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.

Benjamin distinguishes between different categories of strikes and their corresponding categories of violence. There are ordinary, "partial" strikes in which some particular material improvement is sought. Benjamin calls the violence associated with them "predatory": it is violence with the object of seizing something.  Of more interest to Benjamin are two kinds of general strikes, which, following Georges Sorel, he names "political" and "proletarian". The political general strike is carried out as a means to achieve some program of general social reform. In contrast, the proletarian general strike, which is something like a spontaneous uprising, has no program, no particular goal. The former Benjamin associates with what he calls "mythological violence"; the latter, with what he calls "divine violence". Strikes of both of these kinds are manifestations as opposed to mere demonstrations. They both manifest the existence of a new social power which threatens to displace the established one. So while the political general strike is intended to displace it with a new regime of law; the proletarian general strike aims to overthrow law altogether. The "mythological violence" of the political general strike, Benjamin says, is "law-making"; the "divine violence" of the proletarian general strike is "law-destroying."

Divine violence does not destroy merely the particular, currently instituted law; it destroys law in general. Since violence, strictly speaking, is possible only in the ethical sphere delimited by law, divine violence paradoxically destroys the very possibility of violence. Law, here, stands for those formal mechanisms of dispute resolution which are ultimately backed by physical force. The situation of our lives, with all of their conflicts, within the sphere of law thus subjects us to the constant threat of force. It makes us the subjects of potential violence; it renders our relationships with other people, insofar as we come into conflict with them, into, essentially, scenes of violence.

Benjamin notes that "nonviolent [resolution of conflict] is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement…. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, and whatever else might here be mentioned, are their subjective manifestations." But under the reign of law, the "objective manifestation" of all of these "unalloyed means of agreement" is "determined by law"—they are a veneer of humanity over the mechanisms of formalized violence.

This brings us to the most difficult aspects of the essay:  what is the status (for lack of a better term) of divine violence?  He says that the justification of means depends on fate and the justness of ends upon God, by which he means the Messianic God. It is this insertion of Judaic Messianism that provides Benjamin with what I would call a (weak) normative ground.  The jump from the secular to the divine is inspired by his conviction that history represents a fallen world, subject to decay, in which there is only the delusion of progress.  I am speculating here because I believe there is an unresolved tension within the essay, and Benjamin's work in general.  The "Pure Means" of the proletarian revolution suggests a violence severed from any ends and yet divine violence manifests the end of time, where we witness the emergence of a community that has defeated fate.  While mythic violence brings guilt and retribution, the divine violence that Benjamin would like to believe in offers expiation.  Despite Derrida's reasonable horror at how much this vision corresponds to the Holocaust, it is difficult not share in its aspirations.  Benjamin believes that only when legality in the profance sense has been abolished, will the true revolution succeed, and this revolution will be "lethal without spilling blood."  Perhaps the best we can make of this eschatology is that it is uncanny - familiar yet terrifying.