesis on the Philosophy of History

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Thank you,
Long Sunday Management

people with ideas

We went out to Deep Cove this afternoon. This is mostly just a quaint little tourist trap with some fairly stunning views. But it's also near here that Malcolm Lowry lived for many years, squatting in a shack he and his wife built down by the shore. And it's here that Lowry wrote much of his masterpiece, Under the Volcano.

The shack no longer exists. The good people of Deep Cove and environs hardly seem to have had much affection for Lowry while he and it were there: they were rather busier trying to evict him. Since then, of course, they've somewhat ruefully installed a small plaque near the site, praising Lowry and by implication also praising themselves by invoking his great love of the place.

But while holed up in this cold (and in his case, inhospitable) part of the world, Lowry was imagining the warmer climes of Mexico: conjuring up another drunk, quietly going to seed, not fully fitting in, not fully comfortable with either himself or his environs. Here he is, in semi-drunken semi-delirium:

The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it was an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his swimming pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the "other" had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite, for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, whatever it was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in the bushes, his "ambiguous bird" that was now departing quickly on creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.

"Damn it, I feel pretty well," he thought suddenly, finishing his half quartern. (96)

[Update: a nice little note on "Evictions" from Geist, which also points us to Foucault Bluff.]