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doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12102 Manifest Reason: Walter Benjamin on Violence and Collective Agency Alexei Procyshyn [ . . . ] not one generation is able to save another. -Sophocles Antigone Few of Walter Benjamin’s essays have attracted and sustained as much attention as his ‘On the Critique of Violence.’ From Schmitt’s early admiration to Derrida’s and Agamben’s more recent discussions, Benjamin’s Violence-essay has consistently served as a philo- sophical wellspring. 1 With its historically anchored but speculative account of violence, its rich, suggestive dis- cussion of myth, fate, and religion, the essay’s appeal is difficult to underestimate. Most of us, however, seem to have been so taken with the surface effects of Benjamin’s critique – with the frights and surprises awaiting us at each of its controlled stylistic swerves – that we often fail to identify their deeper causes. By and large, his essay has been treated as an occasion to exercise our own intellectual powers by offering keen descriptions of our responses to the small trau- mas Benjamin’s essay produces, or by pointing out the rhetorical and grammatical nuances that render any- thing like a definitive interpretation well nigh impos- sible. All this, unfortunately, occurs at the expense of the intellectual upheavals this essay aims to cat- alyze. The sad fact is that, after reading enough sec- ondary literature, one may be left to wonder whether Benjamin’s essay is anything more than an exercice de style. I want to take a different, more substantive, tack here and argue that the Violence-essay offers an incisive cri- tique of those (Post-)Kantian conceptions of practical action that emphasize the role played by institutions in shaping agents and their potentials for action. More precisely, Benjamin provides us with a critique of, and alternative to Max Weber’s theory of politics, as outlined in his 1919 lecture Politics as Vocation. Contra Weber, who examines the institutional and intersubjective pre- conditions of political action to emphasize the qualities and commitments involved in an individual’s political engagement, 2 Benjamin reformulates such ‘objective’ constraints so that certain forms of political action or resistance – e.g. the general strike – no longer entail the Faustian dilemmas, or related tragic structures (e.g. the ‘causality of fate’) inherent to Weber’s account, because practical action is no longer exhaustively specified by the basic structures purporting to mediate intersubjec- tive, practical action. As we will see, Benjamin’s analysis of this ‘non- mediated’ kind of action focuses on the manifestation of a collective political agent that in other accounts – such as Weber’s – remains structurally obscured by its in- stitutional context. This analysis involves (1) reconcep- tualizing violence such that it is no longer understood exclusively as a means for pursuing socio-historically determined ends, and (2) rejecting a theoretical focus upon individual agents and their means-ends ratios in favor of an account of collective action. My aim here is to show how Benjamin accomplishes these goals. Historical Situation My suggestion that we read Benjamin’s essay in coun- terpoint to Weber’s work finds support in the immedi- ate situation of Benjamin’s essay. From 1919 to 1920, Benjamin was planning a book-length treatment of the problem of violence in politics. But, like most of Benjamin’s more ambitious projects, this Politics- project was never completed. The planned work, as Tiedemann and Schweppenh¨ auser have reconstructed it, 3 was to include the essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” along with a shorter piece, entitled “Leben und Gewalt,” which was written in April 1920. The rest of the project was to comprise a long, two-part essay: the first, which Benjamin had begun to write, 4 was to be entitled “Die wahre Politiker”; the second part was to be further sub- divided into two sections entitled, respectively, “Die Ab- bau der Gewalt” and “Teleologie ohne Endzweck.” Only Zur Kritik der Gewalt” was ever published (1921), and the remaining pieces have all been lost. The outline of Benjamin’s project is nevertheless in- structive for us. In its timing and structure, it resonates with, and seeks to critically respond to Max Weber’s influential account of political action and practical rea- son in “Politik als Beruf,” 5 where he focuses primarily on describing the ‘true’ politician, that is, the qualities and character that an individual who wishes to become a politician must ideally possess in order to endure po- litical life and face the ethical problems and paradoxes engendered by what Weber takes to be the essence of all political deliberation and action – namely violence (Gewaltsamkeit). As Weber puts it, “the specific use of legitimate force as such in the hands of human organiza- tions is what determines the particular ethical problems in politics.” 6 Constellations Volume 21, No 3, 2014. C 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Page 1: Manifest Reason: Walter Benjamin on Violence and Collective Agency

doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12102

Manifest Reason: Walter Benjamin on Violenceand Collective Agency

Alexei Procyshyn

[ . . . ] not one generation is able to save another.-Sophocles Antigone

Few of Walter Benjamin’s essays have attracted andsustained as much attention as his ‘On the Critique ofViolence.’ From Schmitt’s early admiration to Derrida’sand Agamben’s more recent discussions, Benjamin’sViolence-essay has consistently served as a philo-sophical wellspring.1 With its historically anchored butspeculative account of violence, its rich, suggestive dis-cussion of myth, fate, and religion, the essay’s appealis difficult to underestimate. Most of us, however,seem to have been so taken with the surface effects ofBenjamin’s critique – with the frights and surprisesawaiting us at each of its controlled stylistic swerves –that we often fail to identify their deeper causes. Byand large, his essay has been treated as an occasionto exercise our own intellectual powers by offeringkeen descriptions of our responses to the small trau-mas Benjamin’s essay produces, or by pointing out therhetorical and grammatical nuances that render any-thing like a definitive interpretation well nigh impos-sible. All this, unfortunately, occurs at the expenseof the intellectual upheavals this essay aims to cat-alyze. The sad fact is that, after reading enough sec-ondary literature, one may be left to wonder whetherBenjamin’s essay is anything more than an exercicede style.

I want to take a different, more substantive, tack hereand argue that the Violence-essay offers an incisive cri-tique of those (Post-)Kantian conceptions of practicalaction that emphasize the role played by institutionsin shaping agents and their potentials for action. Moreprecisely, Benjamin provides us with a critique of, andalternative to Max Weber’s theory of politics, as outlinedin his 1919 lecture Politics as Vocation. Contra Weber,who examines the institutional and intersubjective pre-conditions of political action to emphasize the qualitiesand commitments involved in an individual’s politicalengagement,2 Benjamin reformulates such ‘objective’constraints so that certain forms of political action orresistance – e.g. the general strike – no longer entail theFaustian dilemmas, or related tragic structures (e.g. the‘causality of fate’) inherent to Weber’s account, becausepractical action is no longer exhaustively specified bythe basic structures purporting to mediate intersubjec-tive, practical action.

As we will see, Benjamin’s analysis of this ‘non-mediated’ kind of action focuses on the manifestation ofa collective political agent that in other accounts – suchas Weber’s – remains structurally obscured by its in-stitutional context. This analysis involves (1) reconcep-tualizing violence such that it is no longer understoodexclusively as a means for pursuing socio-historicallydetermined ends, and (2) rejecting a theoretical focusupon individual agents and their means-ends ratios infavor of an account of collective action. My aim here isto show how Benjamin accomplishes these goals.

Historical SituationMy suggestion that we read Benjamin’s essay in coun-terpoint to Weber’s work finds support in the immedi-ate situation of Benjamin’s essay. From 1919 to 1920,Benjamin was planning a book-length treatment ofthe problem of violence in politics. But, like most ofBenjamin’s more ambitious projects, this Politics-project was never completed. The planned work, asTiedemann and Schweppenhauser have reconstructedit,3 was to include the essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,”along with a shorter piece, entitled “Leben und Gewalt,”which was written in April 1920. The rest of the projectwas to comprise a long, two-part essay: the first, whichBenjamin had begun to write,4 was to be entitled “Diewahre Politiker”; the second part was to be further sub-divided into two sections entitled, respectively, “Die Ab-bau der Gewalt” and “Teleologie ohne Endzweck.” Only“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” was ever published (1921), andthe remaining pieces have all been lost.

The outline of Benjamin’s project is nevertheless in-structive for us. In its timing and structure, it resonateswith, and seeks to critically respond to Max Weber’sinfluential account of political action and practical rea-son in “Politik als Beruf,”5 where he focuses primarilyon describing the ‘true’ politician, that is, the qualitiesand character that an individual who wishes to becomea politician must ideally possess in order to endure po-litical life and face the ethical problems and paradoxesengendered by what Weber takes to be the essence ofall political deliberation and action – namely violence(Gewaltsamkeit). As Weber puts it, “the specific use oflegitimate force as such in the hands of human organiza-tions is what determines the particular ethical problemsin politics.”6

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Weber’s position is of course eminently understand-able. The Great War, which he initially supported, hadrecently ended and international recriminations werein full swing, with Germany bearing the brunt of theblame. The socialist Kurt Eisner, who had made pub-lic the official documents detailing Germany’s role ininstigating the war, had gone on to become Prime Min-ister of Bavaria, and was assassinated by Count Arco-Valley on February 21, 1919. Several weeks prior, in thenorth of the country, the leaders of the Spartacist league,Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, instigated theso-called Berlin uprising of January 15, 1919, and wereassassinated on January 25. These events prompted abrutal repression of both the Bavarian Soviet in Munichand the Spartacist movement in Berlin. In the midst ofthese international and national upheavals, Germany’sacutest public intellectual and the father of the contem-porary social sciences reluctantly agrees to give a lectureon ‘politics as vocation’ to the Free Student Movementat Ludwigs-Maximillians Universitat in Munchen.7 We-ber’s lecture concentrates on giving a description of theinstitutional and practical parameters of political en-gagement, and the orientations individuals may take to-wards them. His perspective, in short, is pragmatic anddecidedly liberal: given the contemporary institutionsof law, political organization, and the manner in whichthey structure rational behavior, successful political ac-tion requires its agents and avatars to have a specificset of qualities in order to negotiate and survive the eth-ical paradoxes that accrue to action in these contexts.Above all, this means that political action is everywheremediated by institutions: by definition, direct politicalaction is impossible, and the ‘true politicians’ assumethe functional roles determined by the basic structuresof their situation. Weber thus remains faithful to theprevailing political and legal structures, while trying toavoid lapsing into an apology for the status quo. “Poli-tics means a slow powerful drilling through hard boardswith a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion.”8

With its planned sections on the true politician andtrue politics, understood – as the references to the‘dismantling of violence’ and a ‘teleology without Te-los’ indicate – in terms critically opposed to Weber’s,Benjamin’s Politics-project would have thus respondedto the Weberian ‘is’ of political life with the counter-factual force of a possible world’s ‘ought.’ This, at anyrate, seems to have been Benjamin’s plan, which at thevery least provides the basis for a compelling readingof the only extant piece of the project, the “Critique ofViolence” essay. We should not be surprised then to findthat this essay does in fact challenge Weber’s basic as-sumptions concerning rational action, violence, and thetwo basic orientations to politics. It even begins to sug-gest, albeit in rather metaphorical terms, an alternativeto them, in a language inspired by Weber’s own appeal

to religious discourse. But even Benjamin’s metaphorsturn on his opposition to Weber. For Weber’s favoritefigures for political action derive from religious andmythical motifs. From his allusions to Greek and Indianpolytheisms (meant to capture the pluralism and rela-tivity of our most basic values and value-orientations),and his discussion of the pitfalls of Christianity’s absol-utizing ethical standpoint (as evidenced by the Quakers’impotence to defend themselves), to his invocation ofthe various attempts to rationalize and cope with thetragic nature of human action figured by the Indian doc-trines of Karma and Dharma, the Persian dualisms ofgood and evil, or the Ancient Greeks’ Damon and Fate,etc., Weber’s sociological text is shot through with reli-gious language. What makes Benjamin’s appeal to, andcontrast of the Jewish story of Korah with the Greek leg-end of Niobe so interesting is the fact that it lays barea glaring absence or oversight in Weber’s text, namelyJudaism, which is one of the few religious orientationsthat Weber does not take up, or rather does not differen-tiate from the absolutizing ethic of Christianity (whichhe sees as including a ‘Jewish value-orientation’). OnBenjamin’s reading, however, a Jewish perspective onpolitics demonstrates the possibility for a universalvalue-orientation that escapes the vicissitudes of a tele-ological account of reason and the causality of fate thatWeber’s theory of action entails.

Weber, Rationality, ViolenceThus, to get a proper sense of the challenge Benjamin’sessay poses to Weber’s account of politics, we need toreturn to the details “Politics as a Vocation.” In this lec-ture, Weber develops a historically inflected account ofthe conditions of possibility for politics in general, andthen seeks to delineate the orientations (what Webercalls an ethic) that individuals may take towards spe-cific problems, given these conditions. This involves,according to Weber, spelling out the relevant institutionsthat determine our contemporary political organizationsand procedures, the personal qualities of the individu-als who enter into these public spaces, the norms andvalues agents must embrace to undertake and endurea political career, and finally the deliberative tools toevaluate and discuss political engagement as such. To-gether, these features give us a theory of institutionallysituated practical reason.

Now, as anyone familiar with the structure ofWeber’s lecture can attest, the basic qualities of a ma-ture politician – i.e. commitment to a cause, a deepsense of responsibility, and the sense of proportion af-forded by a detached or distanced relationship to peopleor things – are all attributes of a self-conscious, rationalagent. Indeed, these features mark the point of insertionof Weber’s well-rehearsed and tested theory of ratio-nality, which allows him to evaluate political action by

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examining the fit or appropriateness of means to ends byextrapolating the socially embedded values one recog-nizes and the basic materials available for undertakinga given course of action. “All serious reflection aboutthe ultimate elements of meaningful human conduct,”Weber writes in his explicitly methodological writings,“is oriented primarily in terms of the categories ‘end’and ‘means.’”9 By understanding practical action as ev-erywhere circumscribed by the ends an agent sets forherself and the specific means she may use to achievethem, Weber develops his account of practical reason,which he summarizes as follows:

Inasmuch as we are able to determine [ . . . ] whichmeans for the achievement of a proposed end are ap-propriate or inappropriate, we can [ . . . ] estimate thechances of attaining a certain end by certain availablemeans. In this way we can indirectly criticize the settingof the end itself as practically meaningful (on the basisof the existing historical situation) or as meaninglesswith reference to existing conditions.10

The theoretical emphasis on the appropriateness ofmeans to ends, relative to a specific historical contextand a specific set of values (i.e. an ethic), allows Weberto understand an individual’s actions and intentions aseverywhere informed by her institutional setting. Thisalso explains why he focuses on violence in “Politicsas a Vocation.” As Weber notes, an accurate descrip-tion of political action cannot be given in terms of theends being served. Rather, given the general structureof practical reason, an account of politics has to rely onthe means specific to it. For what makes an action ex-plicitly political (as opposed to say, economic, artistic,or scientific) can be specified only by the means uniqueto it. And, since Weber argues that the rationalization ofpolitics amounts to a State’s consolidation and central-ization of the ability to act violently, he naturally takes‘violence’ to be the intrinsic means11 and determiningfactor in all things political.

Weber’s theory of rationality thus identifies the liveoptions for action in terms of socially recognized endsand contextually constituted means, while explaining anagent’s orientation towards these features via the valuesshe recognizes and uses to orient herself in her socialsituations. Furthermore this theory of rationality spec-ifies the sufficient condition for calling a given action‘political’: the means employed involve institutionallystructured uses of violence or coercion. To the extentthat Weber can clarify the relationship between vio-lence and the existing political institutions (as a processof expropriation, centralization, and codification of theformer by the latter), he can also specify the prereq-uisites that individuals must satisfy in order to wieldthese violent means appropriately within properly po-litical arenas. This reflective perspective allows him to

formulate what he takes to be the intrinsic problem as-sociated with politics in general, and to insist on thequalities that individual political agents must have inorder to survive their engagements. “It is entirely trueand a fundamental fact of history,” Weber explains, “thatthe ultimate product of political activity frequently, in-deed, as a matter of course, fails utterly to do justice toits original purpose and may even be a travesty of it.”12

Political action, for Weber, is inherently tragic. And theironies that politicians must be able to withstand turnout to be a consequence of his (and every other) tele-ological account of practical reason. Weber makes thisconnection explicit, by noting practical action’s “affin-ity [Verwandtschaft] [ . . . ] with tragedy, in which allour activities are ensnared, political action above all.”13

Those who can legitimately claim politics as a vocation,Weber thus argues, are the individuals who can acceptthe opacity of rational action, take responsibility for its(unintended) consequences (or its counter-finalities, totalk like Sartre), and press on notwithstanding. But this‘notwithstanding’ marks the structure of tragedy.

What remains for Weber is to develop the basicvalue-orientations to political life. According to him,contemporary politicians tend to hold either an ethic ofconviction (Gesinnungsethik) or an ethic of responsibil-ity (Verantwortungsethik). More importantly, these twoethical orientations stand under two fundamentally dif-ferent, even opposed “maxims”14: the “gesinnungsethis-chen Maxime,” on the one hand, reads “The Christiandoes rightly and leaves the results with God,”15 whereasthe verantwortungsethischen orientation holds “that youmust answer for the (foreseeable) consequences of youractions.”16 Now, Weber takes the ethic of convictionto represent an incoherent orientation towards politicalaction, which fails for precisely the same reasons thatHegel identifies when discussing the Beautiful Soul:“you must be a saint in all respects or at least want to beone; you must live like Jesus, the Apostles, St Francis,and their like, and then this ethic will make sense andbe the expression of true dignity. But not otherwise.”17

Yet, with violence as its intrinsic means, the very struc-ture of politics precludes such a value-orientation. If,as Weber contends, ‘legitimacy’ is determined by therational standards governing the ‘success’ of a partic-ular action relative to the values being upheld and theobjective possibilities produced by a given historical sit-uation, then it is impossible for an ethic of conviction toever be legitimate. Conviction, in short, is never suffi-cient for success: the Gesinnungspolitiker can never liveup to her ideals, because the ends she seeks to serve arestructurally precluded by the very institutions she workswithin. “Anyone who wishes to act in accordance withthe ethic of the Gospel should abstain from going onstrike – for Strikes are a form of coercion [ . . . ]. Aboveall, such a person should not speak of ‘revolution.’”18

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Violence as Manifestation

This account of Weber’s theory of politics and prac-tical rationality should make the tensions between hisposition and Benjamin’s palpable. Those familiar withBenjamin’s essay may already have a sense of how hisstrategies connect him to the Weberian problem spacewe have been discussing. For Benjamin too is concernedwith how one’s basic orientations towards political en-gagement are structured by one’s historical position, andhow the relationships between means and ends delineatesuccessful political engagement. However, Benjamin’sterminus a quo in the Violence-essay is an intractablejurisprudential paradox underlying the relationship be-tween means and ends – and hence teleological accountsof practical action more generally.

Unlike Weber, however, Benjamin does not takethis to be a mere matter of value-orientation. That is,whereas Weber takes violence to be a fact of politicsand then moves on to consider the ethical implicationsof this datum for individuals who are politically en-gaged, Benjamin focuses on the institutional structuresthat determine the legitimacy of violence as a politi-cal means. Benjamin, in other words, is concerned withthe social ontology underwriting practical action: theinstitutions that dictate what a situation’s objective pos-sibilities are (for subjectivation, action, etc.). This ex-plains why Benjamin privileges the concepts of ‘right’and ‘justice.’ The latter categories allow him to makethe commitments of Weber’s theory of rational actionexplicit. His basic insight is that any discussion of lawcrucially involves being able to claim a right to some-thing and to use that right in order to protect oneselfagainst others. But the nature of the claim and the man-ner of its use are not strictly speaking a matter of valueorientation. In Benjamin’s terms, any claim concern-ing individual rights implies a moment of law-positingand law-preserving violence – but neither form of vi-olence is actually interrogated by Weber’s sociologi-cal account. What Benjamin will seek to show is thatthese two moments define our institutional settings andrender some courses of action objectively impossible(invisible, unimaginable). But here’s the rub: to saythat an action is objectively impossible means simplythat it is not consistent with the status quo, not that itis incoherent or unrealizeable. Furthermore, if under-taken, such an action would entail some (potentiallysignificant) transformation of the social situation. Mini-mally, it would introduce new categories into our socialontology.

The upshot here is that ‘right’ and ‘justice’ are bothgrounded by ‘violence,’ though as we shall see shortlyit is not the same kind of violence that grounds them(Benjamin distinguishes between mythic and divine vi-olence), nor does the grounding proceed the same way

(it is discursive and metacritical in the one case, spec-ulative and metaphysical in the other). To the extentthat ‘violence’ is inherently bound up with practicalreason, a critique of either notion implies a critique ofthe other. Furthermore, since Weber’s evaluative crite-ria involve determining how well a situation’s objectivepossibilities fit an agent’s value-orientation, Benjamin’scritique has the potential to vitiate the Weberian meta-critical perspective altogether by calling into questionthe idea of rationalization as such. To put the matterplainly, Benjamin’s critique of violence repudiates We-ber’s purposive or teleological conception of rationalityand his account of violence as an exclusively coercivemeans that is constitutive of the political sphere.

The interpretative key to Benjamin’s critique ofWeber’s account of violence, and his essay as a whole,is his tantalizingly underdeveloped idea that violence isexpressive. Although an agent can achieve her ends vi-olently, the philosophical importance of ‘violence’ liesin what this violent performance discloses, or makesmanifest, rather than the fitness of means to ends or theappropriateness of means to institutional setting. “Thenonmediate function of violence,” Benjamin explains,“is not a means but a manifestation.”19 If we are willingto dig a little, we will see that this conception of vio-lence qua manifestation replicates an argument schemethat Benjamin had already employed in “On Languageas Such and the Language of Man” (1916). To put itsimply, Benjamin treats ‘violence’ as a special case ofhis account of meaning more generally: in both cases,practical action – whether in the guise of Adamic nam-ing or revolutionary action – expresses what a contextaffords an agent, and this relational and pragmatic ex-pression is what Benjamin calls, in the Language-essay,a spiritual essence (geistige Wesen).20

Benjamin’s importation of his theory of meaningfrom the Language-essay is relatively straightforward.Indeed, the first line of “On the Critique Of Violence”announces it: “The task of a critique of violence canbe characterized as the presentation [Darstellung] of itsrelationship to Right and Justice.”21 On the reading onoffer here, this opening statement simply means thatthe explicit goal of “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” is how vio-lence delimits ‘right’ from ‘justice.’ This conception ofviolence as a limit-phenomenon reproduces the struc-ture, described by Benjamin in the Language-essay, of acommunicative encounter between intensively infiniteentities, which culminates in the expression of a spiritualessence. In relating these entities, the spiritual essencecompletes a given context and explains its relata.

The presentation of ‘violence’ operates identicallywith respect to the categories of Right and Justice. ForBenjamin describes ‘violence’ as the objective man-ifestation of an individual’s character or essence. “Afunction of violence that cannot be mediated, like the

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one at issue here,” Benjamin explains, “is illustratedby an everyday life-experience. As regards man, he isimpelled by anger, for example, to the most visible out-bursts of violence that is not related as a means to apreconceived end. It is not a means but a manifestation.Moreover, this violence has thoroughly objective man-ifestations in which it can be subjected to criticism.”22

In foregrounding the distinctive character of an agent –her values, context, and relations to others – Benjamin’s‘manifestation’ introduces a new critical vantage fromwhich to consider violent action.

The expressive role Benjamin assigns to ‘violence’connects the methodological and substantive strata ofhis essay. Although we have yet to see what exactlyviolence manifests, the notion that violence itself is notmerely a means, but also an expression of an agent’sessence might just be among the essay’s most valuablecontributions. Minimally, it accounts for the paired im-ages of the general strike and divine violence, whichboth bespeak an ideal-typical practice without relyingon the instrumental categories of Weber’s account. Fur-thermore, the focus on what or who manifests itself inviolence, rather than the intentions or ends informingviolent action, offers an alternative to the means-endsrationality implicit in both positive and natural law.Benjamin motivates its introduction by identifying,early on in the essay, the unproductive opposition (al-most antinomy, in the Kantian sense) between these twojuridical frameworks: “Natural law attempts, by the just-ness of the ends, to ‘justify’ the means, positive law to‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justifica-tion of the means.”23 But from Benjamin’s perspective,any attempt to understand ‘Right’ in terms of legitimatemeans or just ends fails to account for what is truly atstake: namely who is able to act.

Indeed, insofar as the institutions of law and jurispru-dence are proxies for Reason itself, and the oppositionbetween positive and natural law is essentially a meta-critical debate about the parameters for evaluating thelegitimacy of practical action (and its continued ratio-nalization) in the public sphere, Benjamin’s theory ofviolence qua manifestation can be said to free our non-instrumental engagements and commitments from theconstraints that Weber places on any ‘ethic of convic-tion.’ For what Benjamin will ultimately take to be man-ifest in violence are the constitutive values of an agent.This makes it possible for him to salvage precisely whatWeber repudiated as an ‘absolutizing ethic of convic-tion’: the ability to sanction violent engagements (e.g. ageneral strike) that go beyond the restricted scope of the‘objective possibilities’ of the situation in which suchengagements occur. Because, on a Benjaminian read-ing, violent actions do not merely – or necessarily –exemplify a socially structured type of purposive ac-tion but rather define the individuals (group) acting, it

is possible to take up a coherent revolutionary stanceagainst actual states of affairs without falling into theperformative contradictions, bad faith, and general inco-herence that, according to Weber, an ethic of convictionengenders when taken up in political life, especially byrevolutionary or reactionary political movements.

Benjamin contra WeberLet us briefly recall the various threads we have beenpursuing. For Weber, our social, political, and legal in-stitutions are – by definition – the objective, ‘rational-ized’ counterpart of our subjective ‘rational’ capacities.Contra Weber, Benjamin’s opening discussion of lawargues against evaluating the legitimacy of these objec-tive structures by appeal to purposive rationality, whosemeans-ends ratios can only attenuate violence. Indeed,means-ends thinking generates the central problem forBenjamin’s critique of violence, namely that by align-ing violence with instrumental reason and binding it tothe category of means, we commit ourselves to an im-poverished conception of the spaces and possibilities ofpolitical action and tether ourselves to a Weberian ra-tional calculation of objective possibilities (constrictedvalue-orientations, institutionalized means, and sanc-tioned ends). But the problem with such an account isthat, to the extent that violence is a means, its legitimatedeployment hinges on how well it fits with the actualsocial organization in which it is used and the orien-tations and goals this context makes possible. Fitness,however, follows from the status quo.

Weber’s approach thus seems to preclude any in-vestigation into the legitimacy – grounds – of the so-cial context itself. Because he derives the range of the‘ought’ from the domain of what ‘is,’ he forgets to askwhether what is ought to be. Indeed, Weber’s positionseems to prevent us from even being able to formulatethis question, since he conceives of legitimacy in termsof justification: a course of action is legitimate relativeto an institutional setting if it can be justified by ap-peal to the values, possibilities, and means available inthat setting. The problem here is simply that Weber’sconditions for justifying an action and the conditionsgoverning its legitimacy come apart in interesting ways.For instance, it is hard to see how Weber could handle aconscientious objection to institutionalized injustice,24

which relies upon an ethic of conviction (and the sen-timent Weber mocks: ‘Not I, but the world is wrong’),and rejects the ‘live options’ of a situation.

As this example makes abundantly clear, Weber’sdefinitions of politics, political action, and politicalagency are far too narrow to account for political re-sistance, which cannot fail to appeal to an ethic ofconviction and hence cannot escape the contradictionsand ‘necessary political failures’ to which such an ethic

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ultimately leads. On Weber’s view, because resistingagents must adopt an ethic of conviction, they do not‘have what it takes’ to be successful in political arenas.Thankfully, experience shows that Weber is wrong. Wecould come up with a good number of counterexam-ples here – Ghandi, perhaps, Martin Luther King Jr, orsome of the student movements – and show how We-ber’s approach to politics fails to model successful formsof political resistance. Benjamin’s expressive concep-tion of violence, on the other hand, enables us to thinkthrough what Weber tries to define away. His theoryof manifestation offers the non-instrumental evaluativeperspective that promises to free our political engage-ments from the constraints Weber placed on the ‘ethicof conviction’ by expanding the scope of possibilitiesbeyond what is instrumentally available to agents withintheir respective social spaces.

It is in this context that we can begin to make senseof Benjamin’s discussion of the role of precedent inpositive law. On Benjamin’s account, the codificationof violence in positive law occurs at the price of ex-cluding the salient contextual features of concretely sit-uated rational action. The engine of this exclusion is infact the institutional, legal recognition of certain ends,which have been successfully pursued by violent means.From Benjamin’s vantage, Weber’s conception of poli-tics as the legitimate monopoly on violence fails on twocounts: it fails to account for the legitimacy of violentaction (since it only specifies the efficacity of some suchactions), just as it fails to propose a notion of rational-ization that is non-trivial (since it can only ‘justify’ thestatus quo).

Benjamin formulates these two failures in terms ofthe vicious (‘mythic’) cycle of law-instituting and law-preserving violence. This cycle clarifies how and whythe consolidation of coercive means occurs within thehistorically recognized procedures of the public space.In brief, the vicious circularity of this process stemsfrom the fact that, while it recognizes that certain endshave been successfully pursued by violent means, thisrecognition itself presupposes and mobilizes the ‘suc-cess’ criteria instituted and preserved by these samelegal formations. And since these criteria are instru-mental in nature, instrumental success replaces the ideaof right action. Whether we consider the subjectivelyoriented violence involved in instituting a law, or the ob-jectively codified coercive means involved in enforcingand preserving it, what we consistently find is the meredrive towards survival or perpetuation. From whicheverside we consider ‘law,’ we find only a crooked tim-ber to which two drowning men cling for survival: outof sheer necessity, one man seeks to protect with theonly means available to him what the other would justas forcibly take away. Benjamin’s point is simply thatthere is no ‘ought’ to be found in such a situation, no

recognition and no justice – even as its justification(self-preservation) is readily available.

Benjamin’s argument here has the following pattern:a consideration of the historical license provided by therecognition that certain ends have been successfully pur-sued by violent means gives way to a speculative dis-cussion of law-instituting and law-preserving violencemore generally; then, by making visible the transitionfrom and discontinuity between the ends served in in-stituting a law and the ends served in enforcing andpreserving it (there where Weber saw only continuity),Benjamin makes room for an alternative orientation tobe imagined. What we find at the null point betweenthese two forms of violence is what Benjamin will labela pure means – quite literally an activity that serves nei-ther (or no) end. He uses this vantage, which is anchoredin the present, to motivate a specific sense of practicalpolitical engagement that no longer depends upon theevaluative criteria supplied by Weber’s ‘reason.’

More concretely, Benjamin’s objection is that posi-tive law’s justificatory strategy for bestowing or with-holding an individual’s right to use violent means istied to specific, historical instances. Justification, inother words, is a matter of precedent. (Since the de-liberative strategies of positive law are the paradigm forWeber’s evaluative notion of rational fitness, it is nosurprise that Benjamin takes them as his target.) Theproblem, however, is that precedent merely recognizesthat specific ends have been successfully pursued withina given context using violent means. Once recognized,these instrumental successes further determine our so-cial spaces, which in turn constrain what is objectivelypossible. Benjamin’s discussion of precedent qua his-torical recognition of ends thus returns the quaestio quidfacti of the Kantian transcendental deduction to its legalroots. For the ends we recognize, he argues, structure oursocial spaces, determine what is objectively possible,and ground our legitimate modes of comportment. No-tice the contingency of the whole process: a given casebecomes paradigmatic of all future instances. However,this form of deliberation does not allow us to completelyexclude the category of possible ends. As Benjamin re-marks, “Since the recognition of legal violence is mosttangibly evident in a deliberate submission to its ends, ahypothetical distinction between kinds of violence mustbe based on the presence or absence of a general histor-ical acknowledgement of its ends. Ends that lack suchacknowledgment may be called natural ends; the othertype may be called legal ends.”25 In much the sameway as ‘ought’ depends on ‘can,’ Benjamin argues, thehistorical recognition of a violently pursued end presup-poses a wider range of possible aims out of which theselection is made. The problem, as he goes on to note,is that this deliberative process of recognizing certainends and not others ultimately places the individual in

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opposition to the social institutions that constitute ourpublic spaces. Although these institutions embody all ofour successes, they express and authorize only a narrowsubset of our potentials, since they place an objectivelimit on the specific ends we may set for ourselves. Thisin fact is the “general maxim of present-day Europeanlegislation,” according to Benjamin, namely that “all thenatural ends of individuals must collide with legal endsif pursued with a greater or lesser degree of violence.”26

This collision between individuals and institutionsis interesting because it illustrates the ambiguity in thevery notion of an end, and hence the ambiguity in theidea of legitimately pursuing an end by violent means.For the conflict between individual action and legalstatutes is precisely what generates precedent. All ac-tion, as we can gather from a particular reading of Kant(and Benjamin refers to him in precisely this context),posits a law. Successful action, however, constitutes one,since we recognize in its completion a specific fitness.Yet the major difficulty here is that the move from thecounterfactual als ob (‘as if’) of the subjectively positedmoral law to the factual es gilt (‘it holds,’ or ‘is valid’)of a legal status remains utterly obscure. Although a rec-ognized end is codified as law and subsequent actionsare evaluated in light of it, we have yet to understandhow that codification happens. For Benjamin, the histor-ically situated recognition of ends (i.e. precedent) func-tions as an origin, which supplies the material neededfor answering the quaestio quid facti associated withthe first moment of a transcendental deduction. But theimportance of the quid facti extends beyond merely rec-ognizing a right’s origin: it also circumscribes the rangeof what remains possible, since the actual provides uswith the baseline for determining what is consistent withit. The legal recognition of ends via precedent involves(illicitly) constraining a strong sense of the possible towhat remains consistent with actual states of affairs.

Benjamin’s discussion of legal ends outlines pre-cisely this logic. Recognizing a natural end as legal,he claims, introduces a specific limitation: what we cannow consider to be legitimate and possible is constrainedby the institutions that embody these recognized ends.(Indeed, this was the very process by which Weberintroduced the notions of objective possibility and ra-tionalization.) From Benjamin’s perspective, however,this recognitive practice further entails some form ofpolicing or enforcement. After all, if recognition de-termines objective possibility, then it must also placesome systematic checks or constraints on action. No-tice, however, that the successful action, which entailsthe recognition of its ends, and the enforcement of thelegal status conferred upon this kind of action operatelike bookends for our rational deliberations: they remaindistinct from the contents and procedures of rationaldeliberation itself, since they serve their own distinct

goals. Benjamin formulates this point by distinguishingbetween two forms of violence, which frame the recog-nition of legal ends and their embodiment in the statutesof positive law: “all violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither ofthese predicates, it forfeits all validity.”27

This explains why we do not hesitate to accept Ben-jamin’s initial claim concerning the opposition betweenindividual and state: we implicitly acknowledge that,however imbricated or genetically related to one an-other, the ends of individuals and the ends of the stateare fundamentally in conflict, because neither set canbe fully incorporated within the procedural structuresof positive law. Both the individual and the state canlay claim to natural rights, which are connected to thenotion of survival (or self-propagation) and hence to aninstrumental conception of violence. Here then is theparadox: violence is legitimate insofar as it has led tothe present situation, but the very resources for violentaction must be centralized in order to ensure the stabil-ity and continuance of the present state of affairs and toguard against the kind of violence that lead to its veryinstitution. For what we continue to recognize as a legalright is not justified or legitimate in any absolute sense,but rather only insofar as it has been violently institutedby individuals and can be violently preserved by theinstitutional framework of the state.

This brings us to the petitio principii of positive law:its transcendental deductive structure of argumentationrequires an unrestricted and successful initial violenceto create a statute. For without an original violence,there can be no recognition of a legal end, and henceno legal code or deliberation. An unrestricted, pure vi-olence thus establishes the quid facti by fiat. The factof an historically successful action is sufficient for usto deliberate on the legitimacy of specific means topursue similar ends, and establish the right to act incertain ways relative to certain orientations and con-texts. Whence the quid juris. What Benjamin’s accountof law-instituting and law-preserving violence shows,however, is that this argumentative strategy precludesinquiry into the grounds of legitimate practical actionas such and renders the idea of resistance incoherent.The putatively historical orientation of positive law onlyconcerns itself with the instances of a law’s applicationwithout inquiring into that law’s origin, or the condi-tions of a particular law’s emergence. The fact of law,as it were, is sufficient to inquire into its legitimate ap-plication. But the legitimacy of a particular law itself isstructurally excluded from consideration.

The Labyrinthine Space of ReasonHence the opening salvo of Benjamin’s essay: the proxyinstitutions of reason rely upon historically recognized

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ends to sanction and streamline specific means. Whatpositive law recognizes, he contends, is that specificgoals have in fact been successfully pursued with vi-olence, but this recognition inquires into neither therightness of the ends pursued nor the reasonableness ofthe means used. Furthermore, positive law treats ‘vio-lence’ as a brute fact, leaving the meaning and valueof the notion entirely obscure. Its interest in precedentdoes not explain or justify anything. Hence from Ben-jamin’s historico-philosophical perspective, it becomesapparent that the formation of precedent – which fig-ures prominently in a system of legal argumentationand justification – renders violence rationally inacces-sible. Although some notion of violence flanks our legaldeliberations and practical actions, it resists philosoph-ical analysis because the basic interests of positive laworient us towards different concerns. Violence becomesa blind spot rather than an explicit problem for positivelaw. Even Weber, who defines politics in terms of thelegitimate monopoly on violence and relies upon somenotion of violence for the evaluation of a rationally pur-sued end, never gives an account of it. This brings us toa complete impasse and ensnares us in the never-endingcycle of law-instituting and law-preserving violence thatmerely perpetuates and intensifies the mythical charac-ter of practical action more generally. Action is subjectto the hidden forces of fate and to the tragic ironies of afinite perspective, because law is grounded in a violencethat it fails to investigate and in the fear of retaliation.

This brings us to the second phase of Benjamin’sargument, which aims to secure an image of politi-cal engagement that is independent of this institutionalbind, and hence promises to provide us with a concep-tion of violence that makes its value explicit. This stageof his argument, as we will see, hinges on an under-standing of ‘legitimacy’ in terms of what a performancemakes manifest. Again, in much the same way that hisargument in the Language-essay shifts our critical fo-cus from what is being transmitted through language tothe expressive, situational relations among individuals,Benjamin’s approach to ‘violence’ in the present essayinvolves shifting our focus away from the purposivedeliberations in which violence plays an instrumentalpart, to the kinds of beings who express themselvesin violent performances. Hence, rather than trying toevaluate a specific course of action by appealing to ateleologically articulated notion of rational success thatwe impute to it on the basis of some set of features wehave singled out, Benjamin connects an action’s legiti-macy to the agent undertaking it and who expresses ormanifests itself in so acting.

Benjamin brings this point home by considering thedifferent ‘expressive contents’ of the political and gen-eral strikes. On his analysis, these acts fundamentallydiffer with regard to their reliance upon the institutional

situation, the convictions underwriting them, and thekind of subject capable of acting. In a political strike,for instance, the collective striking body depends onand justifies its actions in terms of legally recognizedends. The ability of political strikers to act consciouslyand collectively as a unified body is constituted by thelegal and institutional framework defining their socialsituation. A political strike therefore depends on andreaffirms the basic institutional structures that make itpossible. In the case of a general strike, however, thewholesale rejection of the status quo expresses or man-ifests a collective agent in no need for justification bylegally recognized ends, for such a collective is cruciallyindependent from the institutional layout of its given sit-uation. (It is possible to put this in even stronger termsand say that such a collective agent was in fact objec-tively impossible prior to its manifestation, which thusappears as nothing short of a miracle.) The general strikedoes not seek to actualize an institutionally framed ob-jective possibility but to create new potentials for eman-cipatory political action. (Benjamin’s account here ispresciently accommodating of contemporary phenom-ena such as the decline of unions in post-industrial so-cieties and the rise of ‘occupations.’) This explains whyBenjamin’s essay turns on the problems and paradoxesinvolved in the legal codification of means-ends deliber-ation (i.e. rationalization), why ‘violence’ becomes thefulcrum of his discussion, and why his conception ofpolitics is unapologetically anarchistic.

Indeed, Weber’s understanding of anarchy – “If nosocial institutions existed which knew the use of vio-lence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated,and a condition would emerge that could be designatedas ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word”28 – isleveraged by Benjamin out of its counterfactual func-tion as a boundary condition of political action. Weber,as we know, objects to an anarchic conception of polit-ical action for the same reasons that he rejects a pureethic of conviction: anarchism appears to involve a ba-sic category error, since the very idea of non-coercivecommunal action that remains unmediated by the state(or individual means-ends deliberations) is unthinkableon Weber’s account. By contrast, Benjamin’s anarchic‘Ought’ implies that there is in fact a real possibility fornon-coercive, institutionally unmediated political ac-tion whose main act would be the wholesale refusalof current socio-economic relations. Benjamin’s argu-ment here offers something like an existence proof forthe possibility of an alternative conception of politicalaction whose paradigmatic case is the general strike.What makes the general strike exceptional, what differ-entiates it from the common political strike, Benjamininsists, is the fact that the general strike is fundamentallyfree from coercive and instrumental calculations.29 Thedifference between these two modes of comportment

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may be summarized as follows: in a general strike, indi-viduals simply cease to comport themselves accordingto the relations and objective possibilities that definetheir social situation. In this radical cessation of ‘reason-able’ action, they actualize a distinctive possibility thatseemed initially inaccessible to the contemporary con-figuration of their social spaces. The political strike, bycontrast, takes advantage of this configuration by legallysanctioned extortion, and thus remains thoroughly con-sistent with the present state of affairs, which it merelyserves to entrench.

The general strike allows Benjamin to anchor his an-archic ideal of political engagement in the actual worldby showing how the collective subject it manifests canabandon the institutional relations and objective possi-bilities constituting a given historical situation and openup a new space of possibilities that would otherwiseremain inaccessible to individual agents. Benjamin’sargument here is characteristically dense, and interwo-ven with suggestive remarks concerning war, pacifism,and ‘childish’ forms of anarchism. But this intricatetapestry of concerns nevertheless aims to demonstrate asingle point: the criteria we derive from teleological ac-counts of practical reason and apply to straightforwardlyinstrumental cases of violence (e.g. punishing crimi-nals, going to war for resources, coercive techniquesfor collective bargaining) cannot be used to evaluatethe violence involved in a general strike, because thelatter simply has no end. Or, perhaps more precisely,a general strike does not serve an end in any classicalsense, and hence we cannot approach it in the sameway we would more conventional, instrumental, formsof action.

Ultimately, the general strike’s legitimacy is boundup with its expressive content – i.e. its manifestationof what I have been referring to as a ‘collective sub-ject.’ However, before addressing this idea of a col-lective subject, which rounds out Benjamin’s accountof violence, we need to see why and how the possi-bility of a general strike – and hence the possibilityof non-instrumental rational activity – vitiates Weber’s(and post-Kantianism’s) account of practical action andpolitics. Again, Benjamin’s basic claim concerning thehistorical recognition of legal ends turns out to be de-cisive. For, on the one hand, the absence of a naturalor legal end makes it impossible to institutionalize orrationalize a general strike. The difference between theinstrumental violence of the political strike and the pureviolence of the general strike is ultimately the differ-ence between Macht (power) and Gewalt (violence),which Benjamin develops by transposing his politicalcategories into the figurative registers of myth and reli-gion. With their taste for tragedy, Greeks and Germansalike opt for a conception of rational action that relies onthe power (Macht) involved in setting limits to human

action, whereas the Jewish conception of God’s abilityto expiate human limitations (institutional or otherwise)provides us with a model for understanding Gewalt.

As Benjamin’s discussion of mythic violence makesclear, the cycle of law-positing and law-preserving vi-olence provides the basic structure for every legendof trespass and retribution (as well as struggle forrecognition). The narrative logic of myth crucially de-pends upon the ability to enforce and to recognizelimitations.30 The violence inflicted by trespass, for in-stance, is the manifestation of an individual’s power. Sounderstood, this mythic conception of violence, whichBenjamin finds exemplified in the legend of Niobe, isstructurally identical to his account of positive law. Re-call that Niobe was punished for failing to respect ahigher authority: at a ceremony honoring Leto, Niobeboasted about her large family and mocked Leto for hav-ing only two offspring (Apollo and Artemis). For thistrespass against her station, Leto had Niobe’s childrenmurdered. In shock, Niobe retreated to Mount Siplylon,where her grief overtook her and she turned to stone –“as a boundary stone on the frontier between men andgods.”31 The story of Korah, on the other hand, ex-punges precisely this power narrative. Korah is Weber’strue politician: he is a proponent of positive law and achampion of an ethic of responsibility. According to thebook of Exodus, Korah opposed the Mosaic law on thegrounds that these commandments did not come fromgod, but from Moses himself and that the Law benefitedonly Moses and his kin. Korah’s opposition (was) endedin violence: he and his followers, together with all theirpossessions were swallowed up by the earth such that notrace of their death was left behind. What the divine vi-olence of the Jewish story illustrates, however, is not anindividual’s power to institute or preserve the historicalinstitutions and boundaries of positive law, but rathera transpersonal ability to generate a fuller spectrum ofpossibilities than what fits the present state of affairs.This is why divine violence appears as a miracle. In itstransformation of the status quo something appears thatwas hitherto thought impossible, because it was struc-turally excluded from the situation. Benjamin’s divineviolence thus brings into relief three ideas: first, thatpolitical resistance can operate independently of the‘properly political’ institutional frameworks which de-fine a given situation and give rise to the mythic cycle offate qua instituting and preserving violence. Second, itshows how a new, collective subject can manifest itselfin these acts of resistance: insofar as ‘divine violence’is coextensive with the general strike’s refusal to accepta situation’s social relations as binding or determining,it expresses the constitutive values of a group (or bodypolitic) and is therefore non-instrumental. Finally, thispositive sense of resistance has historical import in thatit provides a point of origin in Benjamin’s sense: it

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separates the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in terms of the emer-gence of a previously unknown collective subject.

The story of Korah, which marks the emergence ofJudaism and its separation from the prehistory of theIsraelite exile, exemplifies the historical import thatBenjamin accords political resistance qua divine vio-lence. Had Korah not been swallowed up, the very ideaof Judaism would have never become intelligible. More-over, this story helps Benjamin to distinguish betweenpower and violence. The kind of resistance exemplifiedin these biblical events is fundamentally at odds withthe Greek story of Niobe, Benjamin maintains, becausethe violence of the former is expressive and constitutiverather than consequential. While Niobe’s fate cannot beunderstood independently of her infraction and the in-strumental use of power, the same considerations arecompletely out of place in the Jewish context.32 Thedecisive difference between power and violence turnson who acts: power (Macht) is always exercised by anindividual agent within a well-defined, institutionallydetermined situation; violence (Gewalt) announces acollective subject capable of transforming this situationbut that cannot be explained exclusively in terms ofthe institutional coordination or mediation of the con-stituent actions of individual participants.

By aligning the Jewish story of Korah with the com-munal, decentralized character of the general strike,Benjamin rejects Weber’s polytheism of value andvalue-orientation in favour of a value-monotheism thatis in fact more ‘responsible’ in the face of what couldand ought to be than any contractual ethics. If, as I havebeen arguing, Korah is a proponent of positive law ratherthan the Mosaic Law, then his paganism is as resolutelyrejected by divine violence as his politics. Benjamin’sdiscussion of this biblical story thus seeks to salvage anethic of conviction from Weber’s critique by showingthat a shared conviction is constitutive of a group andof collective agency and that such a conviction – ratherthan map onto the objective possibilities of a historicalsituation – can utterly transform the situation that pur-ports to exclude it. Benjamin’s essay thus moves froma consideration of the status of an individual’s actions,which are determined by a given historical situation,to a consideration of a collective subject that expressesitself in its opposition to this social situation. This op-position, as we saw, has its source in a collectively heldconviction, which becomes manifest in ‘universal’ actsof resistance, like a general strike or divine violence,that cannot be reinscribed within Weber’s ethic of re-sponsibility. For in focusing on the constitution of acollective subject, Benjamin shows that violence is notmerely a means (to be) used by individuals in theirpursuit of various political ends, but that this very con-ception of political action is derivative in relation to thebasic values (convictions) that are constitutive of col-

lective political agency and action. More forcefully put,what is manifest in the pure violence (or expression) ofa collective is not a datum for instrumental calculation.

Benjamin’s Violence-essay thus shows that we canconceive of political action in terms of the constitutionof a collective subject that is independent of its socialsituation, and that value monism is just as possible asan ethical orientation in and to politics as Weber’s valuepluralism, with its sense of tragedy and fateful resigna-tion. Benjamin’s account challenges Weber’s insistencethat political action is inherently individual action un-dertaken within the institutional structures defining aparticular historical situation. It also challenges his lib-eral understanding of political action as the exercise ofone’s legitimate power(s), and replaces it with a con-ception of politics as an exercise in resistance. For what‘divine’ or ‘pure’ violence means is that historical limitscan be changed, that the objective possibilities imma-nent in a given social situation are neither definitive norexhaustive of what we can do. History is not a series ofprecedents, but rather a long string of miracles.33

NOTES

1. See Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and DavidGray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Jus-tice (New York: Routledge, 1992), Giorgio Agamben, State ofException, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2005), Mathias Fritch, The Promise of Memory: His-tory and Politics in Marx, Benjamin and Derrida (New York:SUNY Press, 2005), Anselm Haverkamp, ed., Gewalt undGerechtigkeit: Derrida-Benjamin (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,1994).

2. In this sense, Weber’s account of politics and politicalaction is prescient of Pippin’s more recent reading of Hegel’spractical philosophy. See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practi-cal Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008).

3. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: GesammelteSchriften, 7 Vols. in 14 Parts, eds. Rolf Tiedemann andHermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt. a.M.: Suhrkamp,1991), vol. II, 943.

4. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamins Briefe, 2 Vols.eds. G. Scholem and Th. W. Adorno (Frankfurt a.M.:Suhrkamp, 1991), 227.

5. For a dissenting interpretation, see Peter Fenves, TheMessianic Reduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2012), 187–226. Fenves reads Benjamin’s “Critique of Vio-lence” as an implicit critique of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals.This interpretation is grounded in the well-documented fact thatBenjamin was familiar with Kant’s tract (his essay “GoethesWahlverwandtschaften” quotes it, and his original dissertationproject on Kant’s concept of history would have also madereference to this text). According to Fenves, Benjamin’s cri-tique involves opposing the category of justice to Kant’s cate-gory of right. The Violence-essay, Fenves contends, “is unlikeany other text that Benjamin published in terms of the di-rectness with which it confronts the category of justice” (TheMessianic Reduction 208). I do not share Fenves’ assessmentof Benjamin’s essay; in fact, I am tempted to say that hisclaim that Benjamin directly confronts the category of justicein this essay seems almost perverse. Although Gerechtigkeit

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and its cognates appear some fourteen or fifteen times in thefirst two paragraphs of the essay, it completely disappearsfrom the bulk of Benjamin’s analysis, reappearing only inthe final three pages, where Benjamin concludes by restat-ing the basic paradox of jurisprudence with which the essaybegan.

The whole point of Benjamin’s essay is that justice is em-phatically not something that can be confronted directly, forany such direct, thematic engagement would place it in the ser-vice of mythic violence and instrumental reason as justifyinga course of action. If Benjamin brackets the concept of justice(for this is what his call, in the fourth paragraph of the essay,for bracketing any consideration of the criteria for ‘justice’amounts to), he cannot then oppose the bracketed notion toKant’s conception of Right. That would be an utterly incoher-ent strategy – and whatever else we may think of Benjamin’sessay, it is not incoherent. To the extent that Fenves’ account in-sists on the centrality of ‘justice,’ it yields paradoxical results.His interpretation fails, in sum, because he misunderstands theopening sentence of Benjamin’s essay: “The task of a critiqueof violence can be characterized as the presentation [Darstel-lung] of its relationship to Right and Justice” (GS II: 179/ SW 1:236). On the reading on offer here, Benjamin’s opening gambitis to make violence a limit-phenomenon, which differentiatesbetween Right and Justice. And this involves, as Benjaminshows, delineating a specific kind of practical agency that is nolonger bound up with the teleological structure of Reason, inwhich violence can only be rationalized – justified – as right.Insofar as Benjamin’s strategy is to show what violence mani-fests, it would seem strange to think that he opposes the notionof right to the notion of justice.

6. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” The VocationLectures, eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. RodneyLivingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 32–94,p. 89).

7. See Tracy B. Strong and David Owen’s Introductionto The Vocation Lectures, p. xxxivf. The bulk of my remarksabove follow Strong and Owen’s reconstruction of the histori-cal context of Weber’s lecture.

8. Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 93.9. Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and So-

cial Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, eds.Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, trans. Henry A Finch(Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), 50–112, p. 52.

10. Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and SocialPolicy,” 52

11. Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 33.12. Ibid., 7813. Ibid. translation modified.14. Ibid., 8315. ibid.16. ibid.17. Ibid., 8218. ibid.19. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Works,

Volume 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1996), 248, emphasis added.

20. For a fuller account of Benjamin’s theory of mean-ing in the Language-Essay, see Alexei Procyshyn, “WalterBenjamin’s Philosophy of Language,” Philosophy Compass9:6 (2014), pp. 368–381

21. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 236.22. Ibid., 248 emphasis added.23. Ibid., 23724. Weber’s own attempt to address the problem – by ap-

peal to the process of rationalization itself – is reminiscent ofKant’s attempt to deduce ‘Right’ from an ‘original acquisition’

by relying on the idea of a lex permissiva (see §§11–18 of theDoctrine of Right [Ak. VI: 260–271]). Whatever the originsof our historical situation, the institutionalization of specificlegal codes is somehow supposed to lead to a just form ofdeliberation and action. But the basic problem still remains:to the extent that we evaluate political action by the criteriawe extrapolate from purposive reason, we subordinate ‘legit-imacy’ to some notion of fitness among value-orientation, asituation’s objective possibilities, and an action’s practical ex-ecution. Any form of engagement that does not recognize theinstitutionalization of what is possible, in a given historicalsituation, or does not accept a pre-formed value-orientation isby definition illegitimate, because the criteria for evaluatingsuch engagement are bound up with the very institutions beingchallenged.

25. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 23826. Ibid.27. Ibid., 24328. Weber, “Politics as Vocation”, 78.29. Benjamin, Selected Works, 245f.30. This applies, mutatis mutandis, to conceptual

schemes or normative statuses, because the possession of aconcept or the acknowledgement of a status entails a specificset of abilities and limitations – akin to the abilities and limita-tions placed upon individuals by mythical or national borders.

31. Benjamin, Selected Works, 248.32. In fact, Korah’s opposition to the Mosaic law was

calculated, and hinged on his oracular view of the future: he hadalready foretold that his bloodline would live on, and thoughtthat this divination secured his survival. In contrast again to thestory of Niobe, God’s divine violence did not wipe out Korah’schildren.

33. As recent general strikes have shown, collective re-sistance can transform our basic institutional structures andgenerate new potentials for practical, intersubjective action. Ineed only refer here to the 2000 general strike in Cochabamba,Bolivia, over the privatization of the water distribution system(and again more recently, in 2005, in El Alto, Bolivia). Thecomplete cessation of work, coupled with mass demonstra-tions, led the Bolivian government to call a state of emergency.The ensuing violence led both government officials and thecorporations involved in the privatization plan to go first intohiding and then, when the police and military could no longerguarantee their safety, to flee the country. This shows howspontaneous mass organization can overcome state violenceor coercion and institute popular governance. For a journalist’saccount of these events, see Benjamin Dangl, The Price of Fire:Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (Oakland: AKPress, 2007); for a participant’s account, see Tom Lewis andOscar Olivera, ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, forewordby Vandana Shiva (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004).

Alexei Procyshyn is lecturer in Contemporary Euro-pean philosophy and critical theory at Monash Univer-sity. He received his PhD from the New School forSocial Research in 2013. Before coming to Monash, hewas a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy and Reli-gious Studies Programme at the University of Macau.He is currently working on two projects, one on WalterBenjamin’s notions of experience and critique and theother on the metaphysical and epistemological commit-ments of ‘immanent critique’. Beyond Benjamin, heis interested in the parameters of failure and achieve-ment for social action and Neo-Kantian approaches tomeaning and value.

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