The Logic of Violence. Walter Benjamin’s Cardinal Antagonisms

Abstract

These pages take a fresh look at some of the irreducible complexities of the philosophical problem of violence (its theological-political delimitation and eventual use), on the occasion of Peter Fenves and Julia Ng’s recent English critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay Toward the Critique of Violence (1921), published on the centenary of the original German text. Starting from this eminently philological context, we would like to show how, in this essay, the true and antagonistic intimacy between so-called “nonviolence” (a politics of pure means) and the “doctrine of non-action” (a Taoist reversal of Kantian morality) is determined through a logical critique of pacifism (as dogmatic, contradictory, metaphysical, “a more remote theorem”). Benjamin’s critique is also crystallized through an exceptional and profound reading of the divine commandment of the Torah: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20, 13).