The Three Names of Power

I want to continue the trend over the past few contributions in bringing Benjamin into relation with Foucault, without reducing discussion to Agamben.  Jon and Paul, in their respective contributions, wonder how, on the one hand, power and violence can be brought into relation with one another and how, on the other hand, this relation appears to be missing from Benjamin’s essay.  Indeed, “the task of a critique of violence” is the act of “expounding its [violence] relation to law and justice” (277).  Power, it appears, does not enter into the critique at all.  A critique of violence is apparently complete without reference to power.

But, I’ll suggest, this is not the case.  In fact, Benjamin is talking about power as much as he is talking about violence.  My argument – admittedly shaky because I don’t read German – relies on textual work found in other sources.  Beatrice Hanssen has written a book that borrows Benjamin’s title: Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, which attempts to engage in a rapprochement between poststructuralism (which Foucault stands in for) and critical theory (which Benjamin stands in for).  (Disclosure: I haven’t read the whole book, nor have I even read entirety of the first chapter.)  Fortunately for me, the essential point is made in the first few pages: “In its double attempt to practice critique and to understand power/violence (both rendered by the German word Gewalt), Benjamin’s essay already set the tone for debates that decades later, if in altered disguise, are still with us” (Critique of Violence, 3). My other textual source makes no mention of Benjamin at all.  Antonio Negri writes, “If there were in English the terminological distinction that many languages mark between two kinds of power – potesta and potentia in Latin, pouvoir and puissance in French, potere and potenza in Italian, Macht and Vermögen in German (which we have been marking as power and strength in this translation) – it would reside in this distinction between political movement and political power” (Insurgencies, 32).  More commonly, the distinction, for Negri, is between constituent power and constituted power.  (For the sake of completeness, I’ll take this minute to point out that Foucault distinguishes between ‘power as such’, most clearly visible in (contradictory ways) in La Volenté de savoir, “Preface to The Use of Pleasure” and two essays that comprise “The Subject and Power” and the ‘form power takes’; i.e., those multiplying power-concepts such as biopolitics, biopower, discipline, governmentality, security, sovereignty, etc.)  We have the three names of power: Macht, Vermögen, and Gewalt. 

Where it previously had appeared as though there was no discussion of power and violence, we have instead an extensive discussion (contra Jon) that does not reduce power to violence (contra Paul).  What we don’t (immediately) have, however, is a way to connect these three names of power.  But, what we do have is a “Critique of Power” as much as we have “Critique of Violence”.  Although awkward, it would be profitable to insert, at Hanssen’s suggestion, “power/violence” for every instance of “violence” and insert as context dictates “constituent power” and “constituted power” for “power”. Providing a full version of this argument and interpretation is well beyond the scope of this symposium, but I will outline a brief sketch.

The essential paragraph towards such a sketch – already cited in a number of contributions to the symposium – reads as follows:

For the function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its ends, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power. Lawmaking is power making, and, to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence.  Justice is the principle of all divine end making, power the principle of all mythical lawmaking (“Critique of Violence”, 295).

Benjamin immediately adds the following observation:

An application of the latter (mythical lawmaking) that has immense consequences is to found in constitutional law.  For in this sphere the establishing of frontiers, the task of ‘peace’ after all the wars of the mythical age, is the primal phenomenon of all lawmaking violence. Here we see most clearly that power, more than the most extravagant gain in property, is what is guaranteed by all lawmaking violence (“Critique of Violence”, 295).

From this we can isolate three important theses:

1. Lawmaking is ‘power’ making;
2. ‘Power’ is what is guaranteed by all lawmaking violence;
3. The conjunction of the previous two has immense consequences for constitutional law. 

All three names of power are present here: violence, constituent power (‘power’), and constituted power (‘Power’).  We also see a sketch of the relation between the three terms.

The first thesis indicates that ‘lawmaking is power making’.  This should be read as saying ‘lawmaking is the expression of ‘power’.  Meanwhile, the second thesis inverts the order of the terms, ‘‘Power’ expresses itself in lawmaking’.  Between the first and the second theses, power has become Power; there has been a qualitative change in the nature of the agent; this is the third thesis.  As Angela points out in her contribution, what we are dealing with is a ‘law of oscillation’.  Violence is inherently unstable, oscillating between expressions of power and Power.  The initial ‘lawmaking violence’ that is power becomes transformed into the ‘law-preserving violence’ that is Power.  The problem, then, is to articulate the genealogy of the eternal transformation of ‘power’ into ‘Power’.