Critique of Violence

En este artículo propongo elaborar un diálogo entre una tradición herética del pensamiento de Marx y los testimonios de las víctimas de la violencia en Colombia. El elemento que me permite articular este diálogo es el de la crítica de la violencia. Mi hipótesis radica en que estas dos posturas, a pesar de su heterogeneidad, hacen parte de un archivo que, con sus palabras y enunciados, suspende de un modo eficaz la reproducción de la violencia de los aparatos de Estado y de las mistificaciones del capitalismo.

The universal claims of theses of modernization and secularization romanticize a future society in which the rational human beings completely deflect from violence. Liberals fail to acknowledge the natural and inalienable existence of violence in human society. They created a faulty binary between progress and violence as antithetical to each other. Modernization and democratization theses of liberals committed the error that they believed in an illusion in which complete escape from violence is possible. The works of

The article reviews two films about animals – Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) and Eo (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) – which both adopt motives that appeared in Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass (2nd century AD). Special attention in the article is given to the methods of the animal’s cinematographic representation, which despite the resemblance of Bresson’s and Skolimowski’s premises differ drastically in the two films.

Over the last decades, filmmakers have tended to decline the anthropocentric approach to animals while filming. The concept of sustainable film production with particular concern for environmental and biodiversity issues has been formed and improved.

The article claims two ways of representation of the same character (in the case of two analyzed films – a donkey). The first method is based on the assumption that animals could hold the same mindset as humans, and the second one – on a fantasy and creative latitude in using non-verbal agents to spell out and transmit animals’ feelings. In the first case, an author gains the possibility to show human relationships from an unconventional angle, in the second case he gets a chance to develop new techniques enriching his artistic style and to draw attention to animal rights issues by acting upon the viewer’s perception via non-verbal communication. Both films inherit from the ancient novel and bring it to the present: the first one takes over the participation effect, whereas the second one adopts an affective tone and ludic element.

he article examines, through the case studies of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917), processes of politicization which Henri Bergson’s philosophy underwent in early 20th century Europe. It begins by outlining the paths that brought the two thinkers to read and endorse Bergson’s philosophy. Despite the fact that
the former only really accepted the psychological arguments of the Données while the
latter engaged much more with Bergson’s metaphysics, both were drawn to the French
philosopher in virtue of the anti-determinist elements present in his thought. But when it came to bring this opposition to determinism to bear on political theory, their paths separated: whereas Sorel incorporated Bergsonian ideas in his revision of Marxism, Hulme found himself unable to erect a political theory on the basis of a metaphysics of flux.
This significant difference is explained in generational terms. A Bergsonian cosmology of openness and transformation was seen as an excessively relativistic philosophical base for politics by Hulme because of the greater stakes that political commitment demanded from his generation – hence his conviction that politics could only be rooted in eternal, unchanging, absolutes.

The article compares the relationship between capitalism and politics in
Max Weber’s and Walter Benjamin’s works. Benjamin’s text Kapitalismus
als Religion references Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’
des Kapitalismus. In recent decades, a considerable number of studies
have focused on highlighting the differences and affinities between the
thinking of Weber and Benjamin. In contrast, this article takes a rarely
pursued approach by introducing an overarching point of reference which
examines Weber’s and Benjamin’s views on politics. The article asks what
potentialities politics has for Weber and Benjamin given the conditions
that capitalism imposes. In order to pursue this question, we need to
analyse not only Weber’s Protestant Ethic but also some earlier writings
that are indicative of the relationship between capitalism and politics:
Weber’s Argentinische Kolonistenwirthschaften, Die Börse. I. Zweck und äußere
Organisation der Börsen, and Die Börse. II. Der Börsenverkehr; and Benjamin’s
Theologisch-politisches Fragment and Zur Kritik der Gewalt. My argument is
that there is a common ground between Weber and Benjamin on politics
since both contribute to the idea that the analysis of modern politics must
consider the transformations in capitalism. For Weber, political action
can provide meaning to the world, in a context of dispute and in a tragic
plot of irreversible forces. For Benjamin, politics refers to the possibility of
interrupting the course of history, characterised by the persistence of myth
that must be overcome.

How can a feminist subject that emerges in the moment of subjection to power discourses be in a position to generate transformative politics? How can we theorize a feminist political subject without such subject becoming exclusionary? This chapter draws on the combinatory theoretical framework of Jacques Derrida and Theodor W. Adorno to propose an alternative theoretical framework that finds answers to these divisive questions in feminist political theory. First, it shows that the feminist political subject emerges within the limit of power when power fails to fully determine subjectivity. Second, it further theorizes the concept of a feminist political subject-in-outline, which defines the feminist political subject without becoming exclusionary.

The theology famously enlisted to political ends in the first thesis of “On the Concept of History” is, as Werner Hamacher emphasized, a theology of the missed or the distorted – hunchbacked – possibilities, and thus itself a “hunchbacked” theology. If, as Hannah Arendt argued, a hunched back is the sign under which the whole of Benjamin’s life should be put, then it can also be said to mark his peculiar brand of political theology: the “real state of emergency” this hunchbacked theology should help to bring about as a counterarticulation of the sovereign exception is marked by an essential distortion (Entstellung) that no tikkun will ever rectify. To the contrary, the very notion of “rectification” is what informs the logic of the sovereign inclusive exclusion (also in the Foucauldian form of “normalization”), thus the messianic tikkun – though usually translated precisely as “rectification” – will have to take a different route. In the 1934 Kafka essay Benjamin writes indeed that the distortion – the little hunchback – will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, and uses the verb zurechststellen (to set right) to denote the “little adjustment” the Messiah will bring about, abiding thereby to the metaphor of verticality that informs the sovereign logic of rectification; however, a preparatory note shows that the tikkun is not to be intended as a straightening of what is crooked: “The distortion [Entstellung] will sublate itself by making its way up and into redemption. This displacement of axis in the redemption manifests itself in that it becomes play.” By articulating an extended commentary on this last quotation, the chapter endeavors to elucidate the peculiar “hunchbacked” form political theology takes in Benjamin’s messianism.

In" Tradition and the Individual Talent," TS Eliot gives a classic delineation of that central New Critical doctrine of the sovereignty of the text. Though deconstruction is ordinarily understood to be in direct opposition to such textual formalism, a close reading of Derrida's essay on Kafka's" Before the Law" reveals a subtle correspondence between a preoccupation with aesthetic form and a deconstructive response to it. While Derrida is impressed by the degree of reflexivity inherent in Kafka's parable, I argue that the parable ...

Geschichtsphilosophie zu artikulieren. Die Bühne für die Erscheinung der Geschichtsphilosophie ist Blut. Wenn man so will, ist der leuchtendste und dominanteste Stern, der also über allen anderen leuchtet, das, was Benjamin ‚göttliche Gewalt' nennt. Dies wird als eine ethische Aufforderung ausgedrückt. Deshalb ist es wichtig, einige religiöse Überlegungen aus den Tagebüchern von Gershom Scholem aufzugreifen, die mit philosophischen Überlegungen von Hermann Cohen und Hannah Arendt in Beziehung gesetzt werden. Der ursprüngliche Entstehungsrahmen dieses Textes ist das Seminar "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" von Professor Jan Slaby. Das erste Kapitel ist eine Erkundung von "Zur Kritik der Gewalt", die darin besteht, die Rolle der Geschichtsphilosophie in den kritischen Bewegungen dieses Textes zu verstehen. Dieser Text führt konvulsivisch Unterscheidungen ein, bis er zu einer endgültigen Unterscheidung kommt. Benjamin schlägt ein Szenario vor, in dem die Aufgabe der Lesenden darin besteht, aus der mythischen Bewegung der Gewalt auszusteigen. Er erkennt in der Gewalt eine Art Teufelskreis, auf den man nicht verzichten kann, denn in all ihren Formen wird jede Gewalt zu Verwaltung, zu Macht, zu Gewalt. Eine Betrachtung von Gewalt muss diese Einschränkung berücksichtigen. Gewalt wird uns nicht als moralisches Problem des Subjekts zeigt, sondern als eine konstitutive Kraft der menschlichen Angelegenheiten. Es genügt, die aktuelle politische Situation zu beobachten, um zu verstehen, dass ein Verzicht auf Gewalt einen Verzicht auf Macht bedeutet. Das erste Kapitel greift diese Unterscheidungen auf und ordnet sie in den Bereich der Geschichtsphilosophie ein. In Anlehnung an Lektüren von Gil Anidjiar und Agata Bielik-Robson wird diese historische Dimension der Gewalt mit dem Motiv des Blutes in Verbindung gebracht. Benjamin verwendet das Bild des Blutes, um einen sehr subtilen Unterschied in der Natur der Gewalt einzuführen. Es gibt also eine Gewalt, die Blut verlangt, und eine andere, der es gleichgültig ist. Das Wort Blutgewalt, das Benjamin in seinem Essay verwendet, dient als Ausgangspunkt für Anidjars Arbeit. Aus diesen Überlegungen und der geschichtsphilosophischen Betrachtung von Gewalt ergibt sich die Idee einer Blutgeschichte. Das Bild des Blutes mag bei der Lektüre des Essays unbemerkt bleiben, aber wie Anidjar präzise zeigt, ist es wesentlich, um die Dimension der kritischen Arbeit zu verstehen, die Benjamin in "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" kaum ankündigt. Das Bild von Blut, das immer mit der Ausübung von Macht verbunden ist, erinnert an Lady Macbeth. Shakespeares Tragödie Macbeth könnte aus dem Blickwinkel des Blutes gelesen werden. Und abgesehen von der Tatsache, dass es Macbeth ist, der den Thron mit Gewalt an sich reißt und den König ermordet, um seinen Platz einzunehmen, ist es vielleicht Lady Macbeth, die das Geheimnis des Blutes versteht, weil sie das Blut nicht von ihren Händen abwischen kann 3. Das Blut, das Lady Macbeth krank macht, ist mehr als individuelle Schuld. Es ist das Zeichen des Königtums selbst, die unaufhörliche Forderung nach Machtblood will have blood. Die Auffassung Blutgewalt Dieses Kapitel stellt die historische Dimension dar, die Benjamin eröffnet, indem er die Frage der Gerechtigkeit in die Betrachtung der Gewalt in der positiven Theorie des Rechts einführt. Es zeigt, dass sowohl für das Naturrecht als auch für das positive Recht das Recht eine Tatsache ist, eine Voraussetzung für die gesamte geschichtliche Existenz, deren Symbol das Blut ist. Benjamin wird dies Schicksal oder Mythos nennen. Dies wird auf der Grundlage der Frage der Gerechtigkeit in Frage gestellt werden. Diese Frage wird dem Mythos als Religion oder als eine Dimension des Göttlichen entgegengesetzt. Das Problem des a priori der Gewalt Benjamins Ausgangspunkt in "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ist das Verhältnis von Recht und Gerechtigkeit zur Gewalt-Gewalt bleibt im Mittelpunkt dieser Achse. Um zu verstehen, wie Gewalt und Recht zusammenhängen, ist es notwendig, ein Kriterium zu finden, durch das es möglich ist, Gewalt von Recht und Gerechtigkeit zu unterscheiden und in Beziehung zu setzen-zu beurteilen. Das Recht hat Gewalt immer als ein Instrument zu seiner Umsetzung angesehen. Bei der Frage nach der Gewalt geht es also nicht um ein moralisches Prinzip, sondern um die Beziehung, die man zu ihm in Bezug auf seine Anwendung herstellen kann. Der streng moralische Standpunkt kommt nach Benjamin als Kriterium für die Kritik der Gewalt nicht in Frage, da dem Naturrecht nach die Gewalt nach den Zwecken beurteilt wird, denen sie dient. Diese natürliche Gewalt, die Gewalt der "darwinistischen Popularphilosophie" 4 , kann nur insofern als gerecht oder ungerecht beurteilt werden, als sie die natürliche Entwicklung der Geschichte oder des Lebens gegenüber Kräften bejaht, die sie verneinen und abstoßen-und wie bereits gezeigt wurde, wird diese Konzeption des Lebens von Benjamin problematisiert. Das ist die Gewalt, die der revolutionäre Terror anwendet, um sich ideologisch zu erhalten. Diese Auffassung von Gewalt beruht sowohl auf dem Naturgesetz des Überlebens des Stärkeren als auch auf der Erhebung dieses Prinzips zu einem moralischen Urteil-zu einer moralischen Maxime. Obwohl Benjamin diese Kombination schnell durchgeht, wird klar, dass hier der falsche Kern liegt, der eine Kritik der Gewalt verhindern würde. Denn aus dieser Position folgt entweder eine stets latente Rechtfertigung des Bestehenden als Sieger oder auch eine moralisierende Ablehnung von Gewalt, d.h. ein naiver Pazifismus. Außerdem wäre Gewalt unter diesem Gesichtspunkt geschichtslos, weil ihre Anwendung immer präsent, immer gegeben wäre. Das Naturrecht, als Lehre von der Gerechtigkeit der Gewalt, bietet also nach Benjamin kein Kriterium für die Kritik der Gewalt-denn das Naturrecht hat keine Beziehung zur Gerechtigkeit. Das positive Recht hingegen, das nicht von einer Idee ursprünglicher Gewalt ausgeht, ermöglicht es, zumindest ein Kriterium für die Unterscheidung verschiedener Formen von Gewalt in ihrer Sphäre, d.h. in der Sphäre der Mittel, aufzustellen. Dieses Kriterium ist der historische Ursprung der Gewalt. Gewalt erscheint im positiven Recht nicht als natürliches Phänomen, als ‚natürliche Gegebenheit' 5 , sondern als ‚historisches Ergebnis'. Die Bewertung des

The pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance. " bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress I It is no coincidence that we propose considering the German Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin a seminal thinker of pedagogy at the precise moment when our pedagogical institutions seem radically put to the test. If Benjamin's eighth thesis "On the Concept of History" holds "that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule, " this historical diagnosis must be fathomed to include the educational circumstance. 1 Given the countless calamities pedagogical institutions are facing two decades into the twenty-first century, the statement that education is "in crisis" reads less like a proposition of true diagnostic value than the citation of an analytic cliché whose appearance within a critical discussion of the state of pedagogy is simply expected if not prescribed. Looking back at its recent history, we observe not only that the university has undergone grave transformations in terms of its self-understanding and institutional structure, but also that it appears as a site of active ruination and perpetuated calamity. 2 Reminding the reader of the birth of the modern university through Wilhelm von Humboldt's humanist visions seems like a tasteless joke if we consider the neoliberal agenda that the university, first and foremost in Anglo-American countries, has come to fulfill. Humboldt saw universities as Freistätte, that is, places of freedom, whose task it was to host nothing but the spiritual life of humanity. 3 An affirmation of such freedom and its profession-in the declarative sense of to professcan be discerned in Jacques Derrida's 1999 prospect of a université sans condition. 4 The rather triste reality of our current situation, however, makes these conceptions seem like increasingly distant fantasies. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the global educational landscape in unprecedented ways, the university had lost touch with its ideal. While the European Union instituted the so-called "Bologna

In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the pedagogical context, and secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence.

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a...

's testimony is all the more universal as it is profoundly singular.-Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Demilitarization of Culture" The subject qua "self-consciousness" […] participates in the universal precisely and only in so far as his identity is truncated, marked by a lack; in so far as he is not fully "what he is."-Slavoj Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment The more authentic the works, the more they follow what is objectively required, the object's consistency, and this is always universal.-Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory I mean of course my mother whose image, blunted for some time past, was beginning now to harrow me again.-Samuel Beckett, Molloy This golden Hades is no place to be blowing one another to bits. It's a place to come and think, […] to study the molten vignettes in mirages.-Paul West, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg This essay examines Kafka's works in the perspective of disciplinary philosophy, a perspective that immediately involves "the paradox of the universal." For what Kafka and philosophy have in common is the effort to represent what is universally the case ("truth") in propositions that are irreducibly singular-singular in the sense of being linguistically specific, constrained by their materiality (their sound-look) and the contingent connotation of their diction. (I exempt symbolic and formal logic.) Kafka's plangent appeal strengthens this idea: "I can still get fleeting satisfaction from works like 'A Country Doctor' […]. But happiness only in case I can raise the world into purity, truth, immutability."1 Das Reine, Wahre, Unveränderliche-purity, truth, immutability-is a good enough indicator of what we might

Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order – which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence – divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is ‘lethal without spilling blo...

The aim of this chapter is to analyze Carl Schmitt'smorphologystarting with his studies on Roman Catholicism as a perfect political form. The possibility of am orphologyofS chmitt'st heories of lawa nd the State is often ignored, but Walter Benjamin and Jacob Taubesgrasped the centrality of the form in Schmittian philosophywithin its political engagement.Mythesis is thatthey suggested an alternativei dea of form without settling for af ormal dissolution. To deconstruct the formal structure of Western power it is no more satisfactory.T he power of gestalt-zerstörend-as Taubes defined it-must be complemented by a forming power,likeanarrative capable of addressing the alluringside of political theology. OpenAccess. ©2 021F rancescaM onateri, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This article offers a reading of the concluding paragraph of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” It discusses Benjamin's assertion that only a philosophical-historical approach can provide the key to a critique of violence in light of his essay's discussion of legal violence, and in light of his discovery of radically different types of violence. Benjamin argues that the legal order remains enclosed in a cycle of law-positing and law-preserving violence. Moreover, the legal order inherits the essential trait of myth and of mythic violence: ambiguity. This article shows that guilt is the destiny of those subjected to mythic (and legal) forms of violence. The fateful cycle of legal violence can be undone only by the irruption of an absolutely heterogeneous type of violence, which Benjamin calls divine violence. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that, in deposing legal violence (and the legal order as a whole), divine violence also deposes itself as viol...

Walter Benjamin published his influential essay 'Critique of Violence'/'Zur Kritik der Gewalt' in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin's essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin's notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order-which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence-divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is 'lethal without spilling blood'. Because the exercise of such 'power over all life' is exercised 'for the sake of living, ' Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the 'God's-eye view' inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin's text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing-at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence-a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele's reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy's role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin's contributions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political struggles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city’s harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory.

Nonviolence resembles the aporetic structure and ambiguity of many works of art or our conceptualization of them. As a term of engagement in the arts, nonviolence is insightful as an operational and comparative concept: operational insofar as it unfolds performative strategies in the arts and comparative insofar as those strategies often resemble the aesthetics of political gestures, e.g., Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent approach to political engagement and change. This essay examines the potential of the term nonviolence in three short case studies—three performances by Akira Takayama (McDonald’s Radio University, 2017), Kandis Williams (Eurydice, Orpheus, and the Maenads, 2019) and Petr Pavlensky (Lightning, 2017).

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a...

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Walter Benjamin's critique of violence assumes that violence is deeply intertwined with the division of time and space. Niobe serves as an example that allows Benjamin to give an account of the violent conditions of the order of time that is constituted under the rule of law. The example of Korah helps to illustrate the difference between divine violence and legal violence and to underscore the centrality of time's passage for the moral world. Unlike in the example of Niobe, whose children are condemned to death as punishment for her guilt, the children of Korah receive a new life and do not have to make amends for the guilt of their parents. Bearing in mind Niobe's guilt and her serving as “a stone marking the border (Grenze) between human beings and gods,” and given that Korah's children are spared after Moses has received the commandments, we can think of the boundless destruction of boundaries as opening a new historical order of time and the hope for an overcomi...

had a vast influence on his contemporaries in the realm of political thought 1. More precisely, Bergson's magnetism was particularly strong among those on the extreme right and left. As Deleuze writes, we have generally no idea "how much hatred Bergson managed to stir up in the French university system at the outset and how he became a focus for all sorts of crazy and unconventional people right across the social spectrum". 2 The French Third Republic already had as its guardian angel Descartes, the defender of reason and discourse; Bergson attracted the "rest", who felt the limits of parliamentary democracy as consensus building through debate, and the need to appeal to diremption and intersection: the violence of language in bergson and sorel • 181

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the 'educative power' stands removed from the law by identifying the university with 'divine violence'. 'Force of Law' not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, 'Force of Law' also draws attention to the laws structuring the colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the 'educative power'. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait.

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a...

Reparations are unique amongst political approaches to ameliorating historic wrongs. No other approach provokes the ardent support of advocates or wrathful backlash of opponents as do reparations.  In this paper I attempt to engage this debate over reparative politics under the auspices of Walter Benjamin’s thought. I will argue that Benjamin’s thought pertaining to forgiveness and law provide his readers with a unique perspective to interrogate reparations and the politics of repair. Specifically, I engage with these themes of Benjamin’s in his essays Critique of Violence and The Meaning of Time in a Moral Universe. In Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence he invokes forgiveness through expiation, a concept that is concerned with the making of amends or reparations. I will argue that Benjamin’s conception of forgiveness is a more robust and a substantively different forgiveness, and as a result might be useful to advancing the cause of reparations and a politics of repair. In The Meaning of Time in a Moral Universe Benjamin speaks of the function of law as retributive against which he situates forgiveness as an oppositional force. I propose that this antagonism between forgiveness and law in Benjamin’s thought might inform the way that reparations are thought of in constructive and novel ways. Finally, I engaged the partition that Benjamin’s erects between forgiveness and reconciliation at the end of The Meaning of Time in a Moral Universe in an effort to offer a critique of the colloquial approach to reparations and the politics of repair. Thus, in this paper I ask if thinking with Benjamin, about forgiveness and law, offers a way to dislodge unbidden ressentiment from reparations, and if his unyielding critique of law could dislocate redemption from a role of the state to alternative sites of political power? In his exhaustive study of Benjamin, James Martel often draws his reader’s attention to Benjamin’s invocation, that when the messiah comes, she does not seek change through force, but only makes a slight adjustment in the world. This paper proposes that Benjamin’s thought might guide reparations advocates towards a slight adjustment that proves to be redemptive of the very idea of reparations in support of a politics of repair.

Legal needs studies and access to justice 2. Public legal education and the rule of law Formal and substantive accounts of the rule of law Public legal education in global rule of law developments The enlightenment ideal of the rule of law The rule of law and the sovereign state 3. Fated orders: Law, myth, guilt Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the liberal rule of law Mythic violence and the origins of law 4. Critical theory, critical pedagogy: Hope in the past Philosophies of education: From early civics to socially transformative accounts of public legal education Critical theory and critical pedagogy 172 On study: Kafka and Benjamin's gateway to justice 187 5. Conclusion 206 Bibliography 219 This thesis is profoundly indebted to the patient oversight and generous help of my two supervisors, Dr Sarah Lamble and Professor Lois Gander. Both as passionate activists and as academics, they have lent wise council as well as comradely support throughout. I was incredibly lucky to have been surrounded by a large, stimulating and warm PhD community at Birkbeck. We discussed, critiqued, marched and danced through our time with the School of Law sharing a politically and intellectually demanding environment that helped us collectively to reach the ends of our various projects. Too many to name here, but in particular I would like to thank Tara Mulqueen, whose friendship and careful reading of many parts of this thesis I were invaluable.

Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State University) explores satire's unstable dynamic of enjoyment and identification, one always threatening to careen out of the author's control. As an example of this instability, Greenberg offers the messy public debate in which Waugh attempted to defend himself from the Catholic press's charge that his novel “Black Mischief” was an immoral book, and Greenberg uses this debate as a point of departure to explore satire's dialectical nature: the structural inextricability of morality and sadistic pleasure, outrage and amusement, anger and blasé indifference.

This investigation pretends to work in Walter Benjamin’s image and politics concepts. And their influence in a third concept found in Franz Kafka, on the tenth anniversary of his death, that is Justice. The first of this concepts is about the image stetics and it is linked to the main importance of image in the modern society. The second concept is about politics. And is also asociated with image because it has a historical relevance in present time. It means that, image is capable of revolution in History. The main problem is to recognice Benjamin’s Justice concept trough image and politic concepts. Where image has a change in the way society can aboard History and then, we can ask, how can we aboard a Justice concept as of Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka?

Taking issue against an established view, which reduces the interactions between Bergson and Sorel to a shared 'irrationalism', the article reconstructs successive phases of engagement between the two, focussing on the question of the effective impact of Bergsonian ideas on Sorel's <em>Reflections on violence</em>. It identifies two complementary dynamics of engagement: a first one dictated by a philosophical affinity on the conceptualization of human agency and a second, more instrumental one, determined by Sorel's need to find an established and popular philosophical support to his syndicalism. This latter issue was particularly urgent for Sorel, since his previous attempt to implant in France Labriola's and Croce's non-deterministic <em>materialismo storico </em>– the original theoretical foundation of Sorelian revisionism – had ended up in failure.

The paper investigates concepts of law and violence in Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, especially in their works On violence and Critique of violence. The main objective of the research is to find similarities and differences between the definitions of these concepts in the thought of these philosophers. The main thesis of the research is the understanding that concepts of law and violence for Hannah Arendt are very different and the other hand, concepts of law and violence for Walter Benjamin apparently are the same.

One of the most unique problems of the nearly 2,000 years old theological tradition lies in the concept of the historical perception of the biblical revelation, from that eschatological expectations also emerge. The hardly avoidable theological connotations of the notion of world-history appear in the German idealism-most notably in Hegel and Schelling-as well as in the thought of the later generations, inheriting this philosophical tradition likewise struggling with these connotations. Although Walter Benjamin himself fell far from this theoretical inheritance, nevertheless traces can be found in his writings that implicitly deal with the very same matter in a quite distinctive manner. In this study the author intends to excavate the realms hidden within the layers of the Benjaminian erudition in order to grasp the tension that stresses between the all of revelation and the world through the biblical image of judgement.

's testimony is all the more universal as it is profoundly singular.-Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Demilitarization of Culture" The subject qua "self-consciousness" […] participates in the universal precisely and only in so far as his identity is truncated, marked by a lack; in so far as he is not fully "what he is."-Slavoj Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment The more authentic the works, the more they follow what is objectively required, the object's consistency, and this is always universal.-Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory I mean of course my mother whose image, blunted for some time past, was beginning now to harrow me again.-Samuel Beckett, Molloy This golden Hades is no place to be blowing one another to bits. It's a place to come and think, […] to study the molten vignettes in mirages.-Paul West, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg This essay examines Kafka's works in the perspective of disciplinary philosophy, a perspective that immediately involves "the paradox of the universal." For what Kafka and philosophy have in common is the effort to represent what is universally the case ("truth") in propositions that are irreducibly singular-singular in the sense of being linguistically specific, constrained by their materiality (their sound-look) and the contingent connotation of their diction. (I exempt symbolic and formal logic.) Kafka's plangent appeal strengthens this idea: "I can still get fleeting satisfaction from works like 'A Country Doctor' […]. But happiness only in case I can raise the world into purity, truth, immutability."1 Das Reine, Wahre, Unveränderliche-purity, truth, immutability-is a good enough indicator of what we might

This article considers the varied impact of the notion of revolutionary consciousness first developed by the French political theorist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) on proponents of anarchism and Marxism, including Walter Benjamin, Bart de Light, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci and, most recently, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I question the strategy amongst these thinkers to draw selectively from Sorel’s writings in an attempt to create a cordon sanitaire around those aspects of his thought that are problematic by virtue of their impact on proto-fascist and fascist ideologues throughout Europe. In addressing this issue I examine how Sorel’s anarchist theory of anti-Statism, constructed around the power of myths, led him to endorse anti-capitalist anti-Semitism as an extension of class struggle; and I critique his Janusfaced concept of aestheticized violence as it relates to his quest for moral regeneration through revolution.

As an advanced practice of reading, deconstruction never could have replaced the basic close reading of texts developed in conjunction with the new criticism. Such attention to the close-grained texture of the text is too necessary both to pedagogy and scholarly explication alike. As itself a particular form of close reading, deconstruction never would have replaced such practices. At greater issue are the purposes to which close and attentive reading are put: the degree to which interpretive practices assume, imply, and more and less consciously pursue particular hermeneutical strategies and draw on normative models of the literary text. As two practices of close reading, new criticism and deconstruction—which are broadly rhetorical and philosophical in their ethos respectively—have a more interesting point of contrast in their relations to formalism, to such notions of a theoretical “model” or set of variously conscious and articulated normative expectations of what the literary t...

The paper was well-attended for this conference. I had 15 in the audience, whereas I attended sessions, sadly, in which there were fewer than 5. This particular conference was an experiment on my part. It was a general social sciences conference, purportedly interdisciplinary in focus. In the end it was not interdisciplinary in ways especially pertinent to my work and my own paper’s content. I received several useful comments, and I saw in the course of presentation ways in which the paper could be improved. But I will look for more theoretically oriented conferences in the Social Sciences in the future. I made several interesting contacts in the course of the conference that could bear fruit in further exchange, so the overall experience was a valuable one. I present this same paper again in the Fall to a very different audience in the Humanities, so I will have a chance to improve the argumentation and to compare the two contexts in terms of its potential audience for the publishe...

This essay, in a symposium celebrating the publication 25 years ago of Jacques Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" traces the themes of that work through the struggle between Derrida and his translator, Mary Quaintance, for authority over the translation. In the end, neither wins the struggle: Authorship of the translation - authority - must be ceded to a third. Derrida reacts to this loss of authority by signing the translation, taking responsibility for the translation even when it is the product of forces beyond his control and of decisions he only imperfectly understands. He thus enacts in his relationship with Quaintance what he characterizes in "Force of Law" as the condition of justice: taking responsibility for words and deeds for which one cannot be wholly responsible. The essay closes with reflections upon the significance of Derrida's refusal to sign the part of the translation that discusses Walter Benjami...

WAITING BEFORE THE LAW IN KAFKA’S PARABLE “BEFORE THE LAW” WE SEE, quite famously, that the story’s protagonist (known only as “the man from the country”) is forced to wait before the gate of law for his whole life. The gatekeeper, whose only purpose seems to be to bar the man’s way, keeps him sitting on a stool just before the gate. As the man is dying from old age, he has this well-known exchange with the gatekeeper:

Deconstruction often sits awkwardly between the realm of literary studies and criticism, and philosophy proper. This paper explores the contribution that a deconstructive literacy might have for those engaged in writing narrative, as a practice and a product. Taking up Kristeva's reading of Arendt, and the Aristotelian categories of praxis and poiesis, it will be argued that the act of narrating life amounts to both the actual generation of the life it purports to describe, while also being a praxis in itself, one that need not produce anything, since the very act of engaging in/with it, leaves atraceless trace that itself is 'full of meaning'. Narrative, however, will not rest in either pole of Aristotle's binary structure. For Arendt, Kristeva will remind us, narrative is an activity that is very 'human', where we engender not just zoe, mere physiological life, but bios, a living that is not colonised by ends alone, and instead finding in itself a value, a ...

In the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today, despite its impotence, in important instances horrifies the public as it did in primeval times.-Walter Benjamin (CV, 283)

This paper will explore the need for a distinctive methodological approach to interdisciplinary inquiry in the cultural as distinct from the social sphere. The challenge of multidisciplinary research within a complex nexus of fields requires clarity in methodological choices and assumptions. Such methodological assumptions require viable models of the field of inquiry. On the basis of two models borrowed from Adorno and Benjamin (force field and constellation), I argue for a structural differentiation between the social and cultural ...

Abstract in English (the article is written in German):

"Revolution and Interrogative Power. The Insistence on the Accurate Critical Question in Benjamin and Foucault"

According to Benjamin and Foucault, calling something into question is not just a precondition of critical practice but its very realisation. The effect of critique depends on how a question is asked. An inaccurately posed question supports what it aspired to criticise. Critical practice thus involves a critique of allegedly critical questions. In their critique of power and violence, Foucault and Benjamin expose the moment in which a critical question becomes uncritical and subsequently seek its critical transformation. In Foucault, this movement is identical with »desubjugation«, and in Benjamin, with »revolution«. A revolutionary resoluteness in raising critical questions, however, can turn out to be decisionistic and uncritical itself. In this paper I reconstruct the struggle for an accurate critical question in Benjamin and Faucault and address how the dialectical turn into uncritical action might be avoided.