Politics in the Wake of Divine Violence

Abstract

The modern political order rejects any notion of ‘divine violence’. But in refusing the possibility of the category, states obscure their own forms of sacred violence. Carl Schmitt describes the structure of a political theology that can illumine this dynamic. But his account of divine violence would put historical figures in the role of sovereign, and so open the way to theocratic tyranny. Walter Benjamin proposes a more transcendent sovereign power. He describes a divine violence that rejects both the theocracy of Schmitt and the neo-Kantian ‘realism’ critiqued by Gillian Rose. From Benjamin we can develop a notion of divine violence that interrupts the mythologization of the state and makes possible a rightly secular politics.