Violence and ambiguity

Abstract

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 (2021), in the following paper we carry out a detailed analysis of the concept of ‘ambiguity’ (Zweideutigkeit) that Walter Benjamin uses in his 1921 text Zur Kritik der Gewalt. We show, first of all, that this concept has the function of operating as a “demonic” (dämonisch) condition of possibility for the encroachment of law into all aspects of citizens’ lives. We take the notion of “encroachment” as coined by Peter Fenves to account for this important, though not much studied, point within the text of Benjamin’s critique of violence. We then identify the various uses of the notion of ambiguity in Benjam’s text to state, in common with Jacques Derrida, that this notion not only has a negative aspect – a condition of the subjection that produces juridical violence – but also a productive one: associated with the Derridean idea of iterability, it allows us to show how ambiguity is the structure of law itself and so constitutes its internal principle of ruin – and thus contains the promise of its own overthrow. We conclude that ambiguity is thus pivotal in Benjamin’s early writings, for it is not only the subject of his thought, but also part of his own textuality.