Paul Passavant: Foucault as a Critique of Benjamin

From Paul A. Passavant: "Foucault as a Critique of Benjamin"

As readers of Jacques Derrida already know, Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence has an entirely problematic narrative. This narrative is organized around an earlier moment in time prior to law and alienation, with the process of modernization being posited as degeneration and fall. During primitive communism, we were not disempowered by law; Benjamin’s specific example is the penalties for fraud under modern legal systems. Prior to the modern period, according to Benjamin, there were no laws against fraud. Instead, the fear of “mutual disadvantages” kept the peace and prevented deception. That is, people calculated that if one deceived another, a violent response might occur, and in this resort to violence, both parties might be worse off than if everybody were simply truthful. Not moral considerations but these pragmatic and anticipatory considerations prevented deception.

Today, for Benjamin, modern law has lost its vitality. This is shown by its fear of any potential exercise of violence outside of its legitimizing mechanisms. Out of this fear, it has lowered itself to prevent, through legal means, deception. As we can see, in this earlier period prior to degeneration, we were not alienated (by law) from our powers to address our mutual disagreements (nor our original rights of violence). As readers of Long Sunday know, Benjamin describes contemporary society’s entrapment within a cycle of law making violence and preserving violence. For Benjamin, justice requires a “purer sphere,” one which he refers to as “divine violence,” which will occur, messianically, in a “coming age,” and, apocalyptically, in a “true war” (presumably one that does not end with the ceremony of law), to establish “eternal forms.” This hope is critical for Benjamin, as Giorgio Agamben notes in States of Exception, since the possibility of violence (should we not use the term violence here but rather “legitimate power”?) unmediated by law—divine violence—indicates the possibility of revolutionary violence (power). Benjamin gives us glimpses of this possibility of agreement and disagreement uncoerced by power or law—again, not unproblematically—by referring to, “unalloyed agreement,” language prior to its “decay” and “penetrat[ion] by legal violence,” conferences, and (ridiculously) inter-state diplomacy. For post-Habermasian eyes trained to examine the conditions of inclusion and exclusion for any process of deliberation, or to identify the forms of power embedded within language—or indeed, for those who engage in discourse analyses—Benjamin’s illustrations are hardly persuasive.

Readers of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish cannot help but be taken with Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. Foucault is also taken with the popular admiration that the “great criminal” receives, as is Benjamin. Readers of Society Must be Defended may also find similarities between Benjamin’s description of the relation of war and law, and Foucault’s description of the relation between war and politics. How is Foucault a critic of Benjamin’s? It might be said (ok, I’ll say it) that Foucault’s project in Discipline and Punish is to engage with Benjamin’s observation that the police powers have run amok with the shift from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy. Foucault’s famous argument in D & P is that in the shift from absolutism we have seen a coinciding shift in the nature of power from sovereign power that works through law to disciplinary power, which works through examination, the calculation of deviation from a (or approximation to a) norm, and the inculcation of these constant calculations within the very “soul” of the (disciplined) subject. In other words, Benjamin sees the possibility of unalienated society constituted by subjects acting responsibly outside of law--subjects who calculate, perceive a possible future of mutual disadvantage, and then decide, through this foresight, not to deceive. Foucault looks at this same society “outside of law,” and sees mutual discipline as these calculations and habits of foresight do indeed prevent overt violence (as they did for Norbert Elias), but for Foucault, these habits of foresight and calculating subjects, while possibly outside of law, are not outside of power as disciplinary power has produced these modern subjects. Thus, for Foucault, this space beyond law is not a space beyond power, and this is the warning that he provides to us as readers of Benjamin.

Moreover, and contra Benjamin, he sees these spaces beyond law multiplying within modernity. The multiplication of these disciplinary spaces within modernity, then, helps to answer the question that Benjamin leaves his readers with—why do we see the proliferation of police powers under modern conditions of parliamentary democracy? For Foucault, the answer is given by the multiplication of disciplinary institutions and the use of surveillance and “the dossier” within them. The indirectness of disciplinary power corresponds nicely to the indirectness of “non-violent resolution of conflict” discussed by Benjamin (see p. 143 in the version of Critique of Violence found published in One Way Street and Other Writings, New Left Books). Foucault’s D & P can therefore be read as a critique of Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. Where Benjamin sees merely an “educative power” that, in its “perfected form stands outside of law,” Foucault sees a disciplinary institution. And where Benjamin seeks to distinguish divine violence from mythic violence in the way that divine violence never strikes the soul of the living, this is precisely where Foucault sees disciplinary power as attaching to us. And finally, on the question of biopolitics, readers of Benjamin, as Agamben might, can recognize a kind of biopolitics in this description of mythic violence: “blood is the symbol of mere life.” But the reader of Foucault will continue reading this passage and perceive Foucault’s critique of Benjamin’s divine violence from a biopolitical perspective as well when Benjamin writes: “mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of living. The first demands sacrifice, the second accepts it.” (151). Can we not see Foucault’s distinction between the soveriegn’s power over death and the biopolitical cultivation of life as a critical reconfiguration of Benjamin’s opposition?

Thus, in this post, I have attempted to suggest that Foucault can be read as a critic of Benjamin’s arguments put forward in his Critique of Violence. He can be read as taking Benjamin’s point that, for mythical thought, life itself is the “marked bearer of guilt,” and inverting it and projecting this forward as the archetypical modern subject governed not by law but by the habits of discipline, thereby disturbing Benjamin’s messianic aspirations for divine violence. Of course, the question still remains regarding the relation of divine violence (or disciplinary society) to law—can it be adequately described as being “outside” of law? Readers of Derrida will undoubtedly fix on Benjamin’s last sentence and argue that the manifestation of divine violence is a sign, and as the condition of possibility of the sign is its iterability, we are firmly situated within a complicated paradigm where law making power and law preserving power are not forms of power that stand in a relation of exteriority one to the other. Of course, Derrida himself was more complicated than this short statement and undoubtedly more appreciative of Benjamin’s struggle in Critique of Violence than the fictional reader of Derrida that I have invented here.