Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Violence

Abstract

This article examines Walter Benjamin’s 1921 text, “Critique of Violence” in light of its multiple readings. Specifically, different readings and interpretations of this text have become vital to contemporary discussions of police violence, sovereignty, life in the state of exception, revolution, political theology, and most importantly the question of ethical violence. More specifically, if the context of Benjamin’s own writing was the refusal to kill that marked the end of the First World War and the bloody wake that was left after the failure of the German revolution, a current debate between Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek concerning an “ethics of non-violence,” considers (among other things) the current situation in Israel/Palestine, and their debate turns on competing readings of Benjamin’s text. As I will show, there are different approaches to politics, to the question of what is to be done, that can be teased out by way of different readings of this small, influential text written almost 90 years ago and it is precisely the contradictory nature of this text, its messianism, its relation to the question of historical fulfillment, its invocation of the biblical injunction against killing (one that places this text in the Jewish philosophical tradition), its understanding of the notion of “mere” guilty life, as well as its use of Georges Sorel’s celebration of the mass proletarian strike, that makes it a lightning rod for different readings of politics, faith and law, and gives it its continued importance.