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.

Comments

[Amish Lovelock]

I think you might have jumped the bandwagon here. You've read Foucault against Benjamin, whereas I have a hunch it might be more interesting to read Benjamin through Foucault. Otherwise you are just inviting a strange teleology - as if all that Benjamin asked was for a return to life before law. Even if that is what he was asking the question is different after Foucault, right? This is surely where Agamben is. Yes - biopolitics and therefore the realm of "means without ends" etc...

To say that Foucault might be read as a critique of Benjamin doesn't mean that Benjaminian questions are impossible, or irrelevant post-Foucault. If so, then what does this mean? I didn't get it.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Good point Amish, this is one of those interrogations that makes a lot more sense from the standpoint of the interrogator than it does the scene of the interrogatee.

Paul, is this just a prelude to Agamben, or is something different at work here, or something distinct at stake?

[Paul Passavant]

Amish and Kenneth:

Benjamin is struggling to escape the cycle between law making and law preserving violence, and the suggestion he makes for this escape is what he calls divine violence which, as I read him, is a move beyond law to justice. Are these questions no longer relevant? They are very relevant today. For example, Derrida describes deconstruction as the experience of this justice beyond law, but for Derrida, when we calculate and make decisions to try to do justice to a particular situation, our intervention (say, through law) is necessarily not fully just. In other words, for Derrida and for myself,Benjamin's work presents both a troubling and productive problematic to work through. While Agamben and Derrida might be said to touch on the question of divine violence/ justice, the two diverge significantly from there. That is, Agamben aspires, as did Benjamin, to escape the cycle of law making and law preserving violence and what Benjamin calls divine violence is where Agamben would like to refound political ontology. Derrida would say this is impossible. The best we can do is experience justice in the moments of deconstruction but we are compelled (in the name of justice) to make decisions and to decide we must calculate and therefore the decision will never *be* justice; indeed, law is how we temporal beings try to do justice (but never get there). So yes, Agamben was on my mind with my post, and I would want to cut off that messianic move at the pass.

[discard the name]

Paul, you oppose Benjamin/Agamben (attempt at a political ontology outside law-making/-preserving violence) to Derrida (deconstructive experience of outside law, etc) -- i agree that the opposition is there, but the determination of one side or the other, it seems to me that it's basically a matter of choice, will, decision, and so on. Are you basically saying, I prefer Derrida to Benjamin/Agamben, or is there something else?

Also, as for "cutting off the messianic move at the pass," why? Isn't this idea that we want justice, but can never really be immanent within it, that we must know that we "never get there" -- isn't this basically liberalism, the logic justifying an indefinite deferral of justice for the sake of a lesser, but more real, justice? (I've always taken Derrida as basically a liberal...)

[Paul Passavant]

discard the name,

while I do prefer Derrida to Agamben on this question, it isn't just an arbitrary whim--I side with Derrida for theoretical reasons. The moment we *calculate* and render a decision reflecting this calculation, the decision is (necessarily) limited in time and in light of the info we could take into account and so forth, which means that the decision is inadequate to the infinity that would be total justice. That strikes me as correct. We can experience what justice might entail through the ordeal of trying to make the right decision, but once we make it, as Derrida argues in the Force of Law (version in Acts of Religion) or in his work on the Gift, we have not done total justice.

As for isn't this just liberalism, well, it might be or it might be more depending. What I appreciate in Derrida is that an intervention, to be successful, occurs in context, in a specific place and time and so even a revolutionary must avail him or her self of the mechanisms of making oneself understood to others in this here and now, even if to constitute something new as in a performative speech act (and he likens founding a new state or a revolution to a performative speech act that relies on certain conditions for its possible success). In other words, the messianic move in Benjamin, and I think in Agamben, is an attempt to abstract ourselves from our current situation and seems to me to be a wish that it would be better to start somewhere else. Unfortuntely, we aren't there, we are here, and we need to get from where we are to some place better and that won't happen if we are waiting to be saved from our current predicament by something totally new.