UNPACKING WALTER BENJAMIN’S SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE AND WAR

Abstract

Conflict, violence and, ultimately, war are central to Walter Benjamin’s sociology of language. Using biblical language, his earlies work shows that after the fall of man, language becomes a vessel to be filled by the usurper, a tool, he uses that bends others to his will, as Satan does in Paradise Lost. Benjamin’s study of German Trauspiels, mourning plays similar to Hamlet and Richard III, leads him to posit that the law and constitutional structures in the Baroque period are of single importance in understanding the role of conflict and violence. In “Towards a Critique of Violence,” Benjamin makes two key arguments. The first is that a workers’ general strike” is a legitimate form of violence and that the state’s response, often military, is not. The second is that the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is misunderstood because it does not contain a penalty and, secondly, it cannot be a blanket injunction; Jewish law, he notes, allowed for self-defence. His best-known works, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” are written after his turn to Marxism associated with the Frankfurt School. In the first, in addition to showing how mechanical reproduction destroys the “aura” of art, he is concerned with how Fascist art, such a Leni Riefenstahl’s films glorifying Hitler. These performances are designed to “absorb” or overawe viewers, making them quiescent, silent participants in the power play that leads to conflict and, ultimately war. Using quasi-religious language, the Theses deconstruct “historicism,” showing how Rankian history sides with the victors, the Great Men and Women of History at the expense of the ruled. He argues that each generation can redeem the past by “brushing history against the grain” and using discontinuities to show the violence and conflict that historicists seek to hide.