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.

 

In this statement, Derrida was referring more particularly to what he calls the text’s “last sequence,” which is for him and me, “the most enigmatic, the most fascinating and the most profound in this text.”[1] Benjamin arrives at this point by means of a rather rapid progression, which has a quite interesting tension between theoretical concerns and practical examples. Theoretically, the piece begins with a reappraisal of the distinction between natural and positive law, which soon becomes a discussion of “ends” and “means,” which in turn morphs itself into temporary resolution with the figure of law-creating and law-preserving violence (which is itself then overturned in the “last sequence”). Practically, you have the ineptness of parliament, the extortion of organized labor, the terror of the police, and the inviolable necessity of the death penalty. These examples are much more coherently linked than I presented them here, but nonetheless, there is a feeling of being thrown head-first from one impossibly complex legal issue or situation to the next, having none of them fully “resolved” when the “last sequence” appears.

It is in this “last sequence” of the essay, that we find that all of the previously mentioned problematics can be seen as having grown out of a more original, more primordial difference and differentiation (which is to say conflict and confrontation): mythical violence against divine violence. Mythical violence is introduced as being a violence which is “not related as a means to a preconceived end” but nonetheless “has thoroughly objective manifestations,” and therefore is ultimately law-imposing (and the very essence of the law in its arbitrary arbitration).[2] Divine violence on the other hand, is distinguished by the fact that even when it acts it is completely illegible: “only mythical violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to men.”[3]

Overtones of the story of the origin of language clearly abound in this distinction: legible/illegible, named/unnamed, presence/absence, etc. We can even make out the Chomskian distinction between performance and competence from Benjamin’s work here; this is not to say that divine violence is not performed, but rather that its performance can never be discerned, it knows (and indeed created) the language without ever having to be caught speaking it. Benjamin was certainly aware that in talking of the founding of the law he was in fact talking of the founding of language:

How would it be, therefore, if all the violence imposed by fate, using justified means, were of itself in irreconcilable conflict with just ends, and if at the same time a different kind of violence came into view that certainly could be either the justified or the unjustified means to those ends, but was not related to them as means at all but in some different way? This would throw light on the curious and at first discouraging discovery of the ultimate insolubility of all legal problems (which in its hopelessness is perhaps comparable only to the possibility of conclusive pronouncements on “right” and “wrong” in evolving languages).[4

Should we be surprised that the insolubility of the problems of the development of law are so clearly “comparable” to the undecidabilities of the development of language? I would go so far as to say that rather than being only “comparable” to one another, each problematic actually presupposes the other. We find an almost direct corollary to Benjamin’s divine and mythical violence in the stages of the development of human language famously outlined by Vico in La Scienza Nuova. “The first language had been hieroglyphic, sacred or divine [violence]; the second, symbolic, by signs or by heroic devices [i.e. mythical violence]; the third, epistolary, for men at a distance to communicate to each other the current needs of their lives [i.e. law].” [5] Surely, it’s more than a coincidence that Vico, a jurist contemplating the origin of language, came to a conclusion so “comparable” to that of an homme de lettres who was contemplating the origin of the law (Benjamin).

In order to understand how Vico can help us understand Benjamin’s divine and mythical violence, it is first necessary to recall that in the time in which Vico was writing, the word “hieroglyphic” had a somewhat different sense to it. Prior to cracking the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics (i.e. hieroglyphics par excellence) certainly must have had a decidedly more impenetrable quality; they were clearly meant to mean something, but exactly what and exactly how seemed unquestionably out of reach.[6] Thus, hieroglyphics only made sense to the divine mind who could conjure them, just as divine violence is only perceivable in its actions to The One who lies beyond the possibility of ever being confused with a human manifestation.

Benjamin’s statement that “all the eternal forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law,” can thus be fleshed out by the false translation (i.e. translation in its essence) through which the hieroglyphic becomes the symbolic.[7] As soon as something is communicated with “signs or heroic devices,” it has been thrust into the realm of economy, of one thing being taken for another. While the divine lies beyond the possibility of assimilation within any kind of economy, myth is the arbitrary arbitration which institutes economy (and that is also to say that it institutes the law, and epistolary communication, as well). However, it should still be acknowledged that for Vico, the “first language” was not exclusively the property of the Lord: 

… that first language, spoken by the theological poets, was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with (as much have been the sacred language invented by Adam, to whom God granted divine onomathesia, the giving of names to things according to the nature of each), but was a fantastic speech making use of physical substances endowed with life and most of them imagined to be divine.[8]

These comments have a rather interesting significance when interpreted in a juridical framework: the first language could not name things according to their nature; recognizing that a justice to the particular case could never be achieved by the act of naming, the first language could not attempt to proceed in this manner. Instead, speech made use of “physical substances endowed with life,” which were “imagined to be divine.” This is clearly a difficult passage to interpret; is Vico suggesting a speech which called upon the forces of nature present in the world, and imparted them with divine significance as they showed themselves? Is this not a direction towards a justice of fate in which God is seen as being the truth which lies behind all of the manifestations which appear on the surface of the earth? This would only be to make God into a myth (one who communicates with “heroic devices”), which is exactly that which God is not. We have to note in the above passage that this is what happens when the first language is spoken, however, hieroglyphics cannot be spoken. The divine can only be found in those fragments of writing which do not tolerate the distortions of cognition and recognition, the presencing of phoneticization, or the economics of “action.” God can only be in the forgetting (oubli-vion) which comes before memory, the one text which cannot possibly be read. Divine justice means the end of memory, the recourse to records (laws) which were written before the possibility of their being read—particularized.

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[1] Ibid.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 294.

[3] Ibid., 300.

[4] Ibid., 293-94.

[5] Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), 126. My emphasis and brackets, M.L.

[6] Out of reach as opposed to that which is close-at-hand [Vorhandenheit]. As Benjamin points out, “a gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a dialectical rising and falling the lawmaking and law-preserving formations of violence.” Certainly, divine violence cannot be reached by such a gaze, if it can be reached at all. Benjamin, Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 300.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 115.