Assuming Violence A Commentary On Walter Benjamin S Critique Of Violence

boundary 2 42:4 (2015) DOI 10.1215/01903659-3154152 © 2015 by Duke University Press
Assuming Violence: A Commentary on
Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”
Eli Friedlander
The task of the present commentary on “Critique of Violence” is to
bring to light a progression in Walter Benjamin’s essay, one that has not
been established clearly enough and that has important implications for
assessment of the essay’s content.1 This will in part require presenting the
“Critique of Violence” in a way that closely relates its major themes to cen-
tral moments in Benjamin’s writings of the same period. By showing the
essay’s affinity to such texts as “The Task of the Translator,” the essay on
Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and the “Epistemo-critical Preface” to The Ori-
gin of German Trauerspiel, we can test the exactitude of this reading.
There has been disagreement about the proper translation into
English of the German term Gewalt in the essay. For though the word vio-
lence fits many of the cases Benjamin discusses, there are places where
a more neutral term such as force might work better. This translation prob-
lem reflects an authentic difficulty with the essay’s content, and to resolve it
1. I have greatly benefited from discussion on issues in this article with James Conant,
Johnathan Soen, and Lisa van Alstyne, as well as from the comments of the reader for
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160 boundary 2 / November 2015
we must better characterize what critique is for Benjamin. A critique of vio-
lence has as its task to reveal the truth content, the highest reality, under-
lying the forms violence may take. Benjamin’s essay, which initially takes
up violence in a manifestly political context, as the violence of law to fur-
ther its ends, proceeds, by way of critique, to the mythical violence under-
lying it, and ultimately to a more original notion of divine violence, which,
while assuming destruction in the world, would be neither its cause nor its
reason.2 Whether this recognition of origin through criticism remains true
to the initial concern with the political is something I will address at the end
of this commentary.
I speak of a progression in Benjamin’s essay primarily to suggest
an order or hierarchy of the forms of violence at issue in it. One should not
take violence as a generic term and view the essay as enumerating differ-
ent species of it, such as the violence of law, the violence of the police, and
military violence, leading finally to considerations about mythical violence
and divine violence (whose relevance to the political would thus remain
unclear). Nor should one be content to establish local dependences or
analogical comparisons between the different types of violence. Rather,
one should trace how 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 law-
making, 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.
To start elaborating these relations of dependence, consider their
simplest case, namely, Benjamin’s account of the violence of the police
and its relation to the force of the law. The police is supposed to be an
organ of the law whose function is to enforce it. We can initially conceive
this relation of enforcement by placing it in the framework of the broader
philosophical question about the application of law. Immanuel Kant, who
considers the problem in his discussion of judgment in the Critique of Pure
Reason, points out that the application of the universal to the particular is
not automatic or merely a matter of logic.3 The laws of thought cannot, in
2. Related to this issue of translation is the need to distinguish systematically several
terms in “Critique of Violence” in order to properly address the questions it raises con-
cerning potential and actualization. Most important among these terms are Gewalt (“vio-
lence”), Macht (“power”), and Kraft (which I translate as “capacity”).
3. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), A132/B171.
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Friedlander / Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” 161
themselves, account for their particular use. Were we to appeal to a law for
the application of law, it would involve us in an infinite regress. It is the exer-
cise of the capacity to judge, which is necessary for the application of law,
and it requires the involvement of the power of the imagination. The latter
produces a schematic picture—think of it as a hybrid of understanding and
intuition—that serves to mediate or bring together the generality of law and
the specificity of the intuited particular case, which would be shown to fall
under it.4
The police should be seen, similarly, to fill a gap between the general
form that the law qua law takes and the specific circumstances in which it
is to be enforced. It might seem as though the law applies itself to the par-
ticular circumstances, as though specific cases naturally “fall under” the
already existing law, and thus that the violence the police musters is merely
needed to enforce it. Yet the police is a hybrid force, like the imagination. It
is both receptive (to law) and at the same time spontaneous (in producing
ordinances). Its ordinances “mediate” between the universality of law and
the particular circumstances that the law cannot determine out of its own
ground: “The law of the police really marks the point at which the state,
whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within
any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the
empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain. Therefore, the police
intervenes ‘for security reasons’ in countless cases where no clear legal
situation exists” (SW 1, 243).5
Putting it this way makes clear that far from constituting a solution
to the problem of application the police achieves the apparent determina-
tion by arrogating to itself force that is not its own. The police, so to speak,
takes the law into its own hands. This arrogation of force can be effec-
tive only through semblance. Rather than a schematism, we might here
speak of ambiguity as the agent of mediation. The middle ground of ordi-
nances is precisely what allows the law to shift to fit disparate situations
4. The problem of the image character of a schematism and its relation to exercising
force, as well as questions of determinacy and ambiguity, will resurface at various junc-
tures in my commentary on Benjamin’s essay.
5. Hereafter, Benjamin’s works will be cited parenthetically using the following abbrevia-
tions: SW (followed by volume number)—Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, 4 vols.,
ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996–2003); O—The Origin of German Trauerspiel, trans. J. Osborne (London:
NLB, 1977); A—The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999); and C—The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–
1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
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while seemingly being applied with justification. The imagination, the agent
of the application of law according to Kant, with its peculiar character of
nonbeing, becomes, with the police, spectral: “Its power is formless, like
its nowhere-tangible, all pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized
states” (SW 1, 243).6
The recognition of this parasitism of one force on another should
direct us as we move now to further articulate the more complex relation in
this order or hierarchy, namely, the relation between the violence of law and
mythical violence. Law arrogates to itself unlimited power whose source
is of another order, the order of fate: “Fate, . . . in all cases underlies legal
force” (SW 1, 248). The identification of legal violence and mythical violence
is liable to be misunderstood as a mere analogy, which takes something
like the following form: Just as in ancient times the unleashing of violence
as retribution was traced to the infringement of the laws of the gods, so in
today’s societies the laws of the state occupy the position once attributed to
these all-powerful divinities. To counter this problematic reading, it might be
enough to note that for Benjamin the primeval world does not refer to dis-
tant historical times. It is possible to consider life in its most modern mani-
festation and thereby realize that it has not overgrown the presence of the
mythical. “In the present state,” Benjamin writes, “the social is a manifesta-
tion of spectral and demonic powers” (SW 1, 227).
The violence of myth belongs to the character of human life itself, or
it is a violence that permeates life in common and manifests itself insofar as
such life does not undergo the highest spiritual articulation open to it.7 This
character of life as a field of fate is at issue in some of Benjamin’s essays
from the time. It is most forcefully depicted in terms of misfortune in the
field of the erotic in his “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” Parts of Benjamin’s
later “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” as well many remarks in the Arcades
Project are similarly proof of the central place of the task of presenting
modern life in common as a field of the manifestation of fate. This is not
the place to engage in detail this difficult dimension of Benjamin’s thought. I
6. One might envisage here the figure, common to so many films, of the vigilante who
takes the execution of justice upon himself, usually because of the powerlessness of the
legal system and the police. Properly understood, this figure is identical with the police
when the latter functions as Benjamin describes it. The police, like the vigilante, is a spec-
tral presence that appears and disappears in relation to various specific circumstances
that the force of law cannot reach.
7. It is probably in his writing on Kafka that Benjamin presents most vividly this utmost
identification of the violence of law with that of myth or the primeval.
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mention the work on nineteenth-century Paris in part to suggest where and
how one is to look for the dimension of the fateful character of life—that is,
of the “guilt of mere natural life”—as well as to avoid problematic paradigms
of what such life might amount to.
In limiting ourselves in the present commentary to the task of describ-
ing in essential terms the progression of “Critique of Violence,” we only need
to characterize mythical violence by way of its fundamental dimensions:
first, the essential oneness that belongs to it (“there is only one fate [daß
es nur ein einziges Schicksal gibt]” [SW 1, 242]) and, second, its unlimited
nature (which should be distinguished from the absolute character of divine
violence). These two characteristics suggest an explication of the monopoly
of violence attributed to the law in its relation to the orders of fate. The
legal order is intent on retaining the monopoly on violence over and above
any end it might pursue. The problematic character of such a monopoly
on violence is not to be assessed primarily in relation to individuals or to
other forms of organization within the state. In the monopoly of violence,
the law seemingly presents itself as a self-sufficient and unlimited unity of
power and thereby arrogates for itself a force that rules over life at a much
more fundamental level. In the violence it takes itself to administer, the law
presents a perverse semblance that it has unlimited power, whereas it is
fundamentally parasitical on the orders of fate in human life in common.8
This means that the suffering and misfortune of humanity as a col-
lective has a far deeper ground than can be regulated and resolved by
means of the state and its laws.9 Moreover, the problem with law is not
8. To cite a philosopher who I take it had the highest affinity to Benjamin’s conception of
the matter, consider how F. W. J. Schelling clearly expresses this point in the Stuttgart
seminars: “The natural unity, this second nature superimposed on the first, to which man
must necessarily take recourse, is the state; and to put it bluntly the state is thus a con-
sequence of the curse that has been placed on humanity. Because man no longer has
God for his unity, he must submit to a material unity. The idea of the state is marked by an
internal contradiction. It is a natural unity, i.e., a unity whose efficacy depends solely on
material means. That is, the state, even if it is being governed in a rational manner, knows
well that its material power alone cannot effect anything and that it must invoke higher
and spiritual motives. These, however, lie beyond its domain and cannot be controlled by
the state, even though the latter boasts with being able to create a moral setting, thereby
arrogating to itself a power equal to nature” (Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of
Theory: Three Essays by F. W. J. Schelling, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau [Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994], 227).
9. This does not mean merely that a dimension of individual existence would not receive
any resolution through the law (as though the law were sufficient for the communal but
not for the meaning of the individual life). Rather, there is a dimension of collective exis-
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resolved merely by negating its authority or resorting to a facile anarchism.
Nor is the proletarian general strike, discussed in “Critique of Violence,” to
be taken as a blueprint for revolutionary measures, as is sometimes sug-
gested. For the ultimate issue is whether a force exists that can counter the
orders of fate underlying legal violence.
In initially distinguishing mythic violence from legal violence, in order
to properly recognize their interdependence, we need to ask first how force
is present in experience. Here, too, we could start with broader philosophi-
cal considerations and refer ourselves to Kant’s discussion of the difference
between quantity and quality in the mathematical principles of experience
in the Critique of Pure Reason.10 The former are principles of extensive
magnitude, whereas the latter define the behavior of intensive magnitudes.
An extensive magnitude made up of a plurality of units that are external to
one another, whereas intensive magnitudes have a qualitative unity that
cannot be conceived as an aggregate of distinct parts. They are manifest
as differences of degree of one and the same quality. To take a simple
example of the latter, consider a phenomenal quality such as color. It is
capable of increase or decrease of degree of its intensity. The change of
degrees of intensity is correlative with the presence of an underlying force,
which accounts for qualitative transformation.11
tence, therefore something that gives a fundamental form to the political that must be
conceived as at odds with the order of law and of the state.
10. To be sure, with Kant these are both principles or laws of objects of experience in
general.
11. To further deepen our understanding of the character of mythic violence and its dialec-
tical relation to law, it might be useful to broaden the perspective to more general meta-
physical consideration of ways to articulate the relation of unlimited force to the order of
the laws of nature. Consider, to start with, that it is fundamental to the Kantian concep-
tion of nature that its lawful character is inherently conditioned. In seeking to go beyond
the Kantian limitation of knowledge to conditioned experience, a number of thinkers
have resorted to the distinction between the conditioned order of law and the unlimited
character of living nature as a whole, whose mode of manifestation in phenomena has
the character of force. One might refer here to Goethe’s or to Schelling’s conception of
nature. Arthur Schopenhauer, to take another example, argued that properly understood
unlimited force, which he called world will, does not manifest itself in the form of law, or
in considering phenomena under the aspect of universal laws. World will as force is also
thereby clearly distinguished from the individual will that chooses on the basis of max-
ims within a space of possibilities ordered by norms. Thus the problem of the relation of
manifestations of force to law is not just at issue in natural phenomena but also pertains
to practical laws. Understanding the character of law itself as essentially conditional is
the basis of Schopenhauer’s criticism of Kant’s explication of morality that takes it to be
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This idea of intensive manifestation (Manifestation) is central to
Benjamin’s account of the mode of presence of mythical violence. In par-
ticular, it implies that the manifestation of force is not understood by way of
the relation of cause and effect. Force is not expressed through the lawful-
ness of the causal nexus. Nor is it measured by whatever effects it may pro-
duce. This is the case both as we consider nature as force and with regard
to manifestations of force in human life. In particular, it is necessary to dis-
tinguish the conditioned character of action, which is expressed by means-
ends principles governing the will, from intensive manifestations of force.
Consider the everyday example that Benjamin gives of intensive
manifestation of violence, namely, an outburst of anger: “As regards man,
he is impelled by anger, for example, to the most visible outbursts of a
violence that is not related as a means to a preconceived end. It is not a
means but a manifestation” (SW 1, 248). Anger has an intensive manifes-
tation. The anger is not the cause of the outburst. The outburst is moreover
not judged, extensively, or in terms of the “extent” of its effects. It might
even be problematic to say that the outburst expresses anger, at least when
expression is understood as a relation between two independently identifi-
able entities. The outburst just is intensely manifest anger.
Whereas law and the judgment eventuating in action that heeds (or
does not heed) it has a conditional structure, manifestation of force is the
intensification of its very identity in experience. What is manifest is the pres-
ence of a force, its very existence: “Mythic force in its archetypal form is a
mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a mani-
festation of their will, but primarily a manifestation of their existence” (SW
1, 248). Manifestation is not action. The norms that are supposed to govern
action open it to justification, to the question “why?” and to responses or
explanations that appeal to the means-end structure in their formulation. In
intensive manifestation of elemental force, there are no means and there is
no “why.” While there is no reason or justification, this should not be taken
to imply that meaning is absent. To be sure, we sometime speak of destruc-
tive violence as meaningless (for instance, the violence of a storm or earth-
quake). Yet I take it that proper recognition of the relation of violence and
meaning is one of the most important matters in reading Benjamin’s essay.
The intensive manifestation of force can also be an intensification
of meaning. This is especially important to bear in mind in considering the
grounded in an unconditional law, the categorical imperative. The absolute or uncondi-
tional does not reveal itself as universal law.
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manifestation of unlimited mythical violence. Its paradigmatic manifestation
in tragedy is that horrifying intensification of the character of significance
in experience, its meaning becoming present with a devastatingly precise
force. The form of the tragic is such that the meaningful order of events is
not unified by succession in time, in which the planned and the acciden-
tal are clearly distinguished. Rather, the inner logic is that of an unfolding
of fate, as experience itself becomes, through intensification, the field of
manifestation of a force belonging to a different order. It is in experience
being concentrated and intensified to an extreme that mythical violence
becomes manifest as the sacrificial suffering of the tragic hero.
The manifestation of mythical force is, one might say, inherently tri-
umphant: “Niobe’s arrogance calls down fate upon her not because her
arrogance offends against the law but because it challenges fate—to a
fight in which fate must triumph and can bring to light a law only in its tri-
umph” (SW 1, 248). This might seem less than surprising, for who could
compete with a god and win? But the point Benjamin makes concerns the
character of manifestation of such violence. It shows itself as that which is
over and above everything else. In showing itself, it proves its authority. Its
manifestation is a mark of distinction; it marks the very distinction of the
unlimited from the finite. I note here in passing that this has the implica-
tion, which I will pursue later on, that divine violence must be understood
in a way that totally eliminates the manifestations of mythical violence, for
the latter can only be present triumphantly—it cannot appear merely sub-
dued. This should not be taken to mean that divine violence has a “more”
triumphant character, that is, one stronger than that of myth. On the con-
trary, it will have something inconspicuous to it or will involve equalization
and indistinction.
The monopoly of violence gives the law the character of unity and
unlimited reach that arrogates the truly unlimited violence that is not its
own, namely, mythic violence. But how can the law arrogate to itself a force
that cannot belong to it? Just as a character of semblance is apparent in
the arrogation of the force of law by law-preserving violence, so is sem-
blance at the heart of the power of the state. Arrogation makes power out
of violent manifestation. We can compare this moment to Friedrich Nietz-
sche’s famous critique of the agency of the subject in the first part of The
Genealogy of Morals. The arrogation of force has to do with its presenta-
tion as power, with creating the semblance of an instance or agency that
has a capacity and that supposedly can choose to act or not. Moreover, this
instance arrogates force precisely by leaving this capacity as power, that is,
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as potential that is not actualized. This is the key to the distinction Benjamin
establishes between violence and power (Macht). The term power enables
him to characterize the perverse arrogation of unlimited mythical violence
in law-instating: “For the function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in the
sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with force as the means, what is
to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss
force; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes
as law not an end unalloyed by force but one necessarily and intimately
bound to it, under the title of power” (SW 1, 248).
It might seem as if Benjamin’s point is that law-instating or the found-
ing of law cannot have a further justification within the sphere of law and
is therefore a moment of violence. Since law-instating must always pre-
cede law-preserving, we would have no justification for the latter either.
This way of presenting the problem is not only simplistic, but also makes
no reference to mythical violence. It would be better to say, as will become
clear, that law-instating violence and law-preserving violence are dialecti-
cally entangled precisely because both are dependent on the order of fate.
As Benjamin puts it somewhat ironically, “Violence crowned by fate is the
origin of law” (SW 1, 242). The crown here is not the ultimate symbol of sov-
ereignty; instead, Benjamin shows it to be wholly dependent on the higher
order of fate, on what gives it and as easily takes it away.
Consider how law-instating violence is different in character—or of
another order, metaphysically speaking—from the drawing of boundaries in
manifestations of mythical violence. Law-instating divides a space of pos-
sibilities of action by distinguishing right from wrong (or correct from incor-
rect). This is not the establishment of a limit between right and wrong. For
both sides are possibilities of man. The limit, properly speaking, is a “fron-
tier between men and gods,” between the finite and the unlimited. The limit
is not a boundary line that men can cross. For how could the finite cross into
the infinite? Hubris, the arrogation of force belonging to the gods, involves
the semblance of holding to force.12 And it is this seeming encompassing
of force, this semblance of unlimited empowerment, that, of itself, brings
about the demise of the individual, that is, the unleashing of the destructive
violence that makes manifest the very limit of the finite creature.
What is becoming manifest in the cruel suffering of the hero of
12. Niobe, the victim of the manifestation of mythical force, is, according to legend, pun-
ished for her arrogance. But, as it only appears that the action of Apollo and Artemis is a
punishment, this arrogance should not be understood psychologically. Arrogance is the
arrogation of force that cannot be one’s own.
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tragedy is the incommensurability of the finite and the unlimited. Tragedy
involves the arresting recognition of finitude. This acknowledgment is the
particular nobility of the tragic hero. But law-instating turns this visibility
of a metaphysical boundary into an interdiction, into a division that has
two sides, where it is forbidden to cross from one to the other. It seeks
control over actions and choices, thus over the two sides of the divi-
sion. The demonic character of law-instating violence—that is, its basis
in the violence of myth—is similarly manifest, according to Benjamin, in
the seemingly fair establishment of equal rights by the victor in a peace
treaty. Benjamin takes the well-known moment of Marxist theory, the cri-
tique of abstract rights that the oppressed cannot translate into real pos-
sibilities of life, and traces it to the demonic character of law, that is, to the
dependence of law on a more fundamental violence that rules life in com-
mon: “When frontiers are decided, the adversary is not simply annihilated;
indeed, he is accorded rights even when the victor’s superiority in power is
complete. And these are, in a demonically ambiguous way, ‘equal’ rights.
Here appears, in a terribly primitive form, the mythic ambiguity of laws that
may not be ‘infringed’—the same ambiguity to which Anatole France refers
satirically when he says, ‘Poor and rich are equally forbidden to spend the
night under the bridges’” (SW 1, 249).
Consider further how the power of the law acquires the immediacy of
its impact. It would be a tautology to state that the unlimited manifestation
of mythic violence is immediate. For manifestation precisely does not take
the conditional form of means and ends. The abolishment of the sphere of
means is tantamount to immediate manifestation of that force. But the arro-
gation of force as power (Macht) is immediate because it needs not be actu-
alized in order to make its presence effective. It is potential violence, and its
immediacy is its threatening character. Benjamin distinguishes the threat-
ening character of legal violence from the deterrence supposedly internal
to the legal system. Understanding threat as the possibility of punishment
for any offense committed leaves room for the party committing the offense
to disregard the threat in the hope, or out of calculation, that ways could be
found to avoid punishment. Punishment as deterrent is open to calculations
of risk. The law is threatening precisely through its uncertainty. Benjamin
exemplifies the incalculable character of threat by referring to legal sys-
tems in which capital punishment can be imposed even for minor offenses
against property. This lack of proportion is a sign that the threatening char-
acter of power must be traced back to the unlimited violence of the orders
of fate. Thus Benjamin writes, “Power . . . resides in the fact that there is
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only one fate [daß es nur ein einziges Schicksal gibt] and that what exists,
and in particular what threatens, belongs inviolably to its order” (SW 1, 242).
The threatening character of mythic violence is evident first in the
impossibility of clearly characterizing what would lead to the entanglement
in fate: “The smallest false step leads to guilt, the slightest error, the most
improbable circumstance leads to death” (SW 1, 56). Yet it is apparent not
just at the onset but also in the outcome, in the inescapability of fate. Ines-
capability appears as an inherent ambiguity in experience. And it is this
coming together of ambiguity and inescapability that constitutes the threat-
ening character of the manifestation of mythical violence. At first glance,
the inescapability of fate appears to contradict its ambiguous presence. But
these are really two sides of the same coin. For it is precisely in the form of
ironic duplicity that the presence of another order, one that is inescapable,
is manifest in the empirical succession of events. One could also say that
such ambiguity derives from an excess of determinacy, so that a movement
can take place in the sphere of meaning, which though seemingly spanning
very different events has an inescapable, horrifying, precision, as every-
thing leads to the same outcome.
The ambiguity in the threatening character of mythical violence,
despite, or precisely in, its being unlimited force, is a sign of its impurity,
or of its involving nonbeing or semblance. This ambiguity can be compared
to the spectral character of the police, which takes itself to determinately
enforce the law. In myth the character of nonbeing appears in ambigu-
ous overdetermination. One might call it demonic rather than spectral. The
eradication of mythical violence thus depends on there being another force
whose forms, as Benjamin puts it, myth “bastardizes with law.” This is what
Benjamin calls “divine violence.” Since the manifestation of the mythical is
inherently threatening, divine violence is completely free of threat: it strikes
“without warning, without threat” (SW 1, 250). Since the mythical is taken
up as power—that is, as potential—divine force is essentially actualized.
Since mythical violence is manifest in demonic ambiguity, divine violence
arrests or is complete determination. What could be the medium of revela-
tion of that other force?
“Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is con-
fronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects”
(SW 1, 249).13 Turning to the difficult notion of divine violence, we should
13. The following considerations indicate in the most schematic and external manner
some of the issues that would need to be articulated at length in characterizing the
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keep in mind that it is extremely problematic to conceive of mythic violence
as having the character of will and as being directed to individuals to punish
infringement of a law. This is even more the case for divine violence. The
latter is in no way a force that causes catastrophic occurrences, or a force
that unleashes destruction upon the world. Indeed, one need not engage
in deep theological reflections to wish to avoid taking God to be the cause
or reason of destruction in the world. Put slightly differently, both divine vio-
lence and mythical violence problematize to the extreme our thinking in
terms of the means-ends form of action. They are in that way equally chal-
lenges to the assumption that underlies positive law as well as natural law,
namely, the dogma that “just ends can be attained by justified means, justi-
fied means used for just ends” (SW 1, 247). And yet mythical violence and
divine violence abolish the means-ends structure in different ways. “For it is
never reason that decides on the justification [Berechtigung] of means and
the justness [Gerechtigkeit] of the ends: force answering to fate decides on
the former, and God on the latter” (SW 1, 247). Whereas the first problema-
tizes through its immediacy primarily the sphere of means, the latter can be
understood, primarily by way of the uniqueness of the highest reality, to do
away with ends. Mythical violence is doing away with means as an immedi-
ate manifestation of power (Macht). Divine violence does away with ends
through the character of concrete uniqueness pertaining to justice.14
dependency of mythic force on divine force, a matter I will not take up in the present com-
mentary: “Mythic force in its archetypal form is the mere manifestation of the gods [bloße
Manifestation der Götter].” One might call the force of myth “elemental” to characterize
the unlimited that has a specific character. Delimited infinity involves a multiplicity of indi-
vidual unities that are each infinite in character, figured in the pantheon of the gods. Force
is here both specific—insofar as it is identified with a being who is not the totality, that is,
who is one of multiple gods—and at the same time unlimited. The essential multiplicity of
elemental forces is the possibility of their mixed state. This is why such force should not
be called “pure.” The cursedness of life, its inherent guilt, or the characterization of mere
life as a field of fate, is precisely understood as a disorder of the elemental in human life
in common. Divine force will therefore have to be understood as involving a uniqueness
that opposes the inherent multiplicity of forces of myth.
14. It is beyond the scope of this commentary, because it is beyond the scope of
Benjamin’s essay, to enter into an investigation of his conception of the nature of justice.
The relation of uniqueness (which, to be sure, is distinct from unity or individuality) to
justice is hinted at in the following passage from the essay: “For ends that in one situa-
tion (Situation) are just, universally acceptable, and valid are so in no other situation, no
matter how similar the situations may be in other respects” (SW 1, 248). I will touch upon
this notion of uniqueness in discussing Benjamin’s understanding of the force of a com-
mandment below. The connection of the just measure and the utterly concrete unique is
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An initial overview of the relation between legal violence, mythic vio-
lence, and divine violence can be obtained by carefully examining one of the
most complex sentences in the essay. I retranslate it here and render it in a
more explicit form: “The unleashing [Auslösung] of legal violence stems (as
cannot be shown in detail here) from the incurring of guilt of mere natural
life. This incurring of guilt consigns, innocently and unfortunately, the living
to expiation. It [legal violence] supposedly ‘expiates’ their guilt—and to be
sure the guilty are to be purified [entsühnt], not of a guilt [einer Schuld] but
rather of law” (SW 1, 250; translation modified).15 The contrastive character
of this complex passage needs to be made completely clear. The violence
in law is triggered or unleashed by guilt that belongs to another sphere, that
of mere natural life. The natural as it appears here is not to be understood
in contrast to the artificial. It is not the bodily in contrast to the mind. Nor
is it what barely lives, life excluded from all forms of common existence.
Rather, it is life in common insofar as it is a field of manifestation of fate,
insofar as it has not undergone a higher spiritual determination: “Fate is the
guilt nexus of the living. It corresponds to the natural condition of the living.”
The incurring of guilt of natural life consigns the living to expiation. The guilt
of mere natural life corresponds to its being the field of manifestation of
mythical violence, what we might call the cursedness of mere life. But the
unleashing of the violence of law takes the expiation as its prerogative and
gives it the form of retribution or punishment (this is why Benjamin puts the
supposed expiatory character of the law in scare quotes). In particular, law
individualizes the guilt of life, or makes it into the guilt of a specific person
for infractions of a determinate law or other under specific circumstances. It
attributes guilt therefore to the living (die Lebenden) while drawing its power
from the guilt of life. “It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the
subject of fate is indeterminable” (SW 1, 204). And yet law precisely makes
such indeterminate guilt a matter of the person, for which law, as a conse-
quence, demands punishment. As Benjamin puts it in “Fate and Charac-
ter”: “Law condemns not to punishment but to guilt” (SW 1, 204). It is only
by first making someone in particular guilty that law can further punish. But
a crucial component of the notion of the dialectical image, which, as I will try to indicate,
is demanded by the account of “Critique of Violence” yet not developed in it.
15. The German reads as follows: “Die Auslösung der Rechtsgewalt geht non, wie hier
nicht genauer dargelegt warden kann, auf die Verschuldung des bloßen natürlichen
Lebens zurück, welche den Lebenden unschuldig und unglücklich der Sühne überant-
wortet, die seine Veschuldung ‘sühnt’—und auch wohl den Schuldigen entsüht, nicht
aber von einer Schuld, sonder vom Recht.”
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the living, insofar as they are exposed to fate, are innocent of any wrong-
doing and at the same time unfortunate (“it is demonstrable that all legal
guilt is nothing other than misfortune” [SW 1, 203]).16 There is, to be sure,
a concept of purification that pertains to guilty life and to unfortunate living.
But purification is not the release of the living from a guilt (einer Schuld,
the particularized consignment of the guilt of life to a person). Divine vio-
lence purifies, or separates the pure from the mixed or impure condition of
the creature. And purification, which is the sole capacity of divine violence,
involves freeing the living from law altogether.
Just as we trace the guilt of mere natural life to fate—that is, to non-
individual life—so the purification of the living cannot be envisaged from
the standpoint of their striving as individual living beings. To envisage at all
the presence of this purifying force requires us to expand the concept of life
beyond the consideration of the living being, his or her capacities and their
actualization in purposive activity. But neither is the mere curtailing of this
striving—that is, the death of the creature—what makes present purifying
violence. To repeat, divine violence is not what causes death or destruction.
Rather, it is only by taking up, or assuming, destruction that such force is
revealed. This is indeed the key to Benjamin’s claim that “[mythic violence]
demands sacrifice; [divine violence] assumes it” (SW 1, 250; translation
modified). Sacrifice, the destruction of life, is demanded for mythic violence
to manifest itself, whereas destruction and suffering are assumed, or taken
up, for the actualization of a higher life in divine violence. The violence of
the divine is violence that belongs to the divine. But this should be under-
stood as violence that only the divine could take up into itself, raise into
itself, or assume. This is its uniquely purifying capacity.
This can be made clearer if we contrast the bloody character of the
mythic to bloodless divine violence. Such a distinction does not concern
the manner of inflicting death (say, the difference between being stabbed
to death and dying by fire or drowning). It points, rather, to the scope of the
expressions of life that one has to take into account in revealing its rela-
tion to the divine. The bloody manifestation of mythic violence marks the
breach of the purposeful striving of the living being. This does not exclude
remaining alive, yet stripped of all that animates one (so that the blood
that courses through the living body can stand for the principle of anima-
tion). Bloody violence is moreover to be conceived as leaving traces of
16. Importantly, to be fortunate is to be beyond fate, released of its rule. It is not a posi-
tion in the field of guilty life.
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its unleashing. It is necessarily so, for it leads to the instating of a new
law. This new law takes the bloody violence of the past as a justification
for the instauration of the new conditions of existence. If Niobe, the para-
digm of mythic violence, is left alive “as an eternally mute bearer of guilt”
(SW 1, 248), Korach and his clan disappear through divine violence with-
out a trace, swallowed by the earth. In erasing all traces divine violence is
revealed as a terminal moment apart from any end. In other words, its actu-
alization does not establish anything (and in particular it does not instate
law, and it certainly does not advance a kingdom of God on earth). Its reve-
lation is not the telos of any dunamis.
What is a terminal moment, completely apart from an end, yet
constituting an actualization of the purifying capacity of divine violence?
How are the living purified? In Benjamin’s philosophical translation of the
religious notion of the purgatory, it is only in the afterlife of meaning that
the disorder of the creaturely is purified. In another essay from the same
period, “The Task of the Translator,” he brings together life, purposiveness,
and significance: “The relation between life and purposiveness, seemingly
obvious yet almost beyond the grasp of the intellect, reveals itself only if the
ultimate purpose toward which all the individual purposiveness of life tends
is sought not in its own sphere but in a higher one. All purposeful manifes-
tations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have
their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the presentation
[Darstellung] of its significance” (SW 1, 255; translation modified).
This careful formulation makes clear that Benjamin wishes to dis-
tinguish what the living being can achieve as a purpose (Zweck) from the
dimension of actualization of life that cannot be identified with realizing
individual capacities of the living. The latter is better called a terminus of
life rather than an end.17 But even more important is the claim that the full
actualization of life is a matter of the articulation of meaning, of the presen-
tation of its significance. Afterlife is thus to be revealed as a configuration
of meaning (one could also say language, in the way Benjamin explicates
that term). Meaning is the medium of the afterlife. It is in that medium that
life partakes in the highest reality.
Actualization in the afterlife of meaning is a central theme of
17. This distinction between the end (as purpose or goal) and the terminus is central to
the “Theologico-political Fragment”: “The Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical
dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal [Ziel]. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal
but the terminus [Ende]” (SW 3, 305).
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Benjamin’s thinking from the “Task of the Translator,” through “Goethe’s
Elective Affinities,” to The Origin of German Trauerspiel, and all the way to
the Arcades Project. This is why it is imperative to recognize how it is also
at work, at the most fundamental level of understanding the nature of divine
violence, in “Critique of Violence.”18 If we used the term “manifestation” to
characterize the presence of mythical violence, the proper term to refer to
divine violence would be “revelation [Offenbarung].” Revelation is the high-
est state of meaning, its highest articulation, which leaves nothing potential
to language and eliminates the unsayable: “The deeper (that is, the more
existent and real) the spirit, the more it is expressible and expressed, and
it is consistent with this identity to make the relation between spirit and
language thoroughly unambiguous, so that the expression that is linguis-
tically most existent (that is, most fixed) is linguistically the most rounded
and definitive; in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely
spiritual. This, however, is precisely what is meant by the concept of reve-
lation, if it takes the inviolability of the word as the only and sufficient condi-
tion and characteristic of the divinity of the spiritual being that is expressed
in it. The highest spiritual region of religion is (in the concept of revelation)
the only one that does not know the inexpressible” (SW 1, 66–67; transla-
tion modified).
One might wish to argue, however, that the concept of revelation, of
complete actualization of meaning, should be distinguished from the mode
of presence of divine violence, which supposedly involves destruction.19
18. The relation of destruction and the articulation of meaning that extends beyond the
bounds of life, or is realized only as afterlife, can be exemplified in Benjamin’s understand-
ing of the work of criticism, the critical force, as being “the mortification of the work [of
art]” (O, 182). This specifically conceives of the emergence of the highest significance in
terms of a mode of criticism that destroys beauty or the unity of living meaning. It involves
the understanding that actualization of the life in the work is not its enlivening, as roman-
tic criticism would have it. It is afterlife understood as mortification that is fundamental to
the revelation of the highest reality in the work.
19. From early on Benjamin suggests that the proper understanding of the highest stakes
of the political have to do with the effectiveness of language. He states this clearly in a
famous letter to Martin Buber: “It repeatedly seems to me that the crystal-pure elimina-
tion of the ineffable in language is the most obvious form given to us to be effective within
language, and to that extent, through it. This elimination of the ineffable seems to me to
coincide precisely with what is actually the objective and dispassionate manner of writing,
and to intimate the relationship between knowledge and action precisely within linguistic
magic. My concept of objective and, at the same time, highly political style and writing is
this: to awaken interest in what was denied the word; only where this sphere of speech-
lessness reveals itself in unutterably pure power can the magic spark leap between the
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Identifying the revelation of divine violence with the articulation of meaning
might further raise the question whether there is a contrast to be retained
between matters of meaning and matters of force. It might be useful, there-
fore, before turning to comment on the last part of Benjamin’s essay, to
trace some of his references in it to the relation of human language and
violence.
After discussing the potential for extortion that always exists in the
linguistic exchange of parliamentarianism, Benjamin briefly envisages a
sphere of wholly nonviolent conflict resolution. This is for him the sphere of
pure means, which “are never those of direct solutions but always of indirect
solutions” (SW 1, 244). The sphere of means or technique at its purest is
not to be identified with instrumental reason at the service of chosen ends
or purposes. But what can pure instrumentality without end eventuate in, if
it can achieve nothing? Instrumentality without end should not be confused
with essential incompletion. There is completion that is not the achieve-
ment of an end. What remains open to it is to have solution be a dissolution
of conflict, or its total disappearance, rather than the victory (whether in
some sense justified or not) of one side over the other.20
One example Benjamin gives of the use of pure means in and
through language is the technique of the conference. In a conference diplo-
macy is paramount and virtues must be active through pure means such as
“courtesy, sympathy, peacableness, trust.” But Benjamin notes further that
the conference is a technique in which “there is no sanction to lying.” This
is taken by Benjamin to signal that “there is a sphere of human agreement
that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the
proper sphere of ‘understanding’ language” (SW 1, 245). Ultimately, the
possibility of pure means points to the sphere of language. Meaning is
the true medium of dissolution.21
words and the motivating deed, where the unity of these two equally real entities resides”
(C, 80).
20. To think in terms of the duality of victory and defeat is precisely to disregard the way
both sides are equally caught up in fate: “the fear of mutual disadvantages that threat-
ens to arise from violent confrontation, whatever the outcome might be. Such motives are
clearly visible in countless cases of conflicts of interests between private persons. It is
different when classes and nations are in conflict, since the higher orders that threaten to
overwhelm equally victor and vanquished are hidden from the feeling of most, and from
the intelligence of almost all. . . . Such higher orders and the common interests corre-
sponding to them . . . constitute the most enduring motive for a policy of pure means”
(SW 1, 245; my emphasis).
21. It is only by holding to the identity of revelation of divine force with the highest actu-
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Meaning assumes violence or can dissolve conflict raised into lan-
guage. Lying can thus be encompassed by language, its violence neutral-
ized. This is so not because the liar can be understood just as much as the
person who speaks the truth. Rather, the way lying can be encompassed in
language points to something deeper, namely, to a distinction that is to be
drawn between a higher fulfillment of meaning in truth and correctness that
may be an aim of knowledge. This distinction is at issue in another example
of the indirectness of pure means in language, in the method of quota-
tion described in the “Epistemo-critical Preface” to The Origin of German
Trauerspiel. In considering the form of the treatise in relation to other modes
of authoritative expression—for instance, the “coercive proof in mathemat-
ics” (O, 28; my emphasis)—Benjamin writes that the only mode of authority
allowed in it is that of methodical quoting, that is, essential indirectness: “Its
method is essentially presentation. Method is a digression. Presentation as
digression—such is the methodological nature of the treatise” (O, 28). In
presentation by way of quotation, we precisely overcome the duality of the
correct and incorrect (richtig und falsch) in language. For what is incorrect
in its original context of assertion may be as valuable as what is correct for
the presentation of a higher configuration of truth (Wahrheit).22 As becomes
evident in the task Benjamin set himself in later work on the Paris arcades,
the method of quotation would allow expressions of illusion, self-deception,
and fancies, as well as lies, to all be assumed, taken up, and put on a par
with what is correct, factually speaking, in presenting truth.23
alization or articulation of meaning that one can begin to address Benjamin’s initially
extremely surprising claim that divine force is present in education understood in its high-
est sense: “The divine force is not only attested by religious tradition but is also found
in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative force, which
in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its forms of appearance” (SW 1,
250; translation modified). Though the question of the nature of teaching is central to
Benjamin’s work, he does not elaborate in the “Critique of Violence” on how to conceive
of divine force in education. The problem of the nature of teachings runs through various
writings of Benjamin and would require independent elaboration. It is to be read in rela-
tion to the notion of doctrine or teachings (Lehre) in the “Program for the Coming Philoso-
phy” and the “Epistemo-critical Preface.” It should also be related to the struggle against
mythic force, which Benjamin later elaborates in the centrality of the notion of study in
Kafka’s world.
22. I note that quoting has a destructive character and, in detaching language from the
original organic context of assertion, also either has an equalizing effect or tends to abol-
ish the value distinction between major and minor.
23. Quotation as a method does away with the “I” dimension of judgment, with the
authority of the first person. Indeed, it is the authority of the “I,” or of subjectivity, rather
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Consider, finally, Benjamin’s comparison of right and wrong in rela-
tion to the law and right and wrong in human language. He notes the “curi-
ous and at first discouraging discovery of the ultimate insolubility of all
legal problems (which in its hopelessness is perhaps comparable only to
the possibility of conclusive pronouncements on ‘right [richtig]’ and ‘wrong
[falsch]’ in evolving languages)” (SW 1, 247). Right and wrong, or cor-
rect and incorrect in language, belong to the standpoint of judgment. That
polarity is nevertheless to be considered in relation to the manifestation of
force, or to a dynamics implicit in the evolution of language. Addressing
whether and how one can arrive at conclusiveness would have to take into
account the transformations that languages undergo. Without wishing to
go here into the difficult essay “The Task of the Translator,” I will note that
Benjamin advances in it the claim that translation can present a terminal
state of meaning, fragments of the pure language. The conclusiveness or
utmost determinacy thus achieved, however, depends essentially on con-
ceiving translation as taking place in, or as, the afterlife of meaning. Conclu-
siveness of meaning is the other side of the destructive work of translation
that does away with the individual unities of sense, or with the intentional
forms of the original work that retained the ambiguity characteristic of its
singular beautiful life. The destruction of such unities of sense serves to
make present the force of language as such, equally present everywhere,
that is, the force that belongs to language as a whole. Benjamin calls it in
that essay “the flow of revelation” (SW 1, 226).
In turning back to the main thread of my commentary on the “Cri-
tique of Violence,” it is crucial to bear in mind that the actualization of mean-
ing in the afterlife belongs not just to a language context, such as literary
works. Thinking of divine violence in these terms means precisely that the
notion of the afterlife of meaning pertains to the meaningful corporeal exis-
tence of man. It is, in other words, to be assessed in history. As Benjamin
puts it in “The Task of the Translator”: “The concept of life is given its due
only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting
for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be
determined by the standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of
all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul” (SW 1, 255).
Before elaborating on that historical dimension, we can first examine
whether the conjunction of divine violence and the highest conclusiveness,
than lying, that constitutes the demonic arrogation of the force of language. On that issue
see my “On Vanishing and Fulfillment,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, ed. Colby C.
Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
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or determinacy of meaning, can be found in the person in isolation (or soli-
tude). The question is raised by Benjamin’s short discussion of the char-
acter of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” That discussion also intro-
duces us to the question of how human beings can relate their existence to
divine violence, an issue of great importance as the essay draws to a close.
Consider that “Thou shalt not kill” initially appears to pose a problem
for Benjamin’s argument: Would it not be an example of a divine law, and
therefore a counterexample to Benjamin’s claim that divine violence is law-
less? Is his point, then, to distinguish between the human law, which is part
of the legal system that orders societies, and the religious law, which has
its source in God? On the contrary, we must make clear that a command-
ment is not a law, and that the revelation of divine force is indeed identical
with the release from the rule (Herrschaft) of law as such.
A law is universal and requires, as I have pointed out above, a sche-
matism or intuitive criteria to be applied to specific cases. But Benjamin
denies the possibility of such a judgment with regard to the command-
ment “No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment.”
Attempting to judge according to a variety of criteria would leave matters
too indeterminate. Instead, we must act here based wholly on the recog-
nition of the circumstances’ uniqueness, involving thereby a sense of the
uniqueness of our own existence that is put on the line in the struggle to
act decisively. This is why Benjamin writes that the “commandment stands
before the deed, just as God was ‘before’ its happening [Dieses Gebot steht
vor der Tat wie Gott ‘davor sei’ das sie geschehe]” (SW 1, 250; translation
modified). The issue is not one of precedence in time, as if one took one’s
authority from God, who stands “behind” the commandment by having pro-
mulgated it, by being the source of its authority. What is specific in the
divine command is that it stands “before” the deed, not temporally speak-
ing but as though spatially, blocking the way to the deed, as if God himself
stood between the person and the deed, preventing it. This means that one
is tested in one’s faith in the condition where such a deed is at issue, one
has to struggle with one’s relation to God. It is therefore a solitary moment:
“[The commandment] exists not as a criterion [Maßtab] of judgment, but as
a compass [Richtschnur] for actions of active persons or communities who
have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on them-
selves the responsibility of ignoring it” (SW 1, 250; translation modified).24
24. Probably the paradigmatic or Ur-type of this solitary struggle in which one’s faith is
tested in solitude, and in which one cannot appeal to any ethical law to secure or justify
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The register of decisiveness, solitary struggle, and the unique or
exceptional suggests that Benjamin thinks of the commandment as immedi-
ately bearing on one’s embodied and utterly concrete existence. For deci-
siveness is not taking a chance in a blind leap of faith into the unknown. It
is rather drawing force from the determinacy of the world in meaning, and it
involves a striking recognition of what is essential to one’s position. Law can
at most eventuate in choice, which cannot overcome the ambiguity of fate.
Only decisiveness puts an end to ambiguity, and, psychologically speaking,
to doubt and inner uncertainty. Such decisiveness involves the person in
the dimension Benjamin calls “existence.”25
The contrast to be drawn between mere life and existence is further
explicated in Benjamin’s dismissal of the attempt to base the forbidding of
killing on a principle of the sanctity of life as such. Mere life is, as we have
seen, natural life guilty by being entangled in fate. It is life fraught with ambi-
guity, prey to demonic forces, and therefore without sanctity. Existence, in
contrast, is the “irreducible total state of man [die unverrückbaren Aggre-
gatzustand]” (SW 1, 251). As our discussion of the distinction between com-
mandment and law should make clear, in decisiveness the person deter-
mines his or her life unambiguously, from out of its immutable ground in
the divine. Such decisive existence, as Benjamin makes clear in “Goethe’s
Elective Affinities,” is reconciled with God in solitude. But divine violence
can purify those who have not been capable of such reconciliation. It can
assume guilt, or fulfill a “morally unimproved humanity” (SW 1, 226). If we
are to speak of this dimension of existence in terms of the life of man,
it would essentially involve “that life in him which is identically present in
earthly life, death, and afterlife” (SW 1, 251). Existence that encompasses
earthly life, death, and afterlife (of meaning) is history. Only by consider-
ing history as the actualization of meaning in the afterlife of what befalls
human beings can we recognize their life from the standpoint of existence,
or what amounts to the same thing, recognize the presence of divine vio-
lence in the world.
Approaching the end of the essay in this way, we can better under-
stand Benjamin’s identification of the critique of violence with the “philoso-
phy of its history—the ‘philosophy’ of this history because only the idea of
the decision to kill, is articulated in Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of the Ake-
dah in Fear and Trembling.
25. This contrast between the elective and the decisive is a central theme of Benjamin’s
essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” written around the same time as the “Critique of
Violence.”
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what it comes to [Ausgangs] makes possible a critical, discriminating, and
decisive approach to its temporal data” (SW 1, 251; translation modified).
It is from this standpoint that Benjamin describes the problematic nature
of the interpenetration of the law-preserving and law-instating violence as
having the character of an oscillation: “A gaze directed only at what is close
at hand can at most perceive a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmak-
ing and law-preserving forms of violence” (SW 1, 251). We have encoun-
tered throughout the essay various “oscillations” correlative with problem-
atic ways of establishing authority: the ambiguous or spectral character of
the police and the threatening, demonic duplicity of the excessive precision
of meaning in fate. Speaking of a dialectical movement of rising and falling
as oscillation characterizes it as a movement that runs in circles. Dialectics,
in that case, is no more than the manifestation of ambiguity and does not
contain any overcoming or Aufhebung.26
To realize that there is a cycle or eternal return at play here, we
must understand in what sense mythic violence “needs” legal violence to
manifest itself. Not only is there in law-instating an arrogation of mythical
violence, but also the violence of law is what mythical violence is given to
manifest itself through. For the arrogation of power by law-instating vio-
lence is indeed hubris, and it leads, out of its own dynamics, to the demise
of law and the triumphant manifestation of mythic violence. That is the
26. This can help us clarify a difficult remark in Benjamin’s 1935 exposé, “Paris, The Capi-
tal of the Nineteenth Century”: “But precisely the modern . . . is always citing primal his-
tory. Here, this occurs through the ambiguity peculiar to social relations and products of
this epoch. Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a stand-
still. This standstill is utopia[,] and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such
an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by
the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute—seller
and sold in one” (A, 10).
What does Benjamin mean by making ambiguity the principle of the dialectic?
The principle (Gesetz) is not the upshot or what issues from the dialectic: the principle is
what delineates the field out of which the upshot Benjamin characterizes as an arrest or
standstill can emerge. What is ambiguous is not at a standstill; it is in a constant trembling
or oscillation. It has the character of semblance. Ambiguity thus characterizes the initial
imagistic appearance of a dialectical situation. Its ultimate presentation is only to be char-
acterized as the arrest of dialectic ambiguity in dialectics at a standstill. Specifically, the
passage quoted above concerns the duality of ideal and spleen in Baudelaire. This is the
duality that introduces into the most modern what is most archaic. The visible appearance
of the primal world in the most modern is manifest in our life surroundings as ambiguity.
Baudelaire’s struggle against this ambiguity of the mythical is the petrifying moment of his
poetry (what Benjamin also calls in the exposé “the medusa gaze”).
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proper standpoint to assess the relation between law-instating and law-
preserving violence. For now, that spectral ambiguity of law-preserving vio-
lence is itself blind to the demonic character of law and becomes the agent
of the unfolding of fate. Benjamin writes that “the law governing this oscil-
lation [Schwankungsgesetz] rests on the circumstance that law-preserving
violence, in its duration, weakens the law-instating violence, by suppress-
ing hostile counterviolence. . . . This lasts until either new forces or those
earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus
found a new law, destined in turn to decay” (SW 1, 251). The “forces” at
issue, whether new or reemerging, are supervenient on the violence of
myth. Law-preserving violence is what puts into motion the unfolding of
fate, leading both to the victory of a new order and to the triumphant mani-
festation of mythic violence over the arrogation of violence by the legal
order, thus inaugurating a new law-instating moment, which in turn is des-
tined to decay. The cycle, or oscillation, then, is “maintained by the mythic
forms of law.” It is the mythical manifesting itself in time, as eternal return,
through the perverse character of law.27
The overcoming of this eternal return has the character of an arrest
of the oscillation. The arresting, that is the striking, is divine violence.28 The
striking is what arrests oscillation, and thus releases one from captivating
27. Even though mythic violence is shown to underlie legal violence, it is ultimately not
purer. Rather, the two belong together in this oscillation: “Far from inaugurating a purer
sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally iden-
tical with all legal violence” (SW 1, 249).
28. In taking the biblical story of Korach and his clan as exemplifying divine force,
Benjamin writes that divine force “strikes [trifft] . . . and does not stop short of annihila-
tion [Vernichtung]” (SW 1, 250). Just as we might be tempted to conceive of Apollo and
Artemis punishing Niobe, so we are here tempted to read the striking character of divine
force as the unleashing of force that causes destruction. I take it that the specificity of
this example has not been brought out enough. In particular, one should note that Korach
challenges the authority of Moses and Aaron in the name of equality. All are equally holy.
This claim of equi-valence is something that, given what I have argued, cannot be dis-
missed as merely blasphemous or rebellious. Indeed, in an important sense there is
no way to identify a place in the world that is higher or more intrinsically valuable than
another. It is only in relation to the whole that the highest value can be revealed. It is in
this context that one should distinguish the fate of Korach from that of Niobe. For the
manifestation of force in the case of Niobe establishes a division and locates power in an
authority that can manifest it as force. The complete and utter disappearance of Korach
and his clan is on the contrary something of an equality of all, as though it expresses what
it means to realize equality of value in the world: it is to vanish as an individual who can
retain within him- or herself power, without a trace.
boundary 2

ambiguity. It is as if humanity were spellbound by the interlacing of law-
instating and law-preserving violence, or ultimately bound through it to the
eternal return characteristic of life as fate. The striking character of divine
violence should be thus understood as freeing one from eternal return.
From a human standpoint this striking moment can be conceived as afford-
ing authentic recognition in history. Before giving the moment a name, let
me briefly address the problem of attempting to identify divine violence in
history.
Benjamin’s essay may allow us to relate the idea of history as a cri-
tique of violence to the highest theological standpoint. But is it also con-
cerned with what is actually most effective, politically speaking? In other
words, is the essay to be taken as the first expression of the identity of the
messianic and the political in history that would come to mark Benjamin’s
later writings? Addressing this question requires that we consider what is
the mode of revelation of divine violence and what its relation is to revolu-
tionary violence. Benjamin asserts that “if violence beyond the law assures
its existence as pure and immediate, it thereby also furnishes proof that
revolutionary violence is possible, in whatever name this highest manifes-
tation of pure violence would become evident through humankind [mit wel-
chem Namen die höchste Manifestation reiner Gewlat durch de Menschen
zu belegen ist]” (SW 1, 252; translation modified). This formulation keeps
distinct the existence of pure divine violence from the indeterminate diver-
sity of ways it works through humankind, in the world.
Given our earlier analysis, it should be clear that there is no action by
means of which humankind executes ends that belong to a divine capacity.
For the only way to refer to divine violence as actualizing a capacity is in
terms of its purifying character. It has a purifying capacity or power (entsüh-
nende Kraft) in assuming violence. As Benjamin puts it, “What is at issue
here is not the ‘realization’ of divine power. . . . This process [of purification]
is the supreme reality” (SW 1, 227). Moreover, the purification of the guilt of
life requires us to conceive of a span of time beyond purposive action, one
that encompasses the afterlife of meaning, “beyond all remembering and
forgetting” (SW 1, 287). This assumption of meaning cannot be the object
of any human intention, such as remembering, nor can it be identified in the
failure of such intent, such as forgetting. Benjamin concludes that “the puri-
fying capacity of violence is invisible to men” (SW 1, 252).
There is no phenomenal form to the revelation of divine force: “For
only mythical force, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty.”
Benjamin clarifies the difficulties of knowing for certain the presence of
boundary 2

divine force in phenomena by reverting to examples that are liable to be
misunderstood if taken instead to be paradigmatic cases of its manifesta-
tion: “Divine force may manifest itself in a true war exactly as it does in the
ordeal [Gottesgericht] of the criminal that the crowd brings about” (SW 1,
252). The point of the two examples is not to characterize these as particu-
larly clear cases of manifestations of divine violence. It is, rather, precisely
to make the point that there is no identifiable phenomenal form of this vio-
lence. It can be present in a true, supposedly justified, war, which would
be conducted in a planned manner for specific ends, just as much as in
the ordeal, torture, or lynching of the criminal—that is, in what can only be
characterized as an outburst of mob violence.
The lack of any phenomenal manifestation of divine violence is tan-
tamount to the claim, made at various points, that revelation is to be char-
acterized by an equalization of meaning of phenomena. Revelation is not
to be conceived of on the model of a miracle, that is, as an exceptional
event intrinsically of higher significance (this, we have seen, is the char-
acter of mythic manifestation).29 But what, then, are the “incomparable
effects [unverglechlichen Wirkungen]” (SW 1, 252) that Benjamin neverthe-
less attributes to divine violence? Wouldn’t speaking of effects necessarily
throw us back into the language of cause and effect that Benjamin was
intent on avoiding? How could there be effects of the purifying power with-
out these being specific appearances?
Here it would be necessary to discuss more deeply the relation of
divine violence and time, a central theme of Benjamin’s later work. To only
hint at a direction to pursue, these reflections consider that the law defines
something like a span of time or statute of limitation for the punishment of
an offense. As Benjamin points out, this is very different from atonement
or retribution, conceived of in terms of mythical violence, which knows no
such limit: “Retribution is fundamentally indifferent to the passage of time,
since it remains in force for centuries, without dissolution” (SW 1, 286).
It is in contrast to both that we are to conceive of incomparable effects
of divine violence revealed in an utterly different order of time. Divine vio-
lence is completing. Yet it is not completing by having the Last Judgment
“finally” achieve the desired retribution (presumably in the torments of hell).
29. Manifestations of divine violence “are defined, therefore, not by miracles directly per-
formed by God but by the purifying moment” (SW 1, 250; translation modified). One can
also speak here of the expressionless character of the revelation. The character of equal-
ization in the revelation of divine violence, as it bears on the political, should be compared
to the model of political theology deriving from Carl Schmitt.
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Rather, in the purification that equalizes and erases all traces, it involves
what Benjamin calls the dimension of forgiveness. This erasing of traces is
not mere forgetting, insofar as it expressed the identity of the disappear-
ance of the phenomenal and the revelation of the eternal. Forgiveness as
a character of the divine has its parallel in the dissolution of conflict by pure
means in the human sphere.
Human struggle can partake in this process of completion and dis-
solution by being active through pure means. The politics of this process
are those of nihilism—that is, they work not toward an end but, rather, as
pure means, toward dissolution of the conflicts that belong to the order
of law, thus of the rule of law, in the present: “To strive for such a pass-
ing away . . . is the task of world politics, whose method might be called
nihilism” (SW 3, 306). The spiritual character of these struggles involves
“courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude,” which, as Benjamin puts it in “On
the Concept of History,” would “have effects that reach far back into the
past [sie wirken in die Ferne der Zeit zurück]” (SW 4, 390). These are the
incomparable effects of divine violence revealed in dissolution. But if man’s
relation to the purifying capacity of divine violence is to work through pure
means toward the dissolution of the order of law, where would the striking
force of the divine nevertheless be recognized? The striking is, as I have
argued, the arrest of all ambiguity. From the human standpoint this would
be the concentrated presentation of the essential in concrete existence in
the present, in an utterly determinate constellation of contents, in an order
that is not a law of phenomena, or as what Benjamin would come to call in
the Arcades Project a “dialectical image.”30
The dialectical image, one might say, has two faces, without being
thereby ambiguous. It is turned, on the one hand, to assume the destruction
of the phenomenal and, on the other, to present the concrete constellation
of pure content. I assume that it is this other side of the destructive charac-
ter of divine force, the opening of a harmonious and clearly delimited con-
stellation of the essential, that Benjamin suggests when he writes: “Once
again divine force frees all the eternal forms, which myth has bastardized
with law” (SW 1, 252; translation modified). This most difficult moment of
30. This is not the place to expand on the concept of the dialectical image and its relation
to the issue of the schematism of judgment I mentioned earlier. I only note that one of the
requirements we placed on the proper account of divine force is that it is a centering of
the forces of myth. This is expressed in the characterization of the dialectical image as an
arresting of ambiguity in a constellation saturated with tensions. It is a point of absolute
balance in the field of elemental forces.
boundary 2

the essay can only be addressed by a systematic reading of the “Epistemo-
critical Preface” to The Origin of German Trauerspiel. For eternal forms are
ideas (in the Platonic use of that term, which is elaborated more systemati-
cally at about the same time in the “Epistemo-critical Preface”). The task
of philosophy elaborated in that preface is the “saving of phenomena” by
taking up their destruction in the presentation of ideas.
Yet we should not take this reference to the presentation of ideas to
be ultimately a retreat to a contemplative sense of the divine, to the con-
templation of eternal forms in harmony. What is at stake is the revelation
of a force, or of truth as force: “Truth is not an intention that realizes itself
in empirical reality; it is the sealing force of the essence of this empirical
reality” (O, 36; translation modified). The last line of “Critique of Violence”
provides a figure of such authentic sovereignty: “Divine violence, which is
the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called
‘sovereign’ violence” (SW 1, 252). The sealing as a terminal moment has
the character of a picture or emblem. It is the striking arrest that impresses
on us a configuration of what is essential in our reality. Yet it can only be pre-
sented, from the standpoint of history, in a construction that assumes the
destruction of the phenomenal in the afterlife of meaning. In and through
that construction the unique measure of the historical that Benjamin would
later call the “dialectical image” of the past is recognized.31
31. It is in the context of the release from law that characterizes divine violence that we
must assess Benjamin’s claim, in the “Epistemo-critical Preface,” that the constellation
is not the law of phenomena. Indeed, it would be appropriate to speak of the holding
together of the constellation in terms of sovereign force, distinguished from the power of
the universal or of the law: “The relation between concepts—and this relation governs the
sphere of knowledge—is one of subsumption. The lower concepts are contained in the
higher ones—that is to say, in some sense what is known loses its autonomy for the sake
of what it is known as. In the sphere of essences, the higher does not devour the lower.
Instead it rules over it [es durchwaltet sie]. This explains why the regional separation
between them, their disparateness, remains as irreducible as the gulf between monarch
and people” (SW 1, 274).
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Assuming Violence A Commentary On Walter Benjamin S Critique Of Violence

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