Who is Able to Stand before the LORD, this Holy God?

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-153
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
The Right

Two accounts of the ark’s violence in 1 Sam 6:19 and 2 Sam 6:7 have prompted a multitude of interpretations in scholarship. Most explanations for the violence of the ark assume the violence is related to the right (or wrong) treatment of the ark. Even if these interpretations acknowledge that the violence is out of proportion to the transgression, they propose, nevertheless, that a known law has been broken; or the violence establishes a custom for the ark’s treatment or endorses the ark’s holiness. This chapter introduces the thought of Walter Benjamin whose work gives categories to understand divine violence as neither preserving or creating law.

The Culture of Criticism

PMLA ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey H. Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social World ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
A Value ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Right

For those who approach literary studies with literary sensitivity, an immediate problem arises. They cannot overlook style, their own or that of others. Through their concern with literature they have become aware that understanding is a mediated activity and that style is an index of how the writer deals with the consciousness of mediation. Style is not cognitive only; it is also recognitive, a signal betraying the writer's relation, or sometimes the relation of a type of discourse, to a historical and social world. To say that of course words are a form of life is not enough: words at this level of style intend a statement about life itself in relation to words, and in particular to literature as a value-laden act. Thus, even without fully understanding it, one is alerted by a similarity in the opening of these two essays: The Right Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Bishop of Winchester, died on September 26th, 1626. During his lifetime he enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the excellence of his sermons, for the conduct of his diocese, for his ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and for the decorum and devotion of his private life. (Eliot, Lancelot 13) One afternoon, Walter Benjamin was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés when he was struck with compelling force by the idea of drawing a diagram of his life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. He drew the diagram, and with utterly typical ill-luck lost it again a year or two later. The diagram, not surprisingly, was a labyrinth. (Eagleton, Pref.)

The Violence of the Ark

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Violence

Proposals that the violence of the ark in 2 Sam 6:7 can be explained in terms of punishment or educative violence are reviewed and shown to be unsupported by details in the text. Unlike the parallel account in 1 Chr 13 and 15, no laws are sufficient to ensure safety from the ark and the ark is simply removed. Similarly, there is a lack of evidence for punishment or educative violence in 1 Sam 6:19. It is proposed that the violence of the ark remains inexplicable, and fits the concept of Divine Violence as defined by Walter Benjamin. Divine Violence is neither a means to an end or end to a means, it is beyond law. It irrupts in the context of a misalignment in the world and is beyond ethics.

Reconceiving Immigration Politics: Walter Benjamin, Violence, and Labor

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
INÉS VALDEZ
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Production Chain ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Immigration Politics ◽  
Coalition Of Immokalee Workers ◽  
The Stability

This article theorizes the circulation of violence in the realms of immigration and labor. Through Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the relationship between racial violence and law, and note that although violence can support the authority of law, excessive violence makes law vulnerable to decay. This tension between authority and excess is eased by humanitarianism. I find clues for disrupting this circulation in Benjamin’s twin notions of the real state of exception and the general strike, introduced two decades apart and invested in theorizing how labor and other marginalized groups threaten the stability of law supported by violence. This reconstruction proceeds alongside an examination of the contemporary US regime of immigration enforcement, which combines the excessive violence of detention and deportation with marginal humanitarian adjustments, which ultimately legitimate violence. On the disruptive side, a Benjaminian reading of labor activism by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers offers three dimensions of emancipatory politics: (a) practices of refusal (to engage on the terms of the immigration debate), (b) the establishment of historical constellations (of racial regulation of labor constitutive of law), and (c) divine violence (through exposure of lawful violence in the food production chain).

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-192
Author(s):  
James Edward Ford
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Law ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
General Strike

Notebook 3 continues to build on the concept of the multitude. Du Bois calls the region of the multitude that pursues truth and justice the “dark proletariat.” This chapter theorizes the dark proletariat’s revolutionary force analyzing the argument and form of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, especially the chapters on “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord.” With this analysis, Du Bois’s account of the dark proletariat during the Civil War marks the historical expression of the divine violence Walter Benjamin identifies but cannot historically locate in his enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence.” Divine violence undoes the guilt that binds the oppressed to the law and State. While Benjamin sought his example among the working class in Europe’s metropoles, Du Bois makes the figure of the fugitive slave the protagonist of his narrative.

Three faces of ageism: society, image and place

2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN E. MCHUGH
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older People ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The United States ◽  
Successful Ageing ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Decline Disease ◽  
The Right ◽  
Home Living

This paper elucidates and champions a spatiality perspective in social gerontology, by arguing that relationships between older people and the spaces and places they inhabit illuminate deeply-ingrained societal attitudes and values. The trilogy of society, image and place is explored through an interpretive reading of images and scripts in ‘successful ageing’ and ‘anti-ageing’ created and promoted by the booming ‘retirement industry’ in the United States. Six tropes are revealed in an interpretation of prevalent images of ‘Sunbelt Retirement Land’: geographic cornucopia, ageless selves, near perfection, the right stuff, down home living, and nomads of desire. This reading serves as a springboard in elaborating Cole's (1992) notion of bipolar ageism, as we vacillate between negative stereotypes of old age and positive elixirs, such as anti-ageing and agelessness, that are cloaked denials of decline, disease and death. The paper concludes with a series of troubling questions about the perpetuation and depth of ageism in society and culture.Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1999: 462–63)

scholarly journals The Jewish wall: The Eisenman empire

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Renato Rizzi
Keyword(s):  
Original Problem ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Expressive Language ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Right

In this article author is arguing that architecture, like all other aesthetic disciplines, has for long been pointing to the original problem: the sense of form. The form is seen as the multiplicity of expressive language that comes from particular kind of knowledge. Regarding this architecture is seen as work of realization; the cognition of knowledge and that the form is representation, the sense is the essence. Author is also arguing that the greater variable, although not the only one, among the four factors concerns the right to knowledge. The greater or smaller its extension and profoundness, the greater or smaller our ability to slide along the essential line of the slope. Or, towards the "contents of the truth of one work", if we wish to use the same words of Walter Benjamin. But the hypothesis, although it has to be demonstrated yet, imposes the logic of thoughts, which should be added to the aesthetics of thoughts: the gift of compilation, the image of the unity of the entirety. In several parts of this paper, through the questions of the theological, the scene of thought, interpretation on representation and contemplation, ideas, concepts and phenomenon, author will discuss on possible interpretations of work of Pieter Eisenman.

scholarly journals A dupla máscara da anarquia: Black Blocs, Anonymous e outros fenômenos │ The double mask of anarchy: Black Blocs, Anonymous and other phenomena

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Capeller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Political Demonstrations

RESUMO Uma tentativa de determinar o verdadeiro sentido das manifestações de 2013 no Brasil por de uma dupla articulação entre as contradições sociais e políticas dos próprios manifestantes, de um lado, e as contradições estéticas e culturais expressas pela grande mídia, assim como pela chamada mídia independente, durante a cobertura dos eventos acima mencionados, por outro. Nessa análise, tentamos interpretar o conceito de “violência divina” de Walter Benjamin, alinhado ao conceito de “poder constituinte” tal como analisado por Antonio Negri, com o auxílio do estudo de Giorgio Agamben sobre o “estado de exceção”, para uma nova abordagem da questão da violência nas manifestações e da forma ambígua com que a grande mídia, assim como a chamada mídia independente, lidou com esta questão. Nosso texto acaba com uma análise crítica de dois fenômenos distintos, errônea ou corretamente associados como “anarquistas”: os vários grupos de anonymous e de black blocs que então surgiram, povoando a superfície dos acontecimentos.Palavras-chave: Estado de exceção; Violência divina; Poder constituinte; Black blocs; Anonymous.ABSTRACT An attempt to determine the real meaning of last year’s political demonstrations in Brasil by a double articulation between the social and political contradictions of the demonstrators themselves, on one hand, and the cultural and aesthetical contradictions expressed by the big media, as well as by its independent internet counterpart, during their coverage of the above mentioned events, on the other. Throughout this analysis we try to interpret Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence" aligned with Antonio Negri’s study of “the constituent power” and Agamben’s work on the juridical concept of the “state of exception” to try to cope with the violence associated with these demonstrations and the ambiguous way that both the independent and the big media dealt with it. Our analysis ends with a critical appraisal of two distinct, and yet rightfully or wrongfully related, so-called anarchist phenomena: the innumerable groups of black blocs and anonymous that were, from then on, emerging to the surface of the events.Keywords: State of exception; Divine violence; Constituent power; Black blocs; Anonymous.

The Characterisation of God in the Stories of the Ark

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
Divine Violence

The Divine Violence of the ark in 1 Sam 6:19 and 2 Sam 6:7 springs from the misalignment of the holy transcendent God being present in the ark. The conception of divine presence does not conform to JE, Priestly, Zion-Sabaoth, or Deuteronomistic theology precisely, but it contains elements found in all of these traditions, confirming that the transcendent God is understood as actually present in the ark in 1 Sam 6:19 and 2 Sam 6:7. God is characterised as holy in these narratives, but God also shows no privilege for God’s own people, treating them akin to the Philistines. God is angry in 2 Sam 6:7, and the concept of anger as an unleashed volatile rage is explored. The thought of Walter Benjamin is used to suggest that the Divine Violence of the ark is beyond ethics: it cannot be justified, but it also does not justify other acts of violence.

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