In terms of the European history of discourses on revolution, Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" belongs to the aftermath of the First World War. It formulates a poetics of violence in order to redress a poetics of shock. The shock was an overdetermined one. It encompassed Benjamin's conviction that the political institutions of parliamentary democracy in post-war Germany had failed to live up to the expectations with which they had been founded. It also incorporated an anxiety about the implications of forceful interventions on behalf of the state by those empowered by the state to a law-keeping function—the police ("a civil structure on a military model", as Derrida describes them).¹ Ironically, it's apocalyptic conclusion also presaged the rise to power in Germany of extreme right-wing reactionary forces and the form of pure violence unleashed as the final solution of the Holocaust. The resolutions Benjamin sought for his times were troubled ones; they continue to trouble our own. The basic problem he addressed was the relation between law and justice as it hinges on violence. In more specific terms, his essay addressed the question of whether violence in the social and political realms could be justified as pure means in itself, independent of whether it was applied to just or unjust ends. That included a consideration of the coercive violence represented by the general and the partial strike—whether treated as political or proletarian in origin—against the power of the state. This preoccupation was his response to the new reality produced by industrial relations in Weimar Germany. It was also a programmatic concern he shared with Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1915). The paradox of Benjamin's position was that he hoped to balance the ideology of proletarian violence represented by Marxism with the theology of divine violence represented by Judaic Messianism.

"Critique of Violence" (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) was written during late 1920 and early 1921.² Three aspects of the title need comment. In the German, the essay claims to be "on the critique of violence", which is rather a different thing to be claiming than what the conventional translation does. Secondly, we are advised to remember that `Gewalt' in German can mean `force', `power' or `might'—depending upon context—though Benjamin's primary (indeed, even sole) referent is violence.³ The fortuity of this accidental pun is not without its own ironic violence. Also, the idea of critique needs grounding in Benjamin's other work of the period. In 1920, Benjamin had published his dissertation on "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism". From Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schelling he learned to think of art as a form of reflection that enabled the finite to relate to the infinite, and of criticism as that which clarified that relation. This indebtedness was complicated, as Rodolphe Gasché has shown, by Benjamin's rejection of their desacralization of the relation of art and criticism to "the Absolute". For him, "all critique must take place in view of... an Absolute that is absolutely transcendent, radically distinguished from everything profane or finite. Between it and the latter, no continuity is thinkable. Yet critique is a relating to such an absolute".⁴ This idea of a necessary onto-theological connection with the transcendent is also the apocalyptic conclusion of the "Critique of Violence". The realm of the transcendent, as immanent in language, has an even earlier genealogy in Benjamin. The 1916 essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" develops the claim that the representationality of language is the consequence of a fall from an originary adequacy of correspondence between language as a system of names and the essences of things as created by God. This belief provides a substratum for subsequent work, including "The Task of the Translator" (1921). In his next major essay, on "Goethe's Elective Affinities", completed shortly after the "Critique of Violence", "the business of critique" is defined in terms of the "excavation" of "the ideal of the problem". Critique is that which shows in the work of art "the virtual possibility of formulating the work's truth content as the highest philosophical problem".⁵ In his next major work, the study of German tragic drama of the baroque period, criticism is described as "the mortification of the works". This curious image is meant to distinguish the critical activity of reawakening the consciousness in living works from the "settlement of knowledge in dead ones".⁶

How might one transpose from these complex notions of critique in the realm of art to violence in all its manifestations? The Kantian conception of critique points to the ideal of autonomous judgment, and Benjamin shares some part of this legacy. He also appears close to Adorno's view of critique as emanating from intellectual freedom that has "the ability to distinguish what is known and what is accepted by convention", itself the outcome of "the power to resist established opinions and... also to resist existing institutions". This accords with Benjamin's undertaking, which may be described as proceeding under the belief, "in a variation of a famous proposition of Spinoza, that the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better".⁷

On the theme of the relation between violence and revolution, Benjamin shared several inclinations with Sorel. One was the rejection of Utopianism—interpreted rather narrowly by Sorel to mean the perpetual deferral of that which is promised to the electorate by politicians in parliamentary democracy. Secondly, Sorel was firm in his call for—and Benjamin firm in his support for the idea of—revolutionary violence by the proletariat, not only in the form of strikes, but in the form of the general class war that was to bring down the bourgeoisie and the state. Thirdly, they both made a distinction between their concern with violence and the ideology of anarchism (even if Benjamin had some sympathy for special cases of ethical anarchism), because the violence of anarchism forfeit all validity if it did not accept its role as means. Fourth, both rejected the kind of violence that had characterized the French revolutionaries of 1893, because they felt it was based on natural law, according to which means were justified simply because they served natural human ends, such as self-preservation (and also, one might add, revenge, which Francis Bacon called "rough justice"). Benjamin contrasts natural law with positive law. Whereas natural law seeks to justify means, positive law tries to guarantee ends. Both must be transcended, according to Benjamin, but positive law at least distinguishes between sanctioned and unsanctioned force, thus providing a distinction between natural and legal ends. When conflicts of interest arise between the two, the pursuit of natural ends can threaten legality, and is legislated against. Not all types of conflict need violent resolutions. Benjamin regarded the strike used as part of the class struggle as an instance of "pure means".

The term violence should be employed only for acts of revolt; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.⁸

Max Weber defined the state as "the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate, violence".¹⁰ Benjamin adds organized labor to the nation state as the only legal subjects entitled in Europe to exercise violence. The many forms of violence sanctioned and reserved by the state for the state include militarism, conscription, the death penalty, and so on. On the theme of revolution, Benjamin teaches us to think of it as a specific kind of violence directed towards a law-making or law-positing function.

This recognition that the making and conserving of laws has little to do with justice has been widely noticed in the history of European discourses on legality and power. Derrida, for instance, invokes Pascal, who invoked Montaigne before him: "And so laws keep up their good standing, not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mystical foundation of their Authority".¹¹ Derrida has given the self-deconstructive aspect of the division between law-making and law-conserving a reading that argues that the two kinds of violence cannot be kept apart. Cases such as war, strikes, or police violence show how the distinction between the foundation and conservation of law can get blurred. Law-making violence is forced into "self-conserving repetition", and "Conservation in its turn refounds, so that it can conserve what it claims to found". Both notions suffer what he calls a "differential contamination"; neither can be kept purely itself. It must be said, however, that Benjamin does not lack awareness of this tendency. If he never gives up "trying to contain in a pair of concepts and to bring back down to distinctions the very thing that incessantly exceeds them and surpasses them",¹² the reason is the form of a will to believe that many—including Derrida—may not share, but which, nonetheless, has its own justification.

In the revelation of the divine, the world—the theatre of history—is subjected to a great process of decomposition, while time—the life of him who represents it—is subjected to a great process of fulfillment. The end of the world: the destruction and liberation of a (dramatic) representation. Redemption of history from the one who represents it. /But perhaps in this sense the profoundest antithesis to "world" is not "time" but "the world to come".¹³

The swerve from the secular world of history to the divine realm that is the termination of history comes about in Benjamin as a consequence of his life-long conviction that the world of time and history is a fallen world, subject to decay, in which there is only the delusion of progress, and from which there is no redemption except, as "Critique of Violence" claims, in" pure divine violence". One might object that if "pure" is to be applied to violence, "pure violence" has to mean violence seen purely as means, without reference to ends—precisely that which divine violence is not in Benjamin, since it has the end in mind of bringing time and history to a stop. Be that as it may, Benjamin posits a dialectical oscillation in which the decay of one structure of law is superseded by another and another, in a series that has no end except the end of time, no justice except in the bloodless violence of the end of history. While mythic violence brings guilt and retribution, the divine violence Benjamin would like to believe in offers expiation. Despite Derrida's pointed horror at how much this vision of expiation appears to him to correspond with the Holocaust, it is difficult not to sympathize with the kinds of objection raised to his reproach of Benjamin by Gillian Rose and others.¹⁴ So by the end of "Critique of Violence", Benjamin has translated the issue from the plane of history to that of redemption from history. He believes that only when legality in the profane sense has been abolished, will the true revolution succeed, and this revolution will be "lethal without spilling blood".¹⁵

As a performative act, Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" is a strange and estranging argument for the interpenetration of the sublime and the terrifying. While his elective affinities obviously suggest an affiliation to the Judaic, I am tempted to say that his critique of violence is also very German in the manner in which, in 1965, Adorno (after much reluctant demurring) answered the question "What is German?" with the claim that "If one is permitted to speculate that something is specifically German, then it is this interpenetration of what is magnificent, not contenting itself with any conventional boundaries, with what is monstrous".¹⁶

1 Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority'", in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 44.

2 Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236-53.

3 Derrida, "Force of Law", 6; Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike: Benjamin's `Critique of Violence'", in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 127.

4 Rodolphe Gasché, "The Sober Absolute: Walter Benjamin and the Early Romantics", in David S. Ferris (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 72-3.

5 Ibid., 334.

6 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, with an introduction by George Steiner (London: Verso, 1977), 182.

7 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 281-82, 288.

8 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915), 195.

9 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 231-32.

16 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, 208.

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