The Necessary Critique of Divine Violenc

Giorgio Agamben
Legal, political and philosophical

perspectives
Edited by Tom Frost
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First published 2013
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
List of Figures x
The limit of thought 1

TO M F R O S T
PART I
Before The Law 11
1 The curse of the law and the coming politics:

on agamben, paul and the jewish alternative 13
ADAM KOT S KO
2 A particular fet ishism: love,

law and the image in agamben 31
C O N NA L PAR S LEY
3 Agamben and the possibilities of tradition 54

TO M F R O S T
PART II
Politics: or, on the vocation of man 73
4 The necessary critique of divine violence: notes on

agamben, benjamin and sorel 75
F R AN K R U DA AN D J AN VO E L K E R
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Chapter 4
1
2
The necessary critique of divine
3 violence
4
5 Notes on agamben, benjamin and sorel
6
7
8
Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker
9
10
11
12
13 Introduction: violence and emancipation
14
Today, one problem still seems to stand in the kernel of our contemporary
15
political situation (if there is such a situation), namely the problem of
16
violence. But this problem cannot simply be accounted for in juridical coor-
17
dinates. It is, as many – and not only contemporary – thinkers claim, due to
18
the fact that the very recourse to juridical explanations itself obfuscates the
19
very problem that one is trying to deal with. This diagnosis has received
20
many different articulations and many proposals to overcome it have also
21
been phrased. Alain Badiou, for example, has claimed that our contempo-
22
rary situation is one of a constant ‘war’ and fetishisms of law can only be
23
overcome by completely rethinking the coordinates of political action and
24
orientation (including how in former attempts of emancipation violence and
25
terror have been employed);1 Slavoj Žižek has proposed to resurrect for this
26
very sake the idea and concept of emancipatory violence that historically
27
appeared under the name of revolutionary terror (in the French Revolution).2
28
One might therefore legitimately ask how Giorgio Agamben, one of the
29
thinkers who puts the question of law and its relation to life in the centre of
30
his thought, stands on this front. This question is even more pressing with
31
regard to Agamben’s oeuvre, since it was he who once in a quite opaque
32
wording suggested that any paradigm of a coming politics – a politics that
33
might do away with the intimate link between violence and law – ‘will no
34
longer be a struggle for the conquest of the State, but a Struggle between the State and
35
the non-State humanity’ – assembling ‘singularities peacefully demonstrating
36
their being in common’.3
37
In what terms might one conceive of this very struggle? Is it a violent one?
38
What sort of violence might be involved? We will enter the Agambenian
39
cosmos via the category of violence, since we take the question of emancipa-
40
tion to be intimately connected to it. Yet, we will not directly address
41
Agamben’s own elaboration. Rather, we will refer to an author who – as
42
often has been pointed out, even by Agamben himself – is crucial for
43
Agamben’s entire enterprise, Walter Benjamin. Although we are aware that
44
BK-DEP-FROST-131008-130005.indd 75 7/24/2013 7:39:07 PM

76 Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker
1 reading Benjamin on the question of violence can be said to be a proper

2 minefield, given the intricacies and sheer amount of already presented read-
3 ings, we nonetheless believe that it will prove to be instructive to take
4 another closer look at what Benjamin proposes in his Critique of Violence.
5 However, Agamben himself never hesitated to point out that reading
6 Benjamin might not be enough for comprehending the crucial problems he
7 addresses (which is why Agamben reads him together with Carl Schmitt).
8 We follow him in this suggestion, yet we will not turn to Schmitt but to a
9 thinker who can be said to be one of the main references of Critique of
10 Violence, the French thinker Georges Sorel. By reading Agamben reading
11 Benjamin reading Sorel, we attempt to provide a systematic answer to the
12 question of how Agamben conceives of emancipation and, more precisely,
13 if there is violence involved in the coming politics.
14
15
Always necessary and always justified: Sorel’s notion of
16
violence
17
18 George Sorel, whose position (under the heading of Sorelianism), even
19 gained the dubious reputation of being a precursor of (Italian) fascism,4 is
20 one of those thinkers who is acknowledged to be of high importance to
21 Benjamin’s political work but whose views are rarely systematically recon-
22 structed. We believe that this work needs to be undertaken, even more when
23 contrasted with Benjamin’s own proposal. So, what is the famous conception
24 of the proletarian general strike that became so influential for Benjamin?5
25 One of the most fundamental distinctions on the basis of which Sorel
26 elaborates his conception relies on an initial conceptual distinction. This
27 distinction is the distinction between power and violence. Power is not
28 violence, although it might rely on violence (i.e. oppression), and violence is
29 not power, although it might appear to be powerful. Power is, as Sorel persis-
30 tently reiterates, interested in imposing, maintaining and reproducing the
31 organization of a social order in which a minority becomes the governing
32 (political) authority.6 Power is immanently linked to authority. Contrarily, the
33 sole aim of violence is not only to break any form of order, but also to
34 suspend and abolish any form of authority. Violence is the conceptual enemy
35 of power; power gives violence a form that already sacrifices its emancipatory
36 potential by foreclosing the insight into the violent structure of the existing
37 circumstances. One thus, for Sorel, needs a violent vision not only to avoid
38 being attracted by power, but also to generate the insight into the violence at
39 its foundation. One thus needs to ‘den[y], in the most brutal fashion, the social
40 compact’.7 Sorel thereby seeks to present a polemical vision of the distinction
41 that lies at the ground of any socio-political organization, a violent vision
42 which seeks to withdraw from any (social) bond with its adversary, since in
43 any bond there always already is something of power, some duty, some
44 authority (even if only of the bond itself).8 Power denies the violence at its

The necessary critique of divine violence 77
1 ground and this denial needs to be undone, the negation of violence that is
2 power needs itself to be negated. It is here that one can see that the underly-
3 ing model for Sorel’s conception is the idea of a negation of negation.
4 He claims that his proposal focuses on ‘violence only from the point of view
5 of its ideological consequences’,9 because the ideal, idea-logical consequences
6 of violence materialize in the withering away of any power (structure) tout
7 court. Power is not violence, since violence is always violence against power,
8 in resistance to power, seeking to abolish power. And power is by definition
9 the exercise of power of those who govern over those who are governed. This,
10 especially today, might generate the impression that Sorel’s position endorses
11 radically anachronistic and even certain barbaric tendencies. But why is it that
12 such a full-blown endorsement of violence as means of overcoming power and
13 domination might ring odd to contemporary ears? It is because for ‘bourgeois
14 philosophy … violence is a relic of barbarism’,10 and to put it bluntly, for Sorel
15 bourgeois philosophy is everywhere, it even infiltrated large strands of the
16 radical left (and generated so called ‘capitalist-socialists’).11 By condemning
17 violence as barbaric, by putting up ‘so many legal precautions against
18 violence’, by organizing ‘our education’ in a manner that ‘is directed towards
19 weakening our tendencies towards violence that we are instinctively inclined
20 to think that any act of violence is a manifestation of a return to barbarism’,12
21 the bourgeoisie and its philosophy (i.e. ideology) succeeds in denying its own
22 violence and in making the violence immanent to any political organization
23 based on power and authority invisible. Today – for Sorel – ‘[a]ny return to the
24 past seems’ to be ‘a crime against science, law and human dignity’.13 This func-
25 tions all the better as the bourgeoisie found a political form that is well-
26 prepared to uphold its ideology – and with it its power – namely parliamentary
27 democracy (it is as if Sorel had read Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of
28 history). Thereby it does not only diminish the violence inherent to the system
29 (i.e. oppression and exploitation) but it also works for the disappearance of any
30 possible option for change – a change that for Sorel can only be ‘the violent
31 passage from capitalism to socialism’.14
32 Power – which by this (socialist) Marxist definition can only be the power
33 of the bourgeoisie – thus manifests itself in a generalized ‘system of compro-
34 mise’ that follows the ‘admitted principle of parliamentary government that
35 the majority cannot persist in pursuing schemes which give rise to popular
36 demonstrations of too serious a kind’.15 Therefore democracy offers the illu-
37 sion of real change and political choice (in the form of parliamentary
38 elections) and a constant rhetoric of excuses which makes:
39
40 [T]he masses believe that they are suffering from the iniquitous conse-
41 quences of a past which was full of violence, ignorance and wickedness;
42 they are confident that the genius of their leaders will render them less
43 unhappy; they believe that democracy, if it were only free, would replace
44 a malevolent hierarchy by a benevolent hierarchy.16

1 It is this very (structure of) belief that is generated by the condemnation of

2 violence (as essentially regressive and barbaric) and by the specificity of the
3 political organization oppressive power is employing, which is the greatest
4 danger to any real form of emancipation as it generates highly problematic
5 consequences. It produces the wrong idea of practical participation in the
6 democratic framework, of political struggle (which as deviant form of true
7 political struggle in Sorel is referred to under the name of a ‘political general
8 strike’).17 The thereby generated ‘faith in the magical force of the State’,18
9 leads to a political incapacitation initiated by the very means of political
10 expression and representation the power structure offers (say workers in
11 trade unions functioning in under the authority of the bourgeoisie turn out
12 to be ‘politico-criminal associations’)19 – these means come with an internal
13 ‘tactics of moderation’,20 and necessarily imply the corruption of all the
14 tendencies and forces that cannot and do not want to be moderate(d).21 All
15 this leads to an obscuration, to ‘a false idea’ of ‘the class struggle’ – this is the
16 primary aim of all the reactionary, oppressive reign of the ‘sophists’, i.e. the
17 bourgeois ideologues and politicians.22 They want to naturalize (and thereby
18 essentialize) classes by getting rid of the element of struggle.
19 But does this turn violence into a means of truly opening one’s eyes?
20 Things are not that simple here, since the faith in the magical force of the
21 State is nothing but an unacknowledged form of belief which is why Sorel
22 tellingly compares former revolutionary fighters that ‘steady down’ and
23 become moderates to ‘that which … one finds in the case of a priest who has
24 lost his faith’.23 So, what is needed to break the hallucinatory, magical state of
25 unacknowledged faith is not simply consciousness of the situation. In other
26 words, what is needed is not real knowledge of the situation, but a true form
27 of acknowledged belief. The means to generate such belief is, as Sorel states,
28 a myth.24 What the myth generates is one crucial insight – whose affective
29 articulation takes the form of ‘indignation’ – namely that Violence is thus always
30 justified and always necessary.25 This formulation can be unfolded: violence
31 always aims at overcoming and attacking established power-structures, and
32 the oppressive effects linked to them, by abolishing authoritarian frameworks
33 tout court. It is inaugurated by something that makes it possible for anyone to
34 relate to it, namely by a myth. This is why, the very paradigmatic mythical
35 form of what Sorel refers to as violent act, the proletarian general strike,26
36 necessarily aims to ‘suppress the State’ for this is ‘the clearest manner’ to
37 manifest ‘its indifference to the material profits of conquest’.27 The struggle is
38 not about conquering the State. It is about abolishing it.
39 However, violence has to maintain itself; aim at its own self-preservation
40 so as not to become power again. It thus constantly has to renew itself to be
41 able to perpetually achieve its primary aim: the negation (violence) of
42 negation (power); it has to purify itself from any element of power. This is
43 why violence is conceptually linked to indeterminacy, since any power-
44 structure entails the determinations of authority and structure (and both

1 reinforce each other). Determination is on the side of power and embodied

2 in the State; indeterminacy is on the side of violence and embodied in myth.
3 This means firstly that violence aims at social-political revolution (the
4 abolishment of power), i.e. violence is emancipatory. This implies that any
5 form of violence that does not aim at abolishing power in general is not
6 violence in Sorel’s sense, as it is already power. This implies secondly that
7 power is degenerated violence, which is also why the faith on which power
8 structures thrive is a degenerated (unacknowledged) form of belief. Power is
9 violence that at one point stopped being violent enough, violence that did
10 not actually want what it previously desired. Thus power is also the blurring
11 of the relation between oppression and oppressed. But violence can resur-
12 rect the violence inherent in any given power-structure, no matter how well
13 it is hidden: ‘violence compels capitalism … to restore to it the warlike
qualities it formerly possessed’.28 Violence thus does not simply emerge ex
nihilo. It is there from the very (ontological) beginning of the social and
14
political space; it is the very medium of politics proper. Thirdly, if emancipa-
15
tory violence emerges it takes the form of a struggle between two conflicting
16 parties (power vs. violence with violence engendering the struggle),29 the
17 names of which – in good old orthodox Marxist terminology – are bourgeoi-
18 sie and proletariat. It re-opens the contradiction between violence and
19 power. Fourthly, if violence is emancipatory and inflicted by the proletariat
20 against the power-reproducing bourgeoisie there is an ethical element
21 involved in violence, namely that one should never stop to do violence
22 against any residue of power. The ethical imperative at work here might be
23 rendered as follows: Continue to be violent until the very last remainder of
24 power has been abolished (without ever introducing an authoritarian
25 element, i.e. any form of power structure, into the processes itself).
26 Why can this not be said to be nothing but a very one-sided, over-empha-
27 sizing interpretation of what classical Marxists call class struggle? The answer
28 is the following: it is a revisited version of class struggle, since it – long before
29 Foucault – relies on the Foucauldian insight that it is the conception of strug-
30 gle that has long been underemphasized in the idea of class struggle, and that
31 any peaceful form of social coexistence relies on certain means that continue
32 the violent warfare at its ground in a different form. Sorel at least remains a
33 classical Marxist with the claim that it is precisely this struggle that can make
34 history: the revolution is the emancipation of and brought about by the prole-
35 tariat. But what precise role does the myth of the proletarian general strike
36 play in Sorel (which became so important for Benjamin)?
37 The myth enters the scene as Sorel – counter to the appearances – does
38 not seek ‘to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function
39 of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism’.30 This is to say,
40 one gets a functionalist account of the myth of the general strike. What is its
41 function? It is to condensate all differences (of particular experiences, indi-
42 vidual life worlds/forms) into one ‘extraordinarily clear’,31 ‘heroic’ decision,32

1 namely it is either them or us. For, ‘the end must always be the catastrophic
2 defeat of the enemy’.33 However, such a ‘drama’,34 such a dramatic and
3 dramatized scene of decision in which ‘everything is clearly mapped out’,35
4 cannot be generated by means of slogans or speech: ‘Ordinary language
5 could not produce these results in any very certain manner’.36 Different
6 ‘methods of expression’ are needed and the myth of the general strike is this
7 very method.37 It has two essential characteristics. Firstly, it is radically inde-
8 terminate and it has to be, since ‘there is no process by which the future can
9 be predicted’,38 for the future depends on the consequences of these acts of
10 proletarian violence. Therefore the indeterminacy is not a weakness, but
11 strength.39 For Sorel argues:
12
13 [T]he framing of the future in some indeterminate time may, when it is done
14 in a certain way, be very effective and have few inconveniences; this
15 happens when it is a question of myths, in which are found all the strong-
16 est inclinations of a people …, inclinations which recur to the mind with
17 the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life, and which give
18 an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action upon
19 which the reform of the will is founded.40
20
21 Secondly, this indicates that the very indeterminacy of the myth is the
22 ground from which the drama of historical decision can be instantiated,
23 because it can bind together all the different tendencies (of different labour
24 branches for example). Its very indeterminacy is the symbolic precondition
25 for a universal identification with the myth that is supposed to address
26 anyone. It is ‘a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the senti-
27 ments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war under-
28 taken by socialism against modern society’.41 It offers identification on a
29 primordial level. This is why it is not language, nor knowledge or rationality
30 that opposes power. The myth finds its resources in the very bodily constitu-
31 tion of the proletarian life.42 The only thing that matters therefore with
32 regard to the myth is its ‘entirety’,43 and if it is whole it ‘has such motive
33 power behind it that it drags into the revolutionary track everything it
34 touches’.44
35 These crucial momentums make it possible that something indeterminate
36 (as negation of determinacy) can have a (negating) effect in the present situ-
37 ation by negating power-structures. This is why ‘myths must be judged as a
38 means of acting on the present’, even if ‘it is … possible that nothing which
they contain will come to pass – as was the case with the catastrophe
39 expected by the first Christians’.45 They nonetheless generate means and
40 motivation, i.e. consequences in and for the present. Its consequences have
41 essentially two sides. First, it generates fear (maybe even anxiety) on the side
42 of power such that ‘the governing classes, no longer daring to govern, are
43 ashamed of their privileged position, are eager to make advances to their

1 enemies and proclaim their horror of all division in society’.46 Yet, as should
2 be clear, then even more: violence has to be endured. Second, it generates
3 the idea of a catastrophe, a catastrophic ending of the existing state of things
4 (i.e. power in capitalism). Yet this idea does not horrify those who put it into
5 practice via the general strike, (the proletariat). The very functioning of the
6 myth makes it possible that the proletariat is not scared away. Rather, it is
7 ready to face it, ready to go to (class) war (and unfold the catastrophic conse-
8 quences for the State, power and its proponents). It generates the courage of
9 doing ‘sublime’ deeds and those who partake ‘must be convinced that the
10 work to which they are devoting themselves is a serious, formidable and sublime
11 work’.47 This is why it can be said that with ‘these men being engaged in a
12 war which was bound to end in either their triumph or enslavement, the
13 sentiment of sublimity was bound to be engendered by the conditions of the
14 struggle’.48 Only with this sentiment of sublimity does it become possible for
15 them to bear the real consequences of violence and of the abolishment of
16 power structures, namely ‘that they will be able to bear the innumerable
17 sacrifices imposed on them by a propaganda which can produce neither
18 honours, profits nor even immediate intellectual satisfaction’.49
19 The proletarians have to sacrifice all to gain everything. Violence is their
20 weapon, the general strike is their motor, yet the aim is – as the myth – inde-
21 terminate, because ‘the passage from capitalism to socialism conceived as a catas-
22 trophe … defies description’.50 In Sorel, against the immanent naturalizing
23 effects of power that seeks to de-historicize itself, against the absorption of
24 time in power, against the obfuscation and negation of violence, violence
25 generates (subjective) possibilities in the present that make a true (not yet
26 determinate) future (without power) thinkable. It does so by negating what
27 negates it, by generating an exception to the present state of things, and by
28 thus re-opening the contradiction that runs through society, as a relation of
29 conflict.
30
31
Violence and critique: Benjamin’s strike
32
33 Against this background, what does Benjamin outline in his seminal arti-
34 cle? The double-bind he wants to challenge is the following: On the one
35 hand, violence can only be considered when engaging in ‘moral rela-
36 tions’,51 when considering it in its relation to law and justice. Judging upon
37 violence therefore mostly refers to judging whether violence is a means to
38 justifiable ends. On the other hand, violence as a pure means can hardly
39 be judged, because it always already appears in the relation of means to an
40 end. The very meaning of violence thus seems at first sight be inseparable
41 from its meaning. Benjamin then establishes some central distinctions that
42 can be drawn from this relation of violence to the sphere of law and judg-
43 ment. ‘Natural law’ is characterized by its understanding of violence as a
44 raw material that has to be used legitimately. This is opposed to ‘positive

1 law’, which conceives of a historical becoming of violence, and sees the

2 necessity to judge also the means, and not only the ends, of violence. Both
3 traditions unite in the ‘common basic dogma: just ends can be attained by
4 justified means, justified means used for just ends’.52 To solve this antinomy
5 between natural and positive law, one would need independent criteria for
6 means and ends.
7 In his attempt to put up such criteria for what he calls ‘pure means’,
8 Benjamin takes positive law as his starting point, as it at least considers a
9 historically changing role of violence as a means (whereas natural law is
10 simply naturalizing the role of violence by suspending any historically
11 specific justification). Positive law understands that means are condi-
12 tioned; violence is sanctioned under specific circumstances. However,
13 Benjamin starts from positive law with the intention to find a viewpoint
14 outside of it, a ‘philosophico-historical’ viewpoint.53 Thus, following posi-
15 tive law which judges means in relation to ends, Benjamin can distinguish
16 natural from legal ends. Natural ends come without legal justification, and
17 Benjamin assigns them to the private person, in contrast to the legal ends,
18 which are pursued by the State. Both options tend to collide, because the
19 State has to take care that natural ends cannot be imposed in a violent
20 manner. Otherwise the realm of natural law would simply continue and
21 immanently subvert any juridical order which would amount to a constant
22 (latent) struggle between subjects of natural law (with natural rights that
23 they might seek to claim) that are at the same time subjected to the laws
24 of the State. To pursue natural ends violently would mean to use violence
25 as an unjustified means. From here on, Benjamin unfolds several exam-
26 ples in which this collision becomes apparent, cases in which natural ends
27 violently threaten the legal sphere. The central example is that of the
28 strike in the case of class struggle. The organized workers are ‘probably
29 the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence’.54 Although the strike
30 seems at first sight be refraining from violent action, it can be, as Benjamin
31 points out, understood to be violent, insofar as it is a ‘form of extortion’.55
32 The opposition of the workers to the State can be fully grasped in the case
33 of the revolutionary general strike, to which the State turns to be hostile.
34 In the form of the strike, the question of violence proves to be ambiva-
35 lent:
36
37 For … even conduct involving the exercise of a right can nevertheless, under
38 certain circumstances, be described as violent. More specifically, such con-
39 duct, when active, may be called violent if it exercises a right in order to
40 overthrow the legal system that has conferred it; when passive, it is neverthe-
41 less to be so described if it constitutes extortion in the sense explained above.
42 It therefore reveals an objective contradiction in the legal situation, but not a
43 logical contradiction in the law, if under certain circumstances the law meets
44 the strikers, as perpetrators of violence, with violence.56

1 In the strike, Benjamin continues, the State is anxious of a specific function

2 of violence which contradicts the idea of violence as a raw material, a pure
3 raw power. This function is what Benjamin calls the law-making function in
4 distinction from the law-preserving function of violence. Both functions tend
5 to get mixed up at certain points in the modern State. For instance, in the
6 institution of the police, in which both sides of violence are found in a ‘spec-
7 tral mixture’.57 The police are entitled to be law-making in cases in which
8 the State is for one reason or another unable to fulfil its function; but clearly
9 the police at the same time has law-preserving functions. For Benjamin, this
10 problematic of the ambivalent status of the police proves to be far more
11 devastating in the context of democracies, because in the context of abso-
lute monarchies it simply represents the will of the king, while in democra-
12 cies this clear representation is blurred. In the line of this argument,
13 Benjamin attacks the parliamentary system for hiding the inherent violence
14 in the form of the compromise, a clear reference to Sorel. The compromise
15 and the police, thus Benjamin can be understood, need to be analyzed
16 together.
17 Turning to the question of a possible ‘non-violent resolution’ of conflicts,58
18 Benjamin’s central example is language: ‘[T]here is a sphere of human
agreement that is non-violent … the proper sphere of “understanding,”
19 language’.59 But this sphere is also threatened by the law, which enters the
20 realm of language via the prohibition of fraud. Fraud is prohibited out of
21 ‘fear of mutual disadvantages that threaten to arise from violent confronta-
22 tion’,60 following up to fraud as an act of language. But, nevertheless,
23 language may serve as an analogy for the question of a pure means in the
24 realm of politics. This is the strike in a specific understanding. Following
25 Sorel’s distinctions, Benjamin distinguishes the political strike to be one that
26 enforces the State, while the proletarian strike seeks to destroy the power of
27 the State. Only the second can be considered as a pure means, non-violent,
28 anarchistic. The political strike is violent because it seeks to modify the
29 conditions of the State; it is law-making in its intention, while the second is
30 defined as being neither law-making nor law-preserving. It is anarchistic for
31 Benjamin in the precise sense that it seeks to destroy the State. And it is a
32 non-violent pure means in the sense that it is not bound to any exterior end.
33 Thus, a pure means in the Benjaminian sense can be conceived as an unre-
34 lated means, or, differently put, a non-objective means. Violence as a pure
35 means has to be understood as a singular act with universal significance: it
36 cannot be generalized into a law, because it is bound to a situation, but is
37 universal since it is bound to justice as its principle. If Sorel thought of
38 violence as a means to re-open the contradictory relation, Benjamin seeks
39 to de-relate this violence even from its utmost opponent (power) and to
40 think violence in its own right.
41 One first example of a violence that is not linked to an end is to be found
42 in – and this also reminds of Sorel – the violence of the myth:

1 Mythic violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the

2 gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but
3 primarily a manifestation of their existence.61
4
5 However, the very mythic violence that Sorel was defending reveals to be
6 identical with the law-making violence and its principle is to institute power.
7 Benjamin observes mythic law-making in the act of the ‘establishing of fron-
8 tiers’ as the ‘primal phenomenon of all lawmaking violence’.62 Two moments
9 are of fundamental difficulty with regard to the frontiers: On the one hand,
10 they cannot create equality, but create only ‘equally great violence’.63 On the
11 other hand: ‘Laws and circumscribed frontiers remain … unwritten laws.
12 A man can unwittingly infringe upon them and thus incur retribution’.64
13 Frontiers impose a pure manifestation; they are not bound to any principle
14 that could justify the violence employed. The second point touches on the
15 deep grounds of Benjaminian thought, for it concerns the retribution to
16 which bare life is exposed. Important here is that it shows law-making
17 violence to act as if it were fate. Opposed to this mythical principle is the
18 principle of the divine, that is to say – justice:
19
20 If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the
21 former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic
22 violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates;
23 if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter
24 is lethal without spilling blood.65
25
26 It is here that Benjamin introduces ‘bare life’:
27
28 Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine
29 violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first
demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.66
30
Divine violence is not necessarily linked to a present God; it is a question of
31 the direct act ‘without bloodshed’,67 traces of it may be found in ‘educative
32 power’ today. It is essential that the commandment not to kill forbids the
33 lethal use of this violence, but cannot be understood as a ‘criterion of judg-
34 ment’, but rather is a ‘guideline for the actions of persons’. The exemplary
35 limit case is self-defence. Benjamin opposes the view that takes the
36 commandment to be more than a guideline: Those who deny absolutely the
37 possible necessity to kill another human being, refer to the idea of sacredness
38 of life as such. For Benjamin this is more than wrong: ‘The proposition that
39 existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious,
40 if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life’.68 The human being may
41 be considered sacred, Benjamin argues, but precisely not because of his bare
42 life. Even if animals and plants were to be considered as being sacred, then

1 they could not be understood as such only due to their being alive. Clearly
2 a human being is more than its being alive: ‘Man cannot, at any price, be
3 said to coincide with the mere life in him …’.69 As Derrida put it:
4
5 In other words, what makes for the worth of man, of his Dasein and his
6 life, is that he contains the potential, and the possibility of justice, the
7 yet-to-come (avenir) of justice, the yet-to-come of his being just, of his
8 having-to-be just.70
9
10 Benjamin appears to be irritated about the myth of the bare life: ‘It might be
11 well worthwhile to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of
12 life’.71 Bare life, Benjamin seems to suggest, refers to the power of the myth,
13 while the power of God is the ability of humanity to escape the context of sin,
14 in which bare life is thrown by law. The myth of bare life thus continues the
15 reign of the myth. Divine violence, rupturing myth, opens the possibility for
16 a real beginning of history. In the end, it is a speculative frame in which
17 Benjamin shows to have his essay organized: ‘The critique of violence is the
18 philosophy of its history–the “philosophy” of this history because only the
19 idea of its development makes possible a critical, discriminating, and decisive
20 approach to its temporal data’.72 The point of view that enables to overcome
21 the positive law is the critical philosophy of history. It enables to rise above
22 the ‘dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms
23 of violence’.73 Of course, this gesture of breaking the circle is itself inscribed
24 in the process of the article: the article can retroactively be understood as a
25 manifestation of a philosophy of history which is in itself the break, the strike,
26 and in it the beginning of something new, overcoming the myth.74
27 Law-making violence is represented by law-preserving violence, and thus
28 fate continues. Against this mythical continuation of fate, only the suspen-
29 sion of law and of the power of State can create history:
30
31 On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on the
32 suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend
33 on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical
34 epoch is founded.75
35
This can be read as a critical argument with Sorel. The problem of the myth
36 that it keeps the relation to the law in place, and against this – dialectical –
37 negation of negation, one has to conceive of a non-dialectical moment inside
38 the negating violence itself.
39 ‘Suspension’ in its German original is ‘Entsetzung’,76 in which ‘rechtsetzend’
40 (law-making) reverberates. Both refer to ‘setzen’ as ‘positing’ – positing the
41 law and de-positing it, putting it down. Divine violence, that is pure violence,
42 is the destruction of mythic violence in the sense that it suspends the mythic
43 violence in the manner of a political, revolutionary strike. ‘[P]ure immediate

1 violence’ is revolutionary violence, a violence outside the law, a violence

2 that overcomes pure negation by continuing its inner moment of being-in-
3 suspension. For Benjamin, emancipation is thus not a political question
4 alone. Revolutionary violence is ‘the highest manifestation of unalloyed
5 [pure] violence by man’.77 Would it be false to understand that Benjamin
6 marks revolutionary violence – a pure, nonviolent violence – as the true sign
7 of humanity, emancipating it from the reign of bare life that is always
8 threatened and trapped by the mythical power of fate?
9
10
Agamben and the zone of indistinction (of relation and
11
unrelation)
12
13 So far, we can reconstruct the following. On the one hand, Sorel conceives
14 of violence as the uncovering of the hidden relations in magical (belief in)
15 power (of the State). Violence thus reinscribes the contradiction between
16 violence and power into the situation, generates a new type of (mythical)
17 relation between them and infers from this very relation the coming to be of
18 class struggle. Benjamin, following his direction, seeks to figure out how one
19 can understand violence as completely purified from any relation (of law-
20 making or preservation). He therefore criticizes the originary link between
21 violence and law and demonstrates why a mythical solution can never be
22 enough, for it still partakes in the lawmaking quality of violence, and is still
23 too relational. This is to say that while Sorel’s position is to negate negation,
24 i.e. the violence of the proletarian strike as the negation of the negating force
25 of power; Benjamin seeks to bring out the affirmative aspect of this very
26 negative aspect of violence. This would be the perpetuation of its depositing
27 gesture, not to turn to any relation with the law again; affirmation thus is
28 systematically situated in the transition from negation to the negation of
29 negation. Now, how does Agamben continue this series?
30 In State of Exception, Agamben reads Benjamin’s Critique of Violence – and
31 this is decisive – as part of a secret debate with Carl Schmitt. Agamben’s
32 reading is at first a defence against any complicity of Benjamin’s discourse
33 with Schmitt’s will to sovereignty. However, it is a difficult defence, embed-
34 ded in an argument that states that there is nevertheless a relation between
35 the question of the sovereign exception and pure violence. Thus, Agamben
36 reads Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty as an answer to Benjamin’s essay on
37 violence, and he marks the central distinction:
38
39 While the strategy of ‘Critique of Violence’ was aimed at ensuring the
40 existence of a pure and anomic violence, Schmitt instead seeks to lead
41 such a violence back to a juridical context.78
42
43 The main difference does not only concern the question of if there exists the
44 possibility of a pure violence outside the law. Because interestingly,

1 Agamben goes on to read Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty as

2 ‘a Grenzbegriff [limit concept]’ with which he sought to overcome the
3 distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence.79 In the
continuation of this ‘debate’, Schmitt will connect sovereignty and the state
4 of exception in the sovereign decision, while Benjamin on the contrary in his
5 book on the Trauerspiel will emphasize the opposite, namely the sovereign
6 indecision. Benjamin, Agamben concludes, thinks the state of exception as a
7 worldly, immanent exception, which redefines the position of God as that of
8 a creature among other creatures. Therefore, for Agamben, with Benjamin
9 the sovereign exception becomes an exception in sovereignty, its failure.
10 The difference, concerning the state of exception, does not relate to the ques-
11 tion of its general possibility, but rather to its place:
12
13 This drastic redefinition of the sovereign function implies a different situ-
14 ation of the state of exception. It no longer appears as the threshold that
15 guarantees the articulation between an inside and an outside … it is,
16 rather, a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in
17 which the sphere of creatures and the juridical order are caught up in a
single catastrophe.80
18
19 Agamben also sees Benjamin refuting Schmitt in relation to the general signif-
20 icance of the state of exception. In his eighth thesis of On the Philosophy of
21 History, Benjamin draws the famous distinction between the state of exception
22 ‘in which we live’ and which has become the rule; and the ‘real’ state of excep-
tion, which to establish would be the task in the fight against fascism. For
23 Agamben, this directly contradicts Schmitt. If Schmitt thinks the state of excep-
tion as a momentary suspension of the law which serves only to reinstitute and
24 reinforce it, Benjamin makes the undecidability between rule and exception
25 the insurmountable ground upon which any possible act has to be thought. It
26 is an exception to the logic of the enforcement of law via the exception. By
insisting on the reality of the state of exception, the will to separate it in time
27 and space proves to be ideological itself, but produces decisive consequences:
28
29 Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there
30 is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridi-
31 cal form acts. The attempt of state power to annex anomie through the
32 state of exception is unmasked by Benjamin for what it is: a fictio iuris par
33 excellence, which claims to maintain the law in its very suspension as
34 force of law. What now takes its place are civil war and revolutionary
35 violence, that is, a human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to
36 law.81
37
38 This is central. The suspension of the state of exception, which in its detach-
39 ment becomes suspended by historical reality (the fascist Germany), leaves

1 only civil war and revolutionary violence as possibilities. But before continu-
2 ing this argument, Agamben interjects a rather surprising analogy concern-
3 ing this debate on the link between violence and law – which Benjamin
wants to suspend and Schmitt wants to inscribe in the sphere of law precisely
4 in its suspension. This debate, Agamben claims, seems as important for
5 Western politics as it was the ‘gigantomachia peri t s ousias, the “battle of giants
6 concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics’.82 Pure being should
7 be read as parallel to pure violence, the exception to logos which logos
attempts to integrate in its ‘meshes’.83 What is the link between metaphysics
8 and pure violence? It seems clear that Agamben not only places an analogy
9 between two different struggles, but wants to question a correlation between
10 both of the struggles. Agamben’s point is that it looks like ‘both law and logos
11 needed an anomic (or alogical) zone of suspension in order to ground their
12 reference to the world of life’.84 Life thus seems to form the core of this knot
13 between metaphysics and the exception. Agamben concludes that both
14 struggles revolve around an ‘empty space’, a ‘juridical vacuum’ on the one
15 hand, ‘pure being’ on the other.85 Life is thus an empty space between two
16 different struggles that correlate with one another.
17 Now, in the realm of the law this zone:
18
19 [C]oincides with an extreme and spectral figure of the law, in which
20 law splits into a pure being-in-force [vigenza] without application (the
21 form of law) and a pure application without being in force: the force of
22 law.86
23
24 The debate on the relation of violence and law is thus related to another
25 relation, that of pure being and logos. These two struggles around a certain
26 void are related, and on the side of the law, this zone of the void is split
27 again – into pure law and pure violence.
Returning to Benjamin and Schmitt, we can now see that this being related
28 to the relation of pure being and logos is also decisive for the narrower frame
29 of the debate on violence and law itself. Agamben’s reconstruction is deci-
30 sive insofar as he claims that the argument between Benjamin and Schmitt
31 depicts two sides of one constellation: the struggle about pure violence. And
as pure being is the empty object of the gigantomachia, pure violence is the
32 empty object of the battle over the state of exception, ‘what results from it
33 and, in this way only, is supposed prior to the law’.87
34 Thus, Agamben has set the question of a violence without relation into a
35 new, different relation. On the one hand, there is the state of exception in its
36 relation to the law, and on the other the question of a pure exception, with-
37 out any relation, even to the law. The debate between Benjamin and Schmitt
38 is a struggle about the state of exception and the pure exception from it, and
39 pure violence is the empty object of this struggle. But the exception from the
40 linkage between law and exception, the exception from the state of exception

1 itself, is a split, a pure split, i.e. a suspension. This suspension at the same
2 time motivates and negates the difference between rule and exception.
3 Benjamin is the exception from the position of the law (that in itself
4 comprises its own exception), which is Schmitt. However, the position named
5 ‘Benjamin’ only becomes conceivable against the background of the position
6 with the name ‘Schmitt’. And just as much, pure violence is the object of this
7 debate, as a de-related, affirmative negation it is only thinkable in its relation to
8 the very relation of exception/law. This is not to say that pure violence can only
be understood in relation to the law, but it can only be captured in the relation
of the exception from the link of law/exception. Agamben shifts the debate to
9
a new level: Pure violence arises as an object not between the State and its
10
exception, at the place of the suspension of this relation, but between the State/
11 exception-link and the exception there from (its suspension). The suspension
12 of the circle Benjamin intends is in itself related to the operation of the circle
13 that Schmitt upholds. One could also read this as saying that pure violence
14 reproduces pure law (a form of law in its purity). Therefore, Agamben at once
15 confirms and extends Benjamin’s argument: he confirms the necessary suspen-
16 sion, but extends this suspension as being itself linked to the circle it suspends.
17 Affirmation and the negation of negation are two sides of one coin – of
18 one relational entity. This new relation is thus a relation between the relation
19 (rule/exception) and that which is supposed to break this relation, the unre-
20 lated (suspension of the relation) itself. The relation between them is as much
21 a relation as it is a non-relation. But why stress this setting as a relation, why
22 not leave it in its ambiguity and understand it as a simple neither/nor or
23 either/or? This relationality is stressed as Agamben finally turns the de-relat-
24 ing force of pure violence into a determination of the law itself. Pure violence
25 as a force of de-relation inheres law, it subsists in a hidden manner in it. After
26 the struggle it will prove to already have been there all along. Therefore, in
27 this new relation, the question of violence and law becomes the question of
28 a self-negating relation. It is self-negating because it de-relates the relation at
29 its most inner point into a zone of indistinction, but it is still a relation,
30 because this zone of indistinction is linked to the distinctions it negates.
31 Agamben’s reading is indeed a defence of Benjamin against any complic-
32 ity with political reactionary positions, but it is a defence that sharpens its
33 position from inside the battle. Only from inside the battle can the retroac-
34 tive determination of pure violence be made – violence is never pure as
35 such, but a position won in the struggle. Agamben can thus understand such
pure violence to be a manifestation and interruption of the link between law
36 and violence. If one takes this insight back to Sorel, we can now see that
37 Sorel’s claim concerning violence has to be understood as this kind of
38 second-order-violence too. It is much more the violence of an interruption
of violent relations, than the expression of an originary violence. Problematic
39 in Sorel is that this purity remains undiscussed, but coming from Agamben,
40 one might reread Sorel in a different light.

1 In his reconstruction so far, Agamben framed his argument between two

2 different analogies. First, there is the question of language. The suspension in
3 question in language is the ‘suspension of denotation’.88 Thus, Agamben repeats
4 the structure of analogy between pure violence and a structure inside language
5 as Benjamin did. Only at the end of his reading, Agamben takes the analogy one
6 step further, when he comes back to the relation between law and life. Drawing
7 on an exchange between Scholem and Benjamin as well as on Benjamin’s essay
8 on Kafka, he parallels the law that is no longer practiced, but only studied – the
9 Scripture – to the suspension of mythical power by pure violence: ‘What can be
10 the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such a way?’89 This law,
11 which, as we can say, survives its use, is ‘is no longer law but life’.90 In Agamben’s
12 interpretation, this ‘law—no longer practiced, but studied—is not justice, but only
the gate that leads to it’.91 And in this form it enables a new use of the law, it is
13 a playful, different use, ‘just as children play with disused objects’.92
14 There is a second analogy to which Agamben alludes. The state of excep-
15 tion and revolutionary violence are like two chess players ‘facing each other
16 across the chessboard of history’.93 Of course, this analogy recalls Benjamin’s
17 famous reference to the automatic chess player from his Theses on the
18 Philosophy of History (or On the Concept of History). In the first thesis, Benjamin
introduces the automaton, dressed up as a Turk, in which at the inside a
19 masterfully playing dwarf is hidden:
20
21 One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The
22 puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’ is to win all the time. It can easily
23 be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today,
24 as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.94
25
26 This can be understood as an exact transcription of a playful use towards a
27 new determination. Historical Materialism deposits theology of its old use
28 and playfully inscribes it into a new world. It is for this playful way of using
29 a thing, any thing, and thereby depositing it from its original end, that
30 Agamben reserved the concept of profanation:
31 The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come
32 about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of
33 the sacred: namely, play. It is well known that the spheres• of play and
34 the sacred are closely connected. Most of the games with which we are
35 familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory prac-
36 tices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious
37 sphere.95
38
Nowadays, the power of play is being lost more and more in Agamben’s
39 view. He understands it to be a political task to save the profanating quality
40 of play. Therefore, he goes on, it is necessary to distinguish between

1 secularization and profanation. Secularization is ‘a form of repression’,96

2 while profanation neutralizes. Agamben writes:
3
4 Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcend-
5 ence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but dis-
6 place the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its
7 power intact.97
8
9 Agamben touches here upon one of Schmitt’s central concepts. Thus it
10 seems not exaggerated to conceive of profanation as concept directed
11 directly against the Schmittian notion of political secularization. And
12 couldn’t one draw the direct link between profanation and pure violence?
13 Profanation is a use that deposits that what it uses from its originary, sacred
14 use, thus profanation deposits the used from the realm of the myth. Precisely
15 because it is the use of the same – but in new usage – it can be said to inter-
16 rupt the myth, like pure violence does it. Agamben takes Benjamin literally:
17 if historical materialism is to win, theology has to be made the dwarf inside
18 the machine, it has to be put into a new use. Profanation is thus the name of
19 the complete machine. Yet, Agamben elaborates the ambivalence of the
20 term profanation itself. Its original meaning in Latin is linked to profanation
21 on the one hand, but on the other to sacrifice. This doubled meaning is
22 obviously closed to the other doubled meaning that Agamben famously
23 discussed – that one of the term sacred. Sacred is what belongs to the gods,
24 but the homo sacer is the man who can be killed, but is not allowed to be
25 sacrificed to the gods.
26
27 A sacred man, one who belongs to the gods, has survived the rite that
28 separated him from other men and continues to lead an apparently pro-
29 fane existence among them. Although he lives in the profane world,
30 there inheres in his body an irreducible residue of sacredness. This
31 removes him from normal commerce with his kind and exposes him to
32 the possibility of violent death, which returns him to the gods to whom
33 he truly belongs. As for his fate in the divine sphere, he cannot be sacri-
34 ficed and is excluded from the cult because his life is already the prop-
35 erty of the gods, and yet, insofar as it survives itself, so to speak, it
36 introduces an incongruous remnant of profanity into the domain of the
37 sacred. That is to say, in the machine of sacrifice, sacred and profane
38 represent the two poles of a system in which a floating signifier travels
39 from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same
40 object.98
41
42 Self-surviving sacredness becomes profane again, or simply becomes profane.
43 It is the machine of sacrifice, playing chess, using the divine in a new use,
44 rendering it profane. And in the end, profanation is a means to sacrifice the

1 sacrifice, a sort of playful sacrifice. Profanation can thus be read as Agamben’s

2 ‘use’ of what emancipation is. Profanation is to establish a zone of indistinc-
3 tion, of pure play. It is to interrupt the play of dialectical continuation
4 (between law and its exception), as Benjamin already had demanded. But if
5 Sorel was aiming at restaging the conflict and to revivify the negation in any
6 realm of power as precondition for negating it (this is what the myth does),
7 and if Benjamin tried to conceive of this quality of violence in its own right
8 and defined it precisely as the deposition of violence in itself – a nonviolent
9 violence – Agamben universalizes this inner point of indistinction as being
10 part of every relation. Therefore, he does not see the strike as an option as
11 Sorel and Benjamin did, but he rather starts from an invisible point of indis-
12 tinction – the state of exception – that can only be demystified and clarified
13 in struggle and profanation, a different use. Thus, the state of exception can
14 always only be the exception from the state, and in its very unrelatedness
15 both sides relate. The state of exception is a state of indistinction, not only of
16 violence and law, but also of the violence that needs to be thought to break
17 the circle of violence (exception) and law. A zone of indistinction of negation
18 and affirmation. A zone to which Agamben also attributes the name ‘form-of-
19 life’, a form in which thus pure being and pure violence correlate.
20
21
Notes
22
23 1 Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and the ‘war against terrorism’’ in Badiou, Infinite
Thought (London: Continuum, 2006), pp.106–23.
2 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), p.159.
24 3 This is how Agamben describes the gathering in Tiananmen Square in Giorgio
25 Agamben, The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
26 Minnesota Press, 2007), pp.84–6. On the role of the paradigm in Agamben’s
27 work, see Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda, ‘The Event of Language as Force of
Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism’ (2011) 16(3) Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical
28
Humanities 163–80.
29 4 One proof of this is often rendered by quoting references that Mussolini made to
30 Sorel. Yet, what should be taken into account is that Mussolini considered himself
31 to be a disciple of Sorel only as long as he remained a self-proclaimed (naïve and
32 unread) Marxist. He cut off most associations with the Sorelian camp – a camp that,
like Sorel too, later started flirting with Italian nationalism – from 1911 onwards.
33
5 Sorel himself argues that he is the first to ever adequately elaborate this concep-
34 tion. Contrary to this, George Lichtheim claims that this conception finds its first
35 systematic articulation in the works (and political claims) of certain – Belgian –
36 members (like de Paepe) of the First International that took place in Brussels.
37 Sorel was aware of the Belgian version but did – and in this respect he was fol-
lowing Marx – see in this version also nothing but ‘Belgian Rubbish’. George
38
Lichtheim, ‘Nachwort’, in Georges Sorel, Über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main:
39 Suhrkamp, 1981), p.383.
40 6 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
41 1999), p.165.
42 7 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.184.

1 8 For a Sorelian this might today come clearly to the fore in all contemporary
2 social ontologies that find their foundation in the concept of ‘mutual recognition’
and ‘intersubjectivity’.
3
9 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.178.
8
15 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.145. One might note in passing that about ten
9 years before Sorel published his Reflections (1908), Freud published his
10 Interpretation of Dreams (1900) wherein the dream is considered to be a compro-
11 mise solution for conflicting tendencies: The dreamer uses the dream to follow
12 his desire to sleep although he might still occupied with certain unsatisfied
desires that keep him awake (the dream thereby becomes the ‘guardian of
13
sleep’). What the dream offers to the dreamer is what Freud calls a ‘compro-
14 mise solution’ as it makes it possible to satisfy the multiple conflicting desires
15 at once, i.e. to sleep and to get some form of satisfaction for the unsatisfied
16 desire. However, the dream compromise is a true compromise because it
17 cannot offer proper fulfilment that the person wishes for but only a ‘hallucina-
tory’ one (dreams are ‘attempts of wish fulfilment’, as Freud states). One might
18
apply this too abbreviated reconstruction onto Sorel’s argument and claim that
19 what one gets in parliamentary democracy is the hallucinatory fulfilment of the
20 desire for equality and freedom. The problem is that this hallucinatory com-
21 promise solution not simply offers a deficient form of the fulfilment of desires;
22 it also disguises itself as being the real thing.
23
17 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.143–73.
24 18 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.153. Another parallel to Freud might be articulated
25 here: The belief in the magical force of the State resembles the faith in the magi-
26 cal force of Words, i.e. a form of animism that Freud links firstly in an ontoge-
27 netic perspective to human childhood (which can reoccur in cases in which for
example after saying someone should die this very someone actually dies) and
28
secondly in a phylogenetic perspective to the childhood of mankind, i.e. primi-
29 tive states of cultural development. This is to say that, against all appearances, it
30 is not violence which is linked to primitivism or barbarism (an uncivilized order)
31 but power. Yet, power is barbaric and denies that it is barbaric (this is why Sorel
32 can recognize the very structure of sophism – negating certain things and deny-
ing that one negates – in its foundations).
33
35 21 Compare Sorel’s treatment of how bribing and arbitration functions and why in
36 parliamentary democratic capitalism ‘an enterprise conducted without bribery is
37 inconceivable’ for nearly everyone. See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp.201ff,
202. One version of how moderation functions is that conflicts are ‘confined to
38
disputes about material interests’. See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.210.
40 23 Georges Sorel, Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics (New Brunswick:
41 Transaction Publishers, 1984), p.286.
42 24 Already in his ‘Décomposition du Marxisme’ Sorel claimed that Marx has
‘always described the revolution in mythical form’. See Georges Sorel, The
43
Decomposition of Marxism, in Sorel, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The
44

1 Social Theories of Georges Sorel, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (London: Routledge
2 Revivals, 2009), p.258.
25 That this is clearly an ethical outline can be seen when taken into account that
3
Sorel conceives of his own position as being something like ‘a metaphysics of
4 morals’, Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.10. For this also see Udi Aloni, What does a
5 Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters (New York: Columbia University
6 Press, 2011), p.20f.
7 26 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp.109–42.
8
28 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.78. In a charmingly honest wording Sorel states: ‘I
9 also believe that it would be very useful to thrash the orators of democracy and
10 the representatives of the government in order that none of them should be
11 under any illusion about the character of acts of violence’. See Sorel, Reflections on
12 Violence, p.77.
29 Sorel is a proper dialectician here, since violence appears twice in the formula
13
‘violence vs. power’, since the ‘vs.’ needs to be comprehended in terms of vio-
14 lence.
33 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.110. This might be said to be the harshest differ-
18
ence to other readings of Marx, since Marx insisted that revolution is not simply
19 the catastrophic defeat of the bourgeoisie (abolishing this class) but rather a trans-
20 formation of the bourgeois coordinates of the world which generates something
21 like the proletariat in the first place.
34 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.113. It needs to be a drama or a dramatized scene
so that one is not buying into one of the best bourgeois tricks with reference to
22
the overcoming of capitalism, namely the assumption ‘that an essential transfor-
23 mation of the world can take place in a time of economic decline’. Sorel,
24 Reflections on Violence, p.128.
26
27 39 Another wording for this is that ‘by accepting the idea of the general strike,
28 although we know that it is a myth, we are proceeding exactly as a modern
29 physicist does who has complete confidence in his science, although he knows
30 that the future will look upon it as antiquated’. Sorel, Reflections on Violence,
p.115.
32 42 If there is any analogy to right wing ideas, one might actually see it here, as there
33 are certain similarities between what Sorel proposes and certain – without any
34 doubt essentially fascist – projects like that of Ernst Jünger (Der Arbeiter) or of a
certain Heidegger (Rektoratsrede).
35
43 Sorel goes as far as to claim that it does not matter ‘whether the general strike is
36 a partial reality or simply a product of the popular imagination’. Sorel, Reflections
37 on Violence, p.117.
39
40


51 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
3 Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge:
4 Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.236–52.
5 52 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p.237.
54 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p.239.
11
12 62 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, pp.248–9.
15 65 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, pp.249–50.
16
19 70 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law. The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”‘ (1990)
20 11 Cardozo Law Review 919–1045.
21
23 74 Werner Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’ (1991) 13 Cardozo Law Review 1133–57.
24 76 Walter Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in eds Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann
Schweppenhäuser Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
25
1991), pp.179–203.
27 78 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of
28 Chicago Press, 2005), p.54.
29 79 Agamben, State of Exception, p.54.
80 Agamben, State of Exception, p.57.
30
35
39
40

1 94 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in ed. Michael W. Jennings Selected
2 Writings: Volume 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p.389.
3 95 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007),
4
p.75.
96 Agamben, Profanations, p.77.
5
6

The Necessary Critique of Divine Violenc

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The Necessary Critique of Divine Violenc

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Giorgio Agamben

Legal, political and philosophical

Edited by Tom Frost

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ISBN: 978-0-415-63758-9 (hbk)

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The limit of thought 1

1 The curse of the law and the coming politics:

2 A particular fet ishism: love,

3 Agamben and the possibilities of tradition 54

4 The necessary critique of divine violence: notes on

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1 reading Benjamin on the question of violence can be said to be a proper

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1 It is this very (structure of) belief that is generated by the condemnation of

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1 reinforce each other). Determination is on the side of power and embodied

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1 law’, which conceives of a historical becoming of violence, and sees the

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1 In the strike, Benjamin continues, the State is anxious of a specific function

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1 Mythic violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the

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1 violence’ is revolutionary violence, a violence outside the law, a violence

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1 Agamben goes on to read Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty as

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1 In his reconstruction so far, Agamben framed his argument between two

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1 secularization and profanation. Secularization is ‘a form of repression’,96

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1 sacrifice, a sort of playful sacrifice. Profanation can thus be read as Agamben’s

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1 48 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p.210.

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