Justice's Last Word: Derrida's Post-Scriptum to Force of Law

Derrida Today ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Staikou
Keyword(s):  
Final Solution ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Critique Of Violence

This article considers Derrida's reading of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in ‘Force of Law’ with particular reference to the claims Derrida makes in his controversial ‘Post-Scriptum’. The article focuses in particular on Derrida's claim – a claim situated within the context of a discourse on the ‘final solution’ – that the ‘Critique of Violence’ is too Heideggerian. This claim is explored in the article mainly through reading Heidegger's ‘Anaximander's Saying’ with the purpose of showing some affinities between his and Benjamin's notions of justice and also with respect to the importance both thinkers bestow on the purity of the name. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘divine violence’ and its ‘complicity’ with the ‘worst’ also in relation to the questions of the witness and the animal in Benjamin and Heidegger. The article insists on the importance of the theme of the singular witness in the thinking of justice and divine violence and opens up possible avenues for exploring Derrida's relation to Benjamin.

scholarly journals Pensar la violencia. Los lectores de Benjamín.

Sincronía ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol XXV (80) ◽  
pp. 28-82
Author(s):  
Jesús López Salas ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Critique Of Violence

In what follows the reader will find an exposition of Benjamin's text For a Critique of Violence, the interpretation made by Derrida, Honneth, Žižek, among others, as well as Bernstein's comment on those readings. Derrida has associated the Benjamin text with the "final solution", grouping it into the forms of thought that justify or make possible acts similar to those facts. Honneth looks for an affable outlet, turning towards a proposal for a cultural revolution. Žižek associates the resentment that humans experience to explain historical events, which are examples of pure or divine violence, which are caused by love that seeks good. Bernstein will accept the reading of Derrida, which he considers a product of imagination. He appreciates Honneth's performance, he finds it enlightening. He rejects the idea of reducing guilt to the conscience of the person responsible for violent acts, who silently and autonomously judges himself for the acts committed, seems to him inadmissible; he considers that violence should be a community discussion supported by fallibilist pluralism.

scholarly journals Law, Violence, History

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-337
Author(s):  
Pablo Oyarzún
Keyword(s):  
Legal Order ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Violence History ◽  
Legal Forms ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
Forms Of Violence

Abstract 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 violence. Although divine violence cannot be attested to as a fact or as a force unequivocally acting in the profane—that is, the human—context, it is nevertheless immanent to the profane world. Its immanence is the immanence of the messianic.

Critiquing Violence: Benjamin on Law and the Divine

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Legal Framework ◽  
Fresh Start ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Ethics Of Responsibility ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
The Relationship

Focusing on Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of violence in his 1921 essay of the same title, this chapter argues that Benjamin’s distinction between divine and legal violence also points to two distinct forms of sovereignty, one internal to law and one external to it. With this, he disrupts the classic notion that sovereignty is indivisible. Tracing the relationship between the two forms demonstrates that Benjamin develops a sophisticated account of the relationship between law and violence, undermines the classic notion that violence is instrumental to (legal) sovereignty, and shows that divine sovereign violence can justifiably usurp legal sovereign violence, thereby offering the possibility of a fresh start. However, the chapter also notes the ambiguity in Benjamin’s account regarding whether divine violence can take on (non-divine) political significance to suggest that his appeal to divine violence is an attempt to develop a just order based on an ethics of responsibility, whereby he allows that we can confront legal sovereignty in the name of create a more just legal framework, but insists that we cannot ground that decision on a transcendent principle. It concludes that Benjamin’s point is that any challenge to legal sovereign violence must emanate from a pure decision that we take responsibility for.

scholarly journals Benjamin on the Border

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-319
Author(s):  
Michelle Ty
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relation ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Who Steps ◽  
Separate And Unequal ◽  
Border Crossers ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This essay offers a critique of contemporary regimes of migrant repression in light of Walter Benjamin's reflections on borders and their constitutive relation to legal violence. In paragraphs 15–17 of “Toward the Critique of Violence,” Benjamin evokes the legend of Niobe, who, in a fatal stroke of retaliation by the gods, is turned into stone—transformed at once into the grief-stricken precipitate of mythic violence and into an enduring marker of the boundary between two separate and unequal worlds. From this tale, Benjamin unfolds an understanding of the border, not as the mere backdrop for the use of force nor as a territorial demarcation that states may justifiably defend, but as the very instantiation of legal violence (in its originary form). He contends, further, that establishing borders is a technic of ambiguity, designed to represent inequality as a single line that may not be transgressed, and produces, too, a nexus of guilt in relation to which one who “steps over” becomes fated to illegality and to the violence that the latter ostensibly warrants. In drawing attention to the inextricability of borders and the violence that they instantiate, and in exposing the identity between mythic retribution and Grenzsetzung (border-positing), Benjamin offers insight into current practices of criminalizing border crossers and militarizing borderlands. Some promise for the negation of the order that secures those who traverse the border as fatalities of law is found in the essay's final moments, when Benjamin imagines extralegal justice, or divine violence, as a de-creative force that annihilates the borders that confer the sentence of life-destroying guilt.

Justice, Law, and the Educative Power: Revisiting ‘Force of Law’

Derrida Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Gabriel Quigley
Keyword(s):  
The Future ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Legal Space ◽  
The Law ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
The University ◽  
Critique Of Violence

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.

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.

scholarly journals Niobe and Korah, Different Orders of Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-305
Author(s):  
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Moral World ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Critique Of Violence

Abstract 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 overcoming of the anthropocentric logic according to which the positing of law is the positing of power.

scholarly journals Precarious Planet: Ecological Violence in The Age of Stupid

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Catherine Mary Lord
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Critique Of Violence

Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid is a mosaic structured documentary which explores how human activity may indeed send the planet into ecological breakdown. The fictional and speculative future is conveyed through the dramatic device of a narrator, Pete Postlethwaite, who plays the world’s last archivist. He speaks from 2055, attempting to analyse through the selected documentaries, how humanity caused its own collective suicide. However, the film invites more than a reading that emphasises its politically activist aspects. Rather, through a dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and Jacques Derrida’s critique of this in ‘Force of Law’ (2002), the film can deliver readings which do theoretical work. The dialogue between the film and the classical theoretical texts can offer a way of re-working the applicability of Benjamin’s concepts of ‘mythical’ and ‘divine’ violence and the invocation to which they point. Namely, Benjamin’s suggestion that it is important to declare a ‘state of emergency’ (1940).

scholarly journals “Leben und Gewalt” or “Gewalt und Leben”

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-329
Author(s):  
Petar Bojanić ◽  
Edward Ðjordević
Keyword(s):  
Potential Influence ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
The One ◽  
Critique Of Violence

Abstract In paragraph 18 of “Toward the Critique of Violence,” the terms life, living, and violence, and the relations among them, complicate Walter Benjamin's justification of divine violence—his text's main discovery. This article seeks to reconstruct Benjamin's uses of life and living in earlier texts and to consider the potential influence of various authors he was reading at the time (Heinrich Rickert, Erich Unger, Kurt Hiller, Gershom Scholem). Benjamin's distinction between life and living is crucial for his critique of pacifism and for his shift in perspective: he moves the focus from the victim to the one committing murder, but whose violent act just might bring justice.

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