Critique Of Violence Research Articles

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and ‘Sacred Life’

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.

La redención del pasado. Sobre un motivo central del pensamiento de Walter Benjamin

El presente trabajo examina la reflexión de Walter Benjamin en torno a la categoría de “redención”, desarrollada principalmente en las tesis Sobre el concepto de historia. Para ello, en primer lugar llevaremos a cabo una reconstrucción de la crítica del “destino”, que Benjamin proyecta en los años veinte sobre el ámbito del derecho, la economía y, especialmente, la historia. La crítica a la lógica expiatoria del “destino” – elaborada en ensayos como Destino y carácter, Hacia la crítica de la violencia o Capitalismo como religión – nos ofrecerá entonces una vía privilegiada para mostrar la estructura “dialéctica” de la redención, con la que Benjamin moviliza su anterior teoría del conocimiento contra la doctrina del progreso.

Judith Butler's Critique of Violence and the Legacy of Monique Wittig

Although Judith Butler's theorization of violence has begun to receive growing scholarly attention, the feminist theoretical background of her notion of violence remains unexplored. In order to fill this lacuna, this article explicates the feminist genealogy of Butler's notion of violence. I argue that Butler's theorization of violence can be traced back toGender Trouble, to her discussion of Monique Wittig's argument that the binary categorization of sex can be conceived as a form of discursive violence. I contend, first, that Butler starts to develop her notion of “gender violence” on the basis of her reading of Wittig, and second, that Butler's more recent writings on military violence and the ethics of nonviolence build on her early interpretation of Wittig. On the basis of my reading, I suggest, in contrast to recent criticism, that Butler's later critique of violence is not at odds with but rather expands upon her prior work on violence.

Assuming Violence: A Commentary on Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”

The task of the present commentary on “Critique of Violence” is to bring to light a progression in Walter Benjamin's essay that has important implications for the assessment of the essay's content. One should not take violence as a generic term and view the essay as enumerating different species of it. Rather, Benjamin establishes a hierarchy of forces with inner dependence whose logic, to put it initially as simply as possible, is one of arrogation. Just as in enforcement the police takes into its hands a force that belongs to the law, so is the violence of law an arrogation, through lawmaking, of an unlimited force that has its proper source in fate, or the rule of myth. The latter violence can be related back in the recognition of origin (as Benjamin understands this term) to divine violence.

On the suspension of law and the total transformation of labour

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings.

A Study on How Kim Hyun accept R.Girard and the criticism of violence

A Study on How Kim Hyun accept R.Girard and the criticism of violence

Critique and Violence

As I read Andrew Benjamin's book on Walter Benjamin this past March, the question of violence seemed to frame the world around me. Large parts of Bosnia were aflame due to a series of anti-capitalist protests against austerity, economic dispossession, and corruption. In Chicago, three activists collectively named the NATO 3 were being prosecuted for terrorism despite overwhelming evidence of police entrapment and prosecutorial misconduct. Thousands were living without consistent access to clean water due to a record level chemical spill in West Virginia. Eighty thousand platinum miners were on strike for safer working conditions in South Africa. Drone warfare has become the new normal. The birthdays of slain teen Trayvon Martin and civil rights activist Rosa Parks came and went, largely without remark. The intervening months seem merely to have accelerated the carnage and despair.If philosophy is to be about the world, if it is to hold critical purchase on the structures we collectively inhabit and the experiences which constitute us as subjects, then central to our discipline must be a robust consideration of the question of violence in all of its varied manifestations. It is from this vantage, as thinkers situated inside a violent world, that we must consider and applaud Andrew Benjamin's framing question: what promises and possibilities do the texts of Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most prescient thinkers of violence, hold for us today?Working with Walter Benjamin meditates on this very question, mounting a series of reinterpretations of key texts in Benjamin's corpus. Beginning with a consideration of Benjamin's early essay Towards and Critique of Violence and ending with an analysis of the multiple iterations of On the Concept of History, Andrew Benjamin's text presents Benjamin's corpus as a coherent whole, one which grows and develops over time, but which remains anchored in certain key, central concepts and themes which recur. In this way, Andrew Benjamin stages Towards a Critique of Violence not only as the first text chronologically, but also as one which develops a crucial philosophical architecture for the pieces discussed in later chapters. As it would be impossible to comment adequately on all pieces of such dense and varied work, I will take Professor Benjamin's suggestion to consider Towards a Critique of Violence as fundamental to all Benjamin's works and confine my comments to his chapter on this seminal essay.Andrew Benjamin frames his intervention into Towards a Critique of Violence/Zur Kritik der by arguing for the necessity of retranslating Gewalt, traditionally rendered as or sometimes as 'force,' as 'operability.' Drawing on Arendt's distinction between power and violence, Andrew Benjamin argues that Benjamin, when discussing Gewalt, means something more akin to what Arendt means by power-the condition for the possibility of structures, and in particular, political structures to operate. Under this paradigm, violence means only what Andrew Benjamin at multiple points calls actual or literal 'violence' and what other authors have referred to as individual, discrete, or subjective violence. The distinction between operability and 'literal' violence thus opposes divine and mythic violence as irreconcilable, non-contiguous, as modes of intervention which are fundamentally in kind and which share nothing. Positing this irreducible difference is what allows Andrew Benjamin to, for example, translate Staatsgewalt as 'the operability of the state' while continuing to render gottliche Gewalt as 'divine violence'; as fundamentally opposed, there is no reason to render them under the same linguistic sign in translation.Andrew Benjamin calls these different and radically incommensurable,1 but I'd like to pose the following question: if they are so incommensurable, why does Benjamin name both of them Gewalt? This question does not seek to reduce the obvious and marked differences between modes or kinds of Gewalt that Benjamin describes; rather, I would like to investigate why, despite these differences, Benjamin finds all of them to be differentiations of the same thing. …

Odkręcić stan wyjątkowy. Walter Benjamin i krytyka przemocy prawa

Esej składa się z czterech części. Pierwsza dotyczy serii trików za pomocą których Benjamin próbuje rozprawić się z faszyzmem. Argumentuję, że strategia ta w wielu punktach przypomina burleski Chaplina i należy ją czytać w kontekście pojęcia komizmu ze Źródła dramatu żałobnego w Niemczech. Druga cześć jest próbą nowej interpretacji Przyczynku do krytyki przemocy. Pokazuję w niej, że istnieje ścisła relacja miedzy czystymi środkami i czystą czy też boską przemocą, która przypomina relację między obrazem dialektycznym (mającym charakter czystej przemocy), a wyzwalaną za jego pomocą – i do tej pory stłumioną – historią oporu klas podporządkowanych (toczącą się w sferze czystych środków). W części trzeciej rekonstruuję spór Benjamina z Adorno, pokazując, że jego niewypowiedzianą stawką jest pojęcie natury (anty-esencjonalistyczne u Benjamina i proto-faszystowskie u Adorno). W czwartej, przekonuję, że to anty-esencjonalistyczne pojęcie natury stoi u podstaw Benjaminowskiej krytyki faszyzmu, kulminującej w pojęciu rzeczywistego/karnawałowego stanu wyjątkowego.

Um sopro de crítica à violência e ao crime

This text is a short philosophical and aesthetic essay about brazilian contemporary Criminology. A critique of violence and crime is made from the images of blow and angst. It treats of a political critique about state of exception.

Menke’s reconstruction of Benjamin’s law, his tragic aporia and recognition

Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921) has been a relevant source of legal and political philosophy about the nature of law, from Derrida to Menke. In this article, we rebuild the reading of Benjamin’s Critique proposed by Menke and consider the appropriateness of violence in the law not as a tragic tension, but as a condition for its reproduction. Finally, we will consider its paradoxical nature as a confirmation of the difference between the force of law and social-normative elements such as recognition [ Anerkennung].

Thinking in Butler

Thinking in Butler

Feminism and the critique of violence: negotiating feminist political agency

The acute sensitivity of feminism to violence, in its many different forms and contexts, makes it a particularly interesting case for the examination of the relationship between politics and violence in theory and practice. Our purpose in this paper is not to adjudicate the normative question of whether feminism implies a commitment to pacifism or to the use of non-violence. Rather, we are interested in examining how the relation between feminist politics and violence is construed as feminists struggle to develop a politics in which opposition to patriarchal violence is central. We begin with the feminist critique of violence, and move to examine how particular articulations of that critique shape and are shaped by practices of feminist political agency in specific contestation over the goals and strategies of feminism. We use the well-known case of feminist debates over the Greenham Common Peace Camp in the UK in the 1980s to demonstrate how negotiating women's political agency in relation to opposition to male violence poses problems, both for feminists who embrace non-violence and prioritize the opposition to war, and for feminists who are suspicious of non-violence and of the association of feminism with peace activism. In both cases, the debates over Greenham demonstrate the fundamentally political character of the ways in which the relation and distinction between violence and politics are conceptually and practically negotiated.

The current challenges of the left in Central America: an essay based on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos

A historically renewed theory makes possible the correct praxis. A new paradigm is rising: a sensitive knowledge for a decent life. Emancipating knowledge rather than regulatory. Delineate new spaces of power. Provoke the unconformity of the living and the victim as a force for social transformation. A renewed praxis: contact with the poor; austere life; antipatriarchal project; justice, freedom and responsibility; generational relay; combat against divisiveness; secular state and religious people; market and state; Latin American integration; a criticism of violence; overcoming poverty without capitalist spirit.Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No.139, 2013: 13-50

Le cercle mythique : Walter Benjamin sur la politique et son interruption

This contribution starts from the idea that it is not so much pre-modern political orders that appeal to mythical logic, but contemporary ones. Lacking an external authority, contemporary political orders cannot but erect themselves in an act of auto-constitution. With reference to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, one could conceive of this act as the mythical encirclement of foundation and conservation. Although democratic regimes famously encourage ongoing debate about political affairs, this mythic circle seems to shut the door on fundamentally contesting the given order. This is why the interruption of the mythic logic is situated by Benjamin not in another political order, but in the other of politics. This article will however examine the possibility of interrupting the mythic circle not by opening or referring to a beyond of the legal order, but by making use of an originally accepted practice in this order. This possibility concerns a train of thought developed by Benjamin himself but largely neglected by the numerous commentators of his text : his digression on the impunity of the lie as an example of non-politicized form of communication within the political order.

The Great Criminal, the Exception, and Bare Life in James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em>

In twentieth and twenty-first centuries, theories of state increasingly grappled with ethical questions raised by specters of colonial violence that give rise to equally violent nationalist revolutions. In few places has this violence been so sustained and long-drawn-out as in Ireland, and James Joyce directly confronts rhetorical and physical violence of this conflict in Ulysses (1921-22).1 This article uses theories of origins of state offered by two of Joyce's German contemporaries-jurist Carl Schmitt and literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin-to think through interdependent ethics of violence, narratives of national origins and sovereignty, and role of would-be citizen in Joyce's novel. I propose that, in character of Leopold Bloom, Ulysses develops strategies for negotiating violence and conceptualizing a form of citizenship that is more inclusive than those offered by prevailing colonial and nationalist models. Bloom's actions attempt to imagine an Irish future beyond terms offered by these models. These actions can be situated relative not only to critique formulated by novel's engagements with Irish nationalism but also to broader concerns of those interested in questions of how state power rhetorically legitimizes itself.Violence and Sovereign: Benjamin, Schmitt, AgambenBenjamin's Critique of Violence (1921) and Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Essays on Concept of Sovereignty (1922) each provide an origin story for sovereign state.' Schmitt's work famously opens Sovereign is he who decides on and work as a whole focuses on structure and maintenance of sovereignty.3 According to Schmitt, sovereign's power rests on his ability not to enforce but rather abrogate law and declare a state of emergency; this power includes ability to define terms of both emergency and its resolution. As a result, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm becausethe sovereign produces and guarantees situation in its totality. . . . The essence of state's monopoly . . . must be juristically defined correctly, not as monopoly to coerce or rule, but as monopoly to decide. . . . The decision parts here from legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to law it need not be based on law.4Schmitt's sovereign has power not simply to establish law but also to determine when that law should be suspended, to decide what constitutes emergency and exception, and thus to produce rather than simply react to juridical situation.When this definition of sovereignty is read in tandem with Benjamin's account of state origins, it becomes evident that Schmitt's account elides or underestimates violence of sovereign decision over both law and norm. If legal order rests on an original decision on exception that defines boundaries, both temporal and geopolitical, of state, then that decision arises out of a violence that is inherent to act of distinguishing inside from outside, exception from norm. This dynamic forms context for Benjamin's Critique of Violence, in which he treats theories of law that take as justification for violent means as ethically inadequate; his essay concludes that the violence of an action can be assessed no more from its than from its ends, but only from law of its suggesting with distinction between effects and ends that neither intended nor unintended results of an act can serve as a basis on which to judge its ethical status.1Faced with a lack of criteria for judging violence, Benjamin writes anatomy of (foundational) violence, one that closely resembles Schmitt's sovereign decision:The function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as means, what is to be established as law, but at 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 title of power. …

The Distinction between Mythic and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” from the Perspective of “Goethe's Elective Affinities”

The Distinction between Mythic and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” from the Perspective of “Goethe's Elective Affinities”

Comments on Johanna Oksala’s Foucault, Politics, and Violence

I would like to begin by recalling a classical (Socratic) dictum: reason is peace, power is war.1 To engage in dialogue and deliberation, to seek after knowledge and truth, is to pursue the way of discourse and to abjure the avenues of combat and struggle. Reason, it is said, delivers us from the shackles of error and ignorance. To have power is to control, to dominate, and, where needed, to coerce, forcing another, on pains of death even, to comply, to bend. Truth, then, so says this tradition, stands beyond the domain of force, while power is nothing other than violence itself.Now, of course, we live in an age in which this fundamental principle, this separation of the domains of reason and power, has been profoundly called into question. It is well known that the advent of totalitarianism has been read as the validation of the longstanding critique of reason that began, we can say, with the Sophists and runs through Adorno and, in our own time, Agamben: reason/ discourse/truth/language, so this subterranean tradition proclaims, is always and necessarily power/domination/coercion and power/domination/coercion is always and necessarily violence. One essentialism here replaces another. The de jure opposition of reason and power gives way to their de jure identification. To put the matter all too simply, to engage in debate is always a tactical maneuver in a play for control and control is always ultimately a matter of force. But where reason just is power and power just is sheer domination, rationality can be nothing other than ideology. Hence, where everything is the same, where indifference reigns, critique threatens to give way to intuition, to fideism, to blind acceptance, and thus to dogmatism. Now this, at least in its broad outlines, sketches, I believe, the predicament in which we find ourselves today when we seek to examine the question of violence. Where reason and power are equated, a genuine critique of Gewalt, of power, force, violence-to invoke Benjamin's famous designation for this project-becomes impossible; for distanciation between the object of such a critique and the power of critique is required in order to establish and police the valid boundaries of violence, and this is precisely what the identification under which we now labor threatens to undermine.Foucault, Politics, and Violence marks a decisive and important intervention in this problematic.2 It creates a vital opening that signals an extremely promising way forward in the construction of a genuine critique of violence. Its core claim-which it draws with care and subtle erudition from a perhaps surprising source, Foucault, who, to be sure, was never himself a theorist of violence-is that for violence to become a genuine object of critique it must be treated as a specific, historically varying technique of power; as one technique, though, it is not the essence of power itself. As a determinate practice, violence has only a historical, contingent relationship with the political and with the rational. The proper work of critique then, on this reading, is to analyze the historically specific forms of violence and to examine the ways in which they have become entangled with various kinds of rationalities.In support of this project, Professor Oksala develops a nuanced argument that can be said to revolve around two key theses: ( 1 ) the politicization of ontology (chapter 1 ), and (2) the historicization of violence (chapter 2).Consider first the politicization of ontology. Oksala shows that reality is the result of social practices and struggles over what counts as truth and objectivity. It is in this sense then that being as such (the object of ontology) is nothing other than, as Oksala wonderfully puts it, politics that has forgotten itself (FPV, 6; cf. 10 and 35). She persuasively, in my view, argues against the influential interpretations of both Ian Hacking, who seeks to restrict Foucault's analyses to the social domain, thereby reserving a place for a robust naturalism, and Beatrice Han-Pile, who sees in Foucault's thought an unacknowledged metaphysics of power. …

Hannah Arendt, violence and vitality

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence.

Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

Легитимация и критика насилия в международном праве. Политологическая перспектива

Легитимация и критика насилия в международном праве. Политологическая перспектива