Stewart Brown (Becoming Un-Fated - The Suspension of Myth and the Possibility of Justice) 01:2012

7/31/2019 Stewart Brown (Becoming Un-Fated - The Suspension of Myth and the Possibility of Justice) 01:2012

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Stewart Brown

Dissertation Submitted for the degree of M.Litt. in Continental Philosophy


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In Loving Memory of Sandy Thain (1922-2011)

whose life, following 1945 is testament to our power, 'upon which the past has a claim'


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Introduction......1

Chapter 1- Mythic Violence and the role of Fate in the Critique of Violence......3

Chapter 2 Myth and Pre-History: Guilt, Fate, and the significance of Tragedy........14

Chapter 3 Happiness, Historical Time, and a Hunchbacked Justice.........28


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'Mistakenly, through confusing itself with the realm of justice, the order of law, which is only a

residue of the demonic stage of human existence when legal statutes determined not only men's

relationships but also their relation to the gods, has preserved itself long past the time of the victory

over the demons' Walter Benjamin, Fate and Character

Walter Benjamin's philosophical thinking of both history and politics as it developed in the early

1920's can be read primarily as an engagement with the domain of myth and an attempt to enact a

philosophical account of its overcoming. The mythic or pagan world is defined by the dominance of a

fated, inevitable link holding between the guilt of law and a violent retribution that strikes at the mere

life, or biological existence within human being. At the heart of the functioning of a mythic apparatus

is the guarantee of power and the effacement of the possibility of contesting what is produced as

inevitable. Through passive insertion into myth, human being becomes implicated in a condition of

existence where violence that serves to establish or protect a given mythic order presents itself as a

natural or fated consequence of guilt. For in myth, what occurs is the continuity of the same; the

perpetual reiteration of that which is given as fate, where fate names a temporal operation that works

to exclude the possibility of internal transformation. Within this set-up, of mythic law and its violent,

ideological apparatus, an immediate or incontestable link is established between 'bloody' retributive

violence and 'justice'. Retributive forms of punishment, through appearing as the fated, inevitable,

outcome of guilt, is the condition for producing a limited 'justice'. Out of this production, myth

reinforces itself; not only is a given state of affairs fated or natural, but it is also justified. For

Benjamin, myth persists into the present on the basis of the continued existence of forms of law, thatexist in their own interest, and yet appear in the light of 'justice', that is most often manifested as

retributive, fated violence.

This dissertation will argue that what is occasioned by what Benjamin will call the 'suspension' of

mythic forms of law, fate, and guilt is the possibility of a justice, understood not as an event that is

completed in the atonement of punishment or retribution, but rather as part of a state of the world that

can only be perpetuated, and never completed. But what would it mean to suspend the apparatus of

myth? It would mean to introduce contestation or mediacy into that which is given as incontestable orimmediate; to suspend the fated link between events and their consequences, through making them

subject to a context of human being or activity which is not merely a reiteration already given myth.


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The site of this struggle is temporal; what is at stake is endings and beginnings, in a present that is

traversed by a radical dissymmetry of power. For myth occurs and is lived out within an already given

and determinate structure that is imposed uponhuman being, and from within which events appear as

no more than particular instances of fate and guilt. Benjamin will come to designate this temporalityas 'inauthentic', and contrast it with what is implicitly an authentic conception of historical time, as a

time that is produced by human being, the possibility of which is not always already formed in

advance. It is only with the activation of authentic historical time, that ethical activity not implicated

within the incontestable obligations of guilt and fated consequences, becomes possible. The two

conceptions of historical time the inauthentic guilt context of fate, and the authentic time of

possibility are irreconcilable. It is only through the suspension of the mythic order of incontestable

law, with the guilt and fate that defines its power, that authentic historical time of ethics and

possibility can be active. And it is only on condition of this activation, one which necessitates what

will be described as forms of generative interruption, inclusive of modalities of destruction and

inauguration, that justice can exceed a limited identification with retribution.

The argument will proceed in four stages. It will begin by exploring mythic forms of law, and the

'fate' (schicksal) which ties law to a 'mythic violence' whose symbol is mere life. It will be shown

through looking at Benjamin's 1921 essay on theCritique of Violence, that what occurs in fate is

the effacement of the presence of power (macht) at the heart of the order of law, an effacement that

allows for a limited retributive justice to be imposed and naturalised. Chapter Two will begin by

looking in more depth at the ideological function of myth before turning to an exploration of the

centrality of guilt (schuld) as it emerges in the earlier essay Fate and Character, and the fated

link it produces between law and the limited justice of retribution. This will lead onto an examination

of Benjamin's theory of tragedy as a central instance of the suspension of the 'demonic fate' that

immediately links the law of the gods to the life of human being. Extrapolating from Benjamin's

writings, in tragedy what occurs is the opening of a position within human affairs from which

'wisdom', as that which occurs once the law is no longer understood as inevitably just, can open up a

thinking of justice. This will be argued through a reading of the ending of Sophocles' Antigone. At

this point three figures of generative interruption and their relationships will have been posited; 'divineviolence', 'genius', and 'wisdom'. The final chapter, in which, Benjamin's critique of the time of fate

will be aligned with the critique of progressivist and positivist historicism as it is developed in one of

Benjamin's final texts, 1940's On the Concept of History. At the heart of Benjamin's rejection of

historicism as a similarly naturalised, 'inauthentic' continuity, emerges the figure of happiness (gluck),

that persists throughout Benjamin's life. The centrality of the concept of happiness will reveal an

ethical core at the heart of Benjamin's philosophy of history, and through its staging of structurally

analogous concerns to previous figures of generative interruption, happiness will allow the ethical

question of justice that exceeds retribution to be posed.1

1 The impetus for this project was born out of discussions within and after Andrew Benjamin's seminar on the early

theological writings of Hegel in Dundee in early 2011. My understanding of Walter Benjamin's thought is


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At the outset ofThe18thBrumaire of Napoleon BonaparteMarx observes that;

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under

self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted

from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains ofthe living.2

What is notable here is the conditions of what Marx calls 'the living'. The living are not presented as

instances of the autonomous, self-legislating subject of modernity. Rather they are thrown into the

midst of a history that is always-already underway, subjected to 'circumstances existing already', which

demand response be it subservience or rebellion and make claims upon the possible scope of

the activity through which they 'make their own history'. The 'circumstances existing already'

constitute a context of activity, that makes claims upon the living, which awaits their entrance onto

what, depending on the idiosyncrasies of a life, may-be - or may-become - a stage, a battleground, a

depression, or a ruin. The claims made by the always-already precedent context of activity, concern

what is and what is not, what could be and what could never be, what is right and what is wrong.

And, as Benjamin will show, the sphere in which these claims reveal their crucial dimension, where

transgression of these claims can have violent consequences is that of Law.

In the Critique of Violence Benjamin can be understood as providing, through a philosophico-

historical perspective upon law, a representation of political history as one of the rising and falling of

law, which, by virtue of the power-making purpose it serves, can have no connection to justice. From

this perspective, a given age can be delineated through the laws which define it: The law of the

fathers, of the land, of its manners, or its texts: Law functions as a superstructural apparatus which

defines the given ontology of an age. It defines inclusion and exclusion, and stakes a claim about right

and wrong. As such, law constitutes an already given structure that is transmitted upon the 'brains of

the living', without their choosing. The activity by which 'men make their own history' is always a

response to already existent laws, whose just-ness is never guaranteed. As Marx' formulation implied,

inseparable from these foundations, and for the many suggestions, clarifications, and sources, that Andrew provided

in months following. I am also indebted to the time and support Iain Campbell and Ross Mcallister over the last fewmonths. And finally, to my family, for putting up with me.2Marx, Karl. (1995) The18thBrumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Available Online at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire, p. 1


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'circumstances existing already', transmitted from the past, are never neutral but are a burden that

weighs 'like a nightmare'.

Benjamin's concept of Law can be staged in contradistinction to its Kantian counterpart. Whereas

within the Kantian tradition law originates in a subject peacefully legislating for itself through self-

attribution of laws through which to govern experience, for Benjamin, Law originates or persists

within a state of struggle.3 Law is what emerges out of the submission of one force to another, and is

preserved and established with violence. The word Benjamin uses for violence is g ewalt, a word for

which english has no proper analog. It is commonly translated as 'violence', but can equally mean

force, coercion, or authority.4 A cause is violent, in the strict sense that Benjamin is using it, by virtue

of its relation to law and justice (a hurricane or volcano cannot be violent), and its critique the

explicit aim of the text consists in the examination and evaluation of this relation. 5 It is through

this critique of violence, through revealing the inseparability of law, violence and power, that

Benjamin will come to evoke fate as that which produces an inevitable, naturalised link between lawand 'justice'.

Benjamin's central concern with violence is its usage as an instrumental means, evaluating its function

along with the justness of its application, for he holds that 'every conceivable solution to human

problems...remains impossible if violence is totally excluded in principle'.6 If it is only through gewalt

understood as traversing both barbaric violence and an operative power that certain intolerable

states of affairs can be brought to the end (to be replaced, it is hoped, by the presence of justice), then

it becomes pressing to determine the nature of a violent means that is just. It is in exploring thisquestion with regard to 'legal violence' that Benjamin will evoke fate. What Benjamin will develop

philosophically is an observation that history throws up; laws enactment, the violence it sanctions,

more often than not have a dubious authority whose origin may not exceed the occupiers of the seat

of power.

3 For Benjamin's relation to Kantian Law, see Caygill, Howard. (1998) The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge p.

26

4 Translators retain 'violence' so as not to risk euphemising the issues in question, and the dangerous proximity betweenrevolution and terror.5 As Balibar notes the term Gewaltthus contains an intrinsic ambiguity: it refers, at the same time, to the negation oflaw or justice and to their realization or the assumption of responsibility for them by an institution (generally the state).(Balibar, 2009, 101)6 Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Critique of Violence' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press. p. 247 (Hereafter CV)


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The most common criteria of evaluating justness is through accounting for violence in terms of an

instrumental relation between means and ends. This approach is common to the two main strands of

legal theory which Benjamin begins by considering, 'natural law', and 'positive law'. Violence as a

means is just, so a certain tradition of natural law has it, if the ends the violence is an instrument of

are themselves just. These just ends, in positive law, themselves can only be achieved by justified

means. Benjamin rejects the possibility of a critique of violence based on a theory of just ends or just

means as they both reveal themselves caught within a 'circle of dogmatic presuppositions', visible

when just ends and justified means come into contradiction with each other. Out of this Benjamin

observes that it is only with mutually independent criteria for the evaluation of means and ends that

this circularity can be broken. The implications of this are that every deed a killing, for example

has to be examined without reference to the justness of its ends. This is also to say, 'no judgementof the deed can be derived from the commandment' (in this case 'thou shalt not kill'). 7 Rather than

deriving from a universal, time-less standpoint (Kant's categorical imperative, for example), Benjamin's

critique of violent means through establishing their relation to justice will emerge from the already

noted, 'philosophico-historical view of law'. 8

Within Benjamins' critique there emerge two 'valid' functions for violence as a means, in the sense

that they involve a relation to law and justice. These are the 'law-making' violence, used for natural

ends, and 'law-preserving' violence which is a means to a legal ends. The distinction between legal and

natural ends is unrelated to natural law's just or unjust ends but rather one between violence that

serves ends that have in general between historically acknowledged (legal) and ends that lack such

acknowledgement (natural). The latter of these is exemplified by military law, in which violence is

used for natural ends (often predatory ends) but reveals itself to be law-making in character. This is

visible in the modern age, in the state of 'peace' that inevitably follows 'war': 'the adversary is not

simply annihilated; indeed, he is accorded rights even when the victor's superiority in power is

complete. And these are, in a demonically ambiguous way, 'equal' rights'. 9 'Peace' here denotes the a-

priori legality of every victory. This is to say, violence as a means to natural ends gains its legitimacythrough the future anterior; the violence that founds law will have beenmorally just once the law that

it founds is in place. The 'natural ends' of law-making violence will retroactively become 'legal ends'

in the wake of the peace that follows war. On the surface, such a violence, on account of its predatory

nature would appear to easily come under critical scrutiny, but this is not so, for in the moment the

order of law is violently imposed, there is no law to which the violence of the law-to-come can be

made accountable. Rather in law-making violence, law and violence are revealed as both co-present

7 CV, 250

8 CV, 238

9 CV, 249


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and dependent on each other: the practice of critique reveals gewaltat the origin of law.

The moment of this law-making 'executive violence' is represented by law-preserving, 'administrative'

violence, which protects and also effaces the moment of undecidability in which legal power is

conferred.10 Benjamin exemplifies this violence with general military conscription, wherein the state

legalises the right to use force against its citizens in order to protect the given order of law, an order

that is assumedly endangered by an external threat. However, the presence of this violence of

preservation that turns against any forces hostile to laws' continuity is a compromising violence, for it

turns against the very thing which it represents, which is to say, to the principle of law-making

violence itself. In order to remain what it is (an order of law) law-making violence must transform

into law preserving violence and suppress the possibility of any other outburst of law-making violence.

This can be seen in the rapidity with which the State assumes a monopoly of violence after the

imposition of the order of law, which is to say, prohibits and represses the private citizens' ability to

wield violence of a law-making, 'natural' character.11

That law-making violence cannot maintain itself without the support of a law-preserving violence

reveals the complicity between the two that results in what Benjamin calls a 'dialectical rising and

falling in the law-making and law-preserving forms of violence',12 a fluctuation from one to the other

in which law begins to degenerate in the wake of a positing that effaces itself in the violence which

preserves.13 Benjamin evokes the example of the parliaments of the Weimar Republic at the time of

writing in 1921 to exemplify the transformation, the 'decay', and ultimate oscillation that the

'ambiguity' of legal violence initiates: 'When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a

legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our time, parliaments provide an

example of this...They lack the sense that they represent a lawmaking violence; no wonder they cannot

achieve decrees worthy of this violence'.14 Thus the parliaments, as manifestations of this internally

related rising and falling of violence, typify a more general historical condition, within which every

order of law is implicated:

The law governing their oscillation rests on the the circumstance that all law-preserving violence,

in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence it represents, by suppressing hostile

10 In State of Exception, Agamben equates Benjamin's decidability with Carl Schmitts' 'State of exception' . See Agamben,Giorgio. (2005) The State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press p, 53

11 In this regard Benjamin gives the example of the admiration that the 'great criminal' evoke when, as the saying goes,they take the law into their own hands. This admiration comes from the law-making character of violence, whichprovokes admiration even where the crime itself is despicable.

12 CV, 249

13 Werner Hamacher's reading of the Critique of Violence is organised around this phenomena. See Hamacher,Werner: Afformative, Strike: Benjamins Critique of Violence, in Andrew Benjamin; Peter Osborne: WalterBenjamins Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, London; New York, 1994, pp. 110-138.

14 CV, 244


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counter violence...This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the

hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay. 15

The 'triumph' of violence over already established (and thus decaying) law is the vicious cycle of law's

'overcoming' through re-establishment. It is the proximity of legal violence law-making and law-

preserving to what Benjamin will come to call the 'immediate manifestations of mythic violence', 16

which provides a productive opening into both the ultimate iniquity of legal violence its distance

from a justice exceeding retributionand to the function of fate within the text.

Just as the violence of an angry husband is both pernicious and without mediacy (it is not a means to

an end), but is rather an immediate manifestation of anger, so too, Benjamin shows, is theparadigmatic mythic violence of the Gods primarily an immediate manifestation of their existence.

Such violence is not mediate in the sense of having a given relation to an end inscribed in human law.

While such violence would seem to punish human infringement and thus be law-preserving -

mythic violence of the gods establishes law with immediacy. Cited by Benjamin is the legend of

Niobe, in which Niobe, queen of Thebes, questions the legitimacy of an annual celebration of the

goddess Leto and her two twins, on the grounds that she herself is more worthy of worship, with both

power and with twice as many children. As a result of her hubris all her children are subjected to a

cruel death, while Niobe, who remains as 'a mutes bearer of guilt', is spared death. 17 Through this

example, Benjamin identifies legal violence with mythic violence:

If this immediate violence in mythic manifestations proves closely related, indeed identical, to

lawmaking violence, it reflects a problematic light on lawmaking violence insofar as the latter

was characterised above, in the account of military violence, as merely a mediate violence 18

It is in the wake of this identification that the history of law and legislation becomes irreconcilablewith the bringing about of justice. For the term that unites legal violence with mythic violence is

macht, power. This is because 'lawmaking is power-making, assumption of power, and to that extent

an immediate manifestation of violence'.19 Power is that which is guaranteed by the establishment of

law. The well known phrase, might is right, brings with it not only cultural-historical truth, but also a

metaphysical truth. Metaphysical, because the critique reveals that the imposition of an order of Law

15 CV, 251. A critique of Benjamin's text, beyond the scope or intention of this essay, might centre upon this phenomena.For within Benjamin's text this law of oscillation occupies the position of a meta-law. Such a trans-historical positingcould evoke criticism from the perspective of a metaphysical nominalism.

16 CV, 248

17 CV, 248

18 CV, 24819 CV, 248


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is, a-priori, bound up with mythic violence.20Thus this critical unmasking of power at the core of both

legal and mythic violence reveals an ultimate incommensurability between Law and Justice. Where

there is power, Law cannot co-exist with Justice and we find ourselves in the realm of the mythic (a

term in Benjamin's work that will demand closer examination). As Werner Hamacher notes in hiscrucial reading of the text, 'As long as history remains constrained by the circular succession of

imposing forces of law, it cannot be the medium of justice'. 21 For where 'Justice', writes Benjamin, 'is

the principle of all divine end-making, power the principle of all mythic lawmaking'22.

It is in the light of the 'pernicious' function of the order of law that Benjamin will raise the question

of another figure of violence, one which would not be related to law in either an imposing or

preserving capacity. This will be the figure of 'divine violence', a paradoxically non-violent, or 'pure

violence', which, unlike the immediate mythic violence of the Gods has no stake in bringing to light a

new law, and unlike mediate legal violence, is not inherently compromised by insertion within cause-

and-effect, means-ends calculations. For the means-ends relationship, as has been shown, is inherently

ambiguous; ends which are posited as of a higher sphere than human existence, efface the moment of

their own positing in which they are implicated in struggle for power. 23

It is for Benjamin, only a 'pure means', that may not always already be compromised with regard to

opening up toward justice. At first glance 'pure means' will itself seem a paradoxical expression, formeans are usually defined in relations to an end, to which it finds itself teleologically subordinate.

Like the Kantian concept of the beautiful, adapted for a political context, a pure means would

constitute a purposiveness without a purpose, a non-instrumental political practice. One of the central

examples from Benjamin's work of this time which can be used to illustrate the meaning of 'pure

means' is the distinction established by George Sorel between the 'political partial strike' and the

'proletarian general strike'. These are 'antithetical in their relation to violence'. 24 The political strike,

since it involves a willingness to return to work if certain demands are met by the state, constitutes an

instrumental, mediate violence which justifies itself with reference to an end (it is 'violent' in

Benjamin's strict sense because it is extortionate). The proletarian general strike, by contrast, is a

manifestation of a pure means, since 'it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external

concessions and this or that modification of working conditions, but in the determination to resume

only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike

20'It also appears that Sorel touches not merely on a cultural-historical truth but also on a metaphysical truth when hesurmises that in the beginning all right was the prerogative of Kings or nobles, in short, of the mighty; and that mutatismutandis, it will remain so as long as it exists' (CV, 249)

21 See Hamacher, Werner: Afformative, Strike: Benjamins Critique of Violence, in Andrew Benjamin; PeterOsborne: Walter Benjamins Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, London; New York, 1994, p. 115

22 CV, 24823 Nietzsche's Genealogy of Moralswould be an exemplary instance of revealing the instrumental value of ends which

present themselves as external to the power relations that define social existence.24 CV, 248


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not so much causes but consummates'.25 Such a strike is a pure means because it involves no reference

to an ends that can be ratified by the given order of law and the violence it represents and

monopolises. For this reason the general strike must be understood as non-programmatic and non-

utopian for both these impulses have an inherently lawmaking character by virtue of constitutingattempts to insert the future within an already determinate, teleological order. 26

While the justness of mediate, legal violence, is made impure by the struggle over power, a pure

violent means have no stake in establishing or protecting a certain order of existence, and thus can

manifest a qualitatively different justice, one distinct from the order of law. According to Benjamin,

the revolutionary violence of the proletarian general strike constitutes 'the highest manifestation of pure

violence by man',27 Divine violence is the zero level of mythic violence; it is the moment of violent

alteration, where what-has-been is suspended violently (gewalt in its most general meaning of a power

or capacity, it must be remembered, cannot be totally excluded in principle from human problems),

yet before the becoming of the earth demands for the positive content of effect. This makes the

distinction between them dangerous and ambiguous: '[O]nly mythic violence, not divine, will be

recognisable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory force of

violence is not visible to men'.28 In their instant of en-action, where whatever was law is suspended, it

is impossible to tell whether the violence will turn out to be the mythic, fated violence, or divine

violence that opens up to a justice that exceeds retribution. However, in effects, they are antithetic in

all regards

'If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries,

the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution,

divine power only expiates; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling

blood...Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure

violence over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts

it'29

Where violence reveals itself as mythic, as we will see, fate rears its head to efface any trace of

undecidability through naturalising the continuity of the order of law. One power (macht) replaced by

25 CV, 24826 This non-utopian impulse will appear many years later in On the Concept of History, as a prohibition againstimages of the future. See Benjamin, Walter (1999) Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations. London:Pimlico.

27 CV, 252. Divine Violence is perhaps the most controversial of all Benjamin's figures. For more on the relationshipbetween 'pure violence' and 'divine violence', see Khatib, Sami Towards a Politics of 'Pure Means': Walter Benjamin andthe Question of Violence(2011) Available online at: http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org

28 CV, 25229 CV, 252. While this passage has provoked strong interpretations, some implicating Benjamin in the German impulse that

was to become Nazism, these readings down-play the centrality of Benjamin's central example of a 'sanctionedmanifestation' of the divine; 'the educative power' (which will come into focus later). The central instance of thisinterpretation would be Derrida's, Force of Lawin which 'lethal without spilling blood' comes to be read as a precursor tothe concentration camp. Many commentators, however, have cast doubt on the need to make such an alignment. SeeHamacher (1994), Agamben (1998), Sinnerbank (2009).


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another in the re-iteration of law. If the presence of power prevents mythic law from being a vehicle

of justice, then the presence of the divine as antithetical to law is the opening to ethics and therefore

to the possibility of justice. For divine violence, 'deposes' the law, by suspending it in its immediate

and effective link to the limited 'justice' of bloody retribution upon 'mere life'. As Andrew Benjaminexpresses it, divine violence constitutes 'a caesura of allowing', or what has been referred to as a

generative interruption that suspends the law and the temporal determination and continuity established

and maintained by law.30 In this suspension, the possibility of novelty is opened up, 'allowed', but is

not yet formed, or determinable in advance. Divine violence thus constitutes the first figure of

discontinuity to emerge in this account of Benjamin's thinking of the suspension of myth. As an

interruption that allows, divine gewalt comes to function not as bloody violence, but rather as an

operative power that, through introducing the possibility of difference into a continuity petrified by its

past, by what Marx referred earlier as 'the tradition of all dead generations' that impose a fated image

of historical time which 'weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living'. This nightmare is the

continuity of incontestable law understood as that which achieves justice through a mythic 'blood-

letting' that presents itself as fated. Benjamin proposes a 'pure violence' that suspends the application

of law to what he will call 'mere life', a figure of biological existence whose symbol is blood. Capital

punishment as retribution is a violence which both preserves and re-establishes law. It is therefore an

exemplary instance of bloody lawful violence, wherein 'justice', violence, law, and power are co-

present. The name Benjamin gives to this co-presence and its naturalisation by which is gains an

automatic legitimacy is fate (schicksal).31

At 'the origin of law', Benjamin writes, is 'violence crowned by fate (schicksal)'. The 'power [of the

law] resides', he continues, 'in the fact that there is only one fate and that what exists, and in

particular what threatens, belongs inviolably to its order'.32 The relationships in operation within these

quotations demand to be worked through with care. The first thing to note is that law, violence, and

fate are placed into a conjunction in which they reinforce each other. An order of Law is established

through violence, and violence is 'crowned' by fate. 33 The 'crowning' occurs through the incorporation

of this violence within the order imposed by fate. The violence which, in preserving also threatens is

30 See Benjamin, Andrew. (2004) 'Benjamin's Modernity' in Ferris, David [ed] The CambridgeCompanion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this essay he traces the path and

persistence of the figure of the 'caesura' in Benjamin's work. It arguably constitutes the most general instance ofdiscontinuity in Benjamin's philosophical project.31As the central interpretive question within a short text that continues to provoke commentary ninety years after it was

written, the force of the distinction between these types of violence will always demand further development.

32 CV, 242.33The german here is very close to the translation; gekrnte, which is derived from krnen, meaning to crown. Benjaminmost likely chooses the metaphor of the crown because of its affinity with authority


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immanent to one fate. This is because in threatening it merely opposes law, and the lawmaking

violence represented by it, with its own lawmaking violence. These two violences are qualitatively the

same with regards to Justice; because both guarantee power, and in this impurity are thus

irreconcilable with Justice.

What necessitates the work of critique is the existence of an operation in which presence of power at

the heart of the order of law is effaced. Once signs of this presence are erased, law and 'justice' can

be conflated. This allows law to justify both its existence, and that of the violence which establishes

and preserves it. Law, especially if aware of its origins, may claim to 'act in the interest of all

mankind'.34 While this justifiably may provoke the lowly, miserable thief to question how his

punishment may benefit the interests of all mankind, there are of course far more vulgar cases where

even 'in the name of mankind' is laughable. The operation by which law and justice, are conflated

through the effacement of power Benjamin gives the name fate. Fate is the name given to retro-active

justification of a law whose only foundation is the violence that establishes and preserves it and the

interests of power which it serves. This order imposed by fate is an oblique, obscure and threatening

mixture of power, law, and violence that Derrida has called 'the mystical foundations of authority'. 35

Definitive of such a foundation is what Benjamin will call 'demonic ambiguity'. The foundation is

ambiguous, and in being so is all the more threatening: the ambiguity of the foundation of authority

always makes it susceptible to presenting itself as a manifestation of the divine, and thus of

incontestable Justice. As the embodiment of fate the violence of law is 'uncertain'. In the case of acriminal, they may or may not get caught, nonetheless apprehension threatens. And after the

submission of the criminal to the law whether apprehension was in fact fate or merely bad luck will

never truly be known. Ambiguity manifests itself most clearly in the above case of Niobe. The law

that her hubris brings to pass is singular and burst upon her 'from the uncertain ambiguous sphere of

fate'.36 Her fate is most ambiguous precisely because it is not a punishment for the breaking of any

law that existed prior to the violence. She is punished for a transgression that only became a

transgression after the fact.

What Benjamin calls 'fate imposed violence' decides upon the justification of violent means. In the

overthrowing of one violent order of law by another, only fate can justify. It seems that in

theCritique of Violence fate, understood as a locus of the mythic, is thus being used in two

distinct yet interconnected ways; As naming both the process through which the mythic violence

which imposes and preserves the order of law as constituted as inevitable, and as the naturalised

continuity of law's historical reiteration. The work of fate functions through a process of naturalisation,

34

CV, 24235 Derrida, Jacques. Force of Law In Cardozo Law Review, 1990 (Vol. 11)

36 CV, 248


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where nature comes to name a locus of fate that excludes the operative presence of what will come to

be named authentic historical time. In an essay from two years after the Critique of Violence on

the problem of the historical drama, Benjamin relates fate, nature, and history;

Nature presents the factual reality of historical events as fate. In fate lies concealed the latent

resistance to the never-ending flow of historical development. Wherever there is fate, a piece

of history has become nature.37

At stake within this set-up are both the significance of events, and their susceptibility to being co-

opted to resist historical change. Where human history, and the events and activity that constitute it

can be understood as open to difference, fate constitutes the attempts to block the creation of historyand conserve what has been through insertion that which is, within a pre-given structure. To be bound

to fate is to be bound to a temporal operation that subjects the 'never-ending flow' definitive of history

to a necessity that constrains the present and future to the repetition of the same. This inevitable

continuity of repetition works through inference: since the past appears haunted by sameness, the

present and future will also be subject to sameness. Any deviation from this continuity is judged as

not in keeping with the 'nature' that observation of 'history' reveals, and thus as under the hold of fate

and the inevitable failure of that which challenges its hegemony. In the Critique of Violence what

becomes natural and given as fate, is the relationship between law and mythic violence where power

(macht) has been effaced and punishment or retribution comes to appear as natural and just. Where

nature is present its continuity is assumed. It is because the mythic violence inseparable from the

order law presents itself as an instance of justice, the possibility of difference of pure means or

pure violence is excluded.

The fated continuity of the cycle of mythic, legal violence is the repetition of the same in which

power is replaced by power. From the critical perspective of the text all legal violence lawmaking

or law-preserving is fundamentally identical, meaning that any particular order of law is merelythreatened by another, which, at its heart, is also power-making. Just means have no place in mediate,

legal violence, for ends are compromised by their relationship to the 'pernicious' function of the order

of Law. In being unmasked as identical to immediate mythic violence, any instance of legal violence

can only be a reiteration of 'only one fate'. This fate is always the same in the sense that it works to

efface the irreconcilable gap which critique can show between the violence of law and justice. The

past of law, therefore, is not so much a historybut rather a fate. This is because within law and the

violence which establishes and preserves it there is an exclusion of the possibility of self-

transformation, for the preservation of already existing law can only brings about its violent re-37 Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Calderon and Hebbel' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press. p. 365


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iteration.

The fate of the order of law is being caught in the repetition definitive of myth for, as Benjamin noted

again some twenty years later in the preparatory notes to one of his final texts, 1940's On the

Concept of History, 'the essence of mythic happenings is recurrence'. 38

The ambiguity of a fated continuity in which law subjects life to mythic violence is always demonic

because within it is the sign of something undecided, in relation to which human freedom is not yet

secure from. This is significant of a more general problem of myth which we will now turn to.

Perhaps the central function of myth is to preclude the possibility of an active, critical engagement and

contestation with that which it announces; the order of law (and mythic violence) as inherently just

because fated. And due to the exclusion of the possibility of self-transformation, this fate demands to

be lived out.

38 Benjamin, Walter (2006) On the Concept of History Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press. p. 404


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The central antithetical opposition of the Critique of Violence, between the mythic and the divine,

is developed from one of Benjamin's early influences, Hermann Cohen's The Religion of Reason out

of the Sources of Judaism(1919). In that text a theoretical framework is developed providing grounds

for a critique of pagan, mythic ethics from the standpoint of radical, ethical monotheism that is

purified of obligatory mythic ritual. While the Critique of Violence extends this framework into

the political sphere, Benjamin's earlier text Fate and Character remains in closer proximity to the

ethical sphere which Cohen intended for the opposition. In this text, as we will see, Benjamin

criticises fate through attacking the 'dogma of the natural guilt of human life, of original guilt, the

irredeemable nature of which constitutes the doctrine, and its occasional redemption the cult, of

paganism...'39Fate and Character stages the interruption of the pagan, mythic, 'pre-historical' world

of recurrence and fate that occurs in tragedy. What tragedy stages, according to Benjamin's

philosophico-historical perspective, is a revolution that is at once political, ethical, and historical. In

tragedy, the cessation of mythic world of fate and guilt is staged. Before we turn to look at Benjamin's

historico-philosophical view of tragedy, in which victory over the pagan, mythic world occurs 'for the

first time', we need to further explore what is at stake in a mythic apparatus in which guilt necessitates

the violence of retribution under the guise of fate.

Definitive of the function of myth is an explanatory capacity which, in explaining, mystifies, and

therefore denies access to the very thing requiring explanation. What this mystification achieves is the

effacement of the possibility of an active engagement with and thus transformation of the very

thing obscured by the work of myth. To this extent myth can be defined an an immediacy which

excludes the possibility of contestation. As myth, 'fate' functions to explain the appearance of

continuity, but, in an explanatory circularity, it is the persistence of the continuity of appearance that

functions to explain fate. The power of myth, therefore, can be attributed to the passivity it demands

from those under its hold. This passivity is connected to the fact that myth never presents itself as

39 This critique, for both Cohen and Benjamin, is directed as much at Antiquity as at Christianity's dogma of original sin.

Benjamin, Walter (1996). Fate and Character in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. p. 206 (Hereafter, 'FC')


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such. To those under its hold, myth presents itself, for instance, as 'truth' or as 'nature', or as 'fate'. For

one 'obviously' cannot contest that which is given to be true, natural, or fated. As a myth then, fate

functions as self-fulfilling prophecy, through precluding the possibility of engaging with its production

as myth.

The struggle against myth can be understood to begin as a struggle over Law, where law has a

determining effect upon the naturalisation of certain violences, and the blows of fate that they are

presented as representing. In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin observes that one of the first victories over

the mythic ('pre-historic') world consisted in the writing down of law.40 Only through the possibility of

actively engaging with the letter of the law could it be accurately contested. In the mythic world the

vagueness of law served the rulers who wielded it: it could be easily manipulated to suit the purposes

of those who were granted the privilege of immediate access (power). If one was not of the privileged

classes the law remained unassailable (Protestantism is also founded on a struggle of this form). One

could transgress the law unawares (as in the case of Niobe) and become subject to violent retribution.

Such a transgression, along with the violent atonement that follows, would present itself, in the

understanding of the law, not as accidental but as fate or destiny. What this achieves is both the

manifestation of law and the naturalisation of violent atonement, where 'nature' names a locus of fate.

The order of law, in its most mythic form of all is the law of the Gods, which, in being given as fate,

demands passive obligation. The question of an active contestation of the order of law, is both

analogous to, and will shed light upon, the struggle against fate (which is, by definition, a struggle toboth rescue and construct history). For as we have seen fate (not the justice excluded by law's

pernicious function), and the violence which it explains and naturalises, stands at the origin of law.

At stake within Fate and Character is the 'nature of man'. 41 Both 'fate' and 'character' stake a

claim upon this nature. Fate, schicksal has cognates in schicklich, meaning 'proper, fitting, seemly'and schicklichkeit, meaning 'propriety, seemliness, appropriateness'. Fate then, makes a claim upon

what is proper to man's nature and thus to the possible future of man; it is a temporal operation that

subjects human existence to what is already given by myth. These claims are tied to the sphere of

Law, which not only sanctions and justifies a violence tied to power, but also makes claims upon

what is possible and impossible within human affairs. In contradistinction character (charakter) also

makes a claim upon what is proper to man. The two claims are irreconcilable once each gets placed

within an appropriate sphere.

40 Benjamin, Walter (1999) Franz Kafka, inIlluminations. London: Pimlico. p. 11441 FC, 205


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The investigation of the mythic world in Fate and Character begins with the observation that guilt

and misfortune are intrinsic and essential to fate; 'Insofar as something is fate', Benjamin writes, 'it is

misfortune and guilt'.42 Guilt orientates the guilty toward a certain course of activity. As an imposition

it limits the possibility of autonomous activity. Guilt also has an explanatory function; eventsconspired in this way because you are guilty. Guilt is thus an ideological category; it produces

obligations that are in the service of protecting a certain order of existence. The appearance of a

necessary correlation between guilt and retribution is what defines the necessity of fate. In this guilt

context, the misfortune caused by guilt comes to appear as fate, which is to say, as inevitable. With

the evocation of guilt we are at the heart of the sphere of law, the 'residue' of the 'demonic' in which

misfortune imposed by fate and guilt are connected to the mythic violence at the heart of the order of

law. The order of law 'condemns not to punishment but to guilt. Fate is the guilt context of the

living...the guilt context is temporal in a totally inauthentic way[..]'. 43 Where guilt is present, it must be

atoned for, and this 'atonement', where mythic forms of law persists, is a bloody retributive violence

that appears as fated. This is a logic of cause and effect determination, whereby guilt strictly entails

punishment, which presents itself as the fulfilment of a justice. Benjamin describes the order of law a

'residue of the demonic', for the reason that this cause and effect logic persists at the heart of modern

legal systems of guilt and justice through retributive atonement.44 Guilt therefore, is a motor of the

mythic world of fate, power and bloody violence. The fate systems of antiquity described in the

Critique of Violence, are defined by guilt and atonement. It is for this reason that Benjamin

declares, in an essay contemporaneous to this period, that 'outside the realm of guilt, fate loses all its

power' (377). As a locus for the dominance of myth a closer examination of the currency that schuld

has in Benjamin's work at this time is demanded, in order to pose the question of what, for Benjamin,

constitutes the setting in which the fated link between guilt, life, and the violence of law has been

identified.

In a note from around the same time as Fate and Character Benjamin characterises guilt as 'a

category of world history...Every world-historical moment is indebted and indebting...a state of the

world is...always guilty with regard to some other later one'. 45 As a 'world-historical category', guilt-

history names the becoming-guilty of existence. The german word for guilt is schuld, commonlytranslated as 'guilt' but which also, in contrast to english, brings with it connotations of debt and blame.

As a 'category of world history' this becoming guilty of existence can ensure the linear direction of

history, and the unity and given-ness of the significance and meaning of the past. This is because, in

the context of 'world history', 'guilt' can functions as standpoint from which everything that happens

can be ascribed a continuous, homogeneous meaning. History understood as an engine of guilt

production. What guilt specifically introduces is a particular temporal relation between moments, that

42 FC, 20443 FC, 20544 Although modern legal institutions grounds its decisions in a thorough investigation of a chain of events.

45 Quoted in Hamacher, Werner: Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion" , in diacritics, Volume 32,Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2002. p. 82


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contributes to its status as being 'temporal in an inauthentic way'. From the perspective of guilt, a

given moment is merely the indebted offspring of another state of existence, a state that is itself to

blame for what it has given rise to. Guilt appears here as a genealogical category of descent. That

which came prior has had something taken from it by that which follows, and by extension, whatevercame before has withheld from that which follows. In the mythic world of guilt and fate, every state

of existence is guilty to the extent that it releases another deficient state and bears the guilt for it. In

every moment there is an absence, a lack by virtue of the previous moment being the bearer of its

guilt, but this guilt eternally recurs since every moment that follows will be subject to an analogous

deficiency. A moment in the guilt nexus is a locus of absence, which is to say, no moment is fully

identical with itself, it is always dependent upon another within the temporal context of guilt: For that

which is implicated within the never ending continuity of guilt and atonement in fate, there is no

moment which can be properly differentiated from any other. There is an inseparability between

moments, a reciprocal obligation between two states of the world. From the perspective of guilt, there

is co-habitation.

This is why Benjamin, following Cohen, will characterise the pagan, mythic world, with its fated

systems of guilt and atonement as proto-ethical, and as ultimately pre-historical. 'The perpetual

concatenation of guilt and atonement' leaves no room for a relation other than that given by the guilt

context of fate. There is no room for the admittance of a modicum of indeterminacy and thus freedom

that is required for properly ethical action. Where guilt is dominant moral responsibility is always

delegated and diffuse. As Werner Hamacher observes in his incomparable analysis of Capitalism as

Religion,

Acting in the guilt-nexus means following an obligation to act, dictated in advance by another

and is therefore only a form of not acting. Anyone who is bound by guilt and obligation

does not do what he does, but instead executes a preordained program and falls fatally, lethally

for action itself, into the predestination of an inheritance from whose succession he is not free

to abstain.46

In the context of guilt there is nothing that is indeterminate. Every occurrence is inseparable from

another to which it is in debt or is at fault. All activity occurs as a determinate particular within a

universal guilt. Guilt as history, of course, is fate; the eternal recurrence of guilt and retribution is a

repetition of the same, and the inevitable re-iteration of mythic orders. Human history can only occur

within a structure in which differentiation, indeterminacy, contingency, and thus the possibility of

freedom is admitted. The exclusion of ethics and of the possibility of indeterminacy is because

It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable. The46 Hamacher, Werner: Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion" , in diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4,

Fall-Winter 2002. p. 85


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judge can perceive fate wherever he pleases; with every judgment he must blindly dictate fate.

It is never man but only the life in him that it strikes the part involved in natural guilt and

misfortune by virtue of semblance47

The incurrence of fate orientated around 'the guilty person' is deeply ambiguous. Quoting Kafka's K.,

Benjamin observes elsewhere that one is condemned 'not only in innocence but also in ignorance'. 48 In

myth one can become guilty without having suspected a thing. The incurrence of fate, Benjamin notes,

'is never the result of the moral fallibility of the human agent'.49 It does not stem from a clear and

distinct moral transgression that occurs in the midst of events. Because the guilt context is not yet

ethical, fate is always already incurred; it awaits and pre-exists its victim. The origin of guilt is

invisible to those who are involved; for this reason it corresponds 'to the natural condition of the

living' (204). This guilt is a natural guilt, 'not unlike original sin'. 50 Like original sin, natural guilt has

always already been incurred. Its origin, if it is even possible to speak of one, occurs in the deepest

ambiguity of myth, where apples and snakes are explanations that explain nothing. One finds oneself

in the midst of the temporal form of natural guilt and fate, like 'the living' in Marx' formulation find

themselves in 'circumstances existing already'. This production, its history the becoming nature of

guilt is effaced and what remains appears as an always already given guilt. 'The guilt context',

Benjamin writes, 'is temporal in a totally inauthentic way...this time can at every moment be be made

simultaneous with another (not present)...It is not an autonomous time []'.51 That the time of guilt is

inauthentic and not autonomous precludes the possibility of a moment of time that has become the

locus of possibility for an ethical activity that exceeds the mythic recurrence of fate and guilt. For a

time that cannot be differentiated and separated from guilt cannot be one of 'authentic' human

historical activity, one which constitutes an opening to justice that is not retributive.

It is for this reason that it is not 'man', understood as an ethical agent, but 'mere life' that the mythic

violence of fate strikes. The semblance (schein), or, as Sam Weber translates it 'phenomenality', that

Benjamin refers to here is a result of the production of human being or 'man' as 'mere life'. 52 When

'man' is reduced to its 'natural' and biological dimension, as a given entity, without history (and the

differentiation and indeterminacy this implies), it becomes subject to fate and guilt. Nature, like myth,designates a locus of recurrence. To the extent something is natural, its presence in human affairs is

inevitable, yet any explanation of this presence is obscured through the tautology of myth which

precludes the possibility of contestation. The fate of 'mere life' in its semblance of guilt is death. That

is why bloody violence upon 'the life within man', constitutes 'atonement' for guilt, and give rise to a

limited 'justice'. In the Critique of Violence Benjamin notes that 'mere life' is the 'marked bearer

47 FC, 20448 Benjamin, Walter (1999) Franz Kafka, inIlluminations. London: Pimlico. p. 11449 Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Calderon and Hebbel' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press. p. 37750 Ibid51 FC, 20452Weber, Samuel (2008) Benjamin's AbilitiesCambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 260


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of guilt'.53 This life becomes subjected to retributive 'blood letting' in the name of a justice that is

inherently compromised by its relation to the order of law and the violence of power (macht) at its

core. Fate, that ambiguous and unjustifiable fiat linking guilt inevitably to mere life constitutes a pre-

determined response (retribution) to an already given temporal context. What is precluded within thisstructure is the possibility of negotiating and contesting the inevitability that repeats and reiterates the

same, that is to say, history as guilt-history or history as 'one fate'. It is only with the suspension of

the inevitability that cuts across this setting that a historical time can be located which belongs neither

to guilt or to fate. What persists in the suspension of this inevitability is the presence of an ongoing,

incomplete process. Where the blood-letting retributive justice of mythic violence has a conclusive

finality to it the dropping of the trapdoor beneath the feet of the criminal, the falling guillotine, the

push of a red button by contrast, 'pure means' (without ends), 'justice', are ongoing, incomplete, and

demand activity. For this reason, it is only through identification of the 'mistaken confusion' between

the 'order of law' with 'justice', that the suspension of the mythic, temporal apparatus of guilt, fate,

bloody violence, and law, can occur. According to Benjamin's historico-philosophical perspective, the

location where this first occurred, where the possibility of overcoming myth was first identified, was

in tragedy.

While Benjamin's theory of tragedy is gestured toward in Fate and Character, it is developed at

length in the study of the Origin of German Tragic Drama. The condition for the possibility of tragedy,

for Benjamin, is the dominance of the mythic in which man is submitted to the will of the gods. This

conception of tragedy and the interruption it stages relates directly to specific situation the Greeks

struggled with. The preeminence of the tragic form within the Greek world is telling about the epoch

that antiquity comes to be understood to inaugurate, that of the monotheistic kernel transmitted west

within the Platonic Dialogues. There are two preliminary things to note about this succession that will

be returned to in more depth in the following chapter. First, that Benjamin does not understand thissuccession as continuous, but rather, as discontinuous. This is to say, the succession is premised upon

both modes of destruction and beginning. For this reason, forms of activity (gewalt, for example) will

be prioritised. Second, while it constitutes 'a victory', it is emphatically not an unproblematic

reconciliation or return to a unity of subject and substance that Hegelian thought might name beauty

or freedom. Rather, myth and its apparatus of law and fate, as we have learned in modernity, is not

easily disposed of: As early Frankfurt school thinkers have shown, the secularisation that occurs in the

Enlightenment brings with it its own specific 'dialectic' in which myth returns to modernity in the

form of stratified and naturalised social relations. For this reason, the mode of thinking that is

developed in Benjamin's texts of the early 1920's have resonance with our own time, in the sense that

53 CV, 252


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the laws delineating any epoch have always tended to crystallise into solid mythic institutions that

preclude the possibility of radical contestation. It is only where a given mythic apparatus is suspended

in its immediacy that the possibility of historical activity beyond reiterating fate originates. (This can

be understood as the fundamental meaning behind the well known Maoist phrase 'there is greatdisorder under heaven, the situation is excellent').54

In Benjamin's historico-philosophical theory of tragedy in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the

dominance of myth is brought to an end by the defiant figure of the tragic hero. Their death is

understood as a sacrifice in the name of a new order within which the incontestability of the mythic

worlds' polytheistic powers has been undone. It opens the space for contestation, for the activity of the

demosfrom which the gods have been excluded and human being takes responsibility for its social

existence. The rule of myth is described, as in the Critique of Violence, in terms of 'demonic

ambiguity'. 'The decisive confrontation with the demonic world order gives tragic poetry its historical-

philosophical signature. The tragic relates to the demonic as paradox does to ambiguity'.55 The

polytheism of the mythic world is demonic because, on the one hand no clear hierarchy is permitted

in the economy of the gods, and second because the laws of the gods are not always already given; as

in the case of Niobe, laws may yet exist that will only be revealed in fate imposed violence. At stake

in Greek tragedy, is what Sam Weber has called in his book on Benjamin's Abilitiesa 'principle of

singular identity',56 later exemplified in the Socratic form of the Good, that challenges the ambiguity of

the mythic world. Benjamin's observes that in the wake of tragedy, 'the old rights of the Olympians

are disqualified' to be replaced by a 'new, unknown God'.57

The death of the hero is a prophecy of a new historical epoch and new political structure. But this

prophecy is paradoxical because it occurs in the falling silent of the hero, in their performative refusal

to speak the language of the mythical world they reject. The tragedy and the silence of the hero

announces the isolation of individuality as Man or as Community - which is also a form of

autonomy in which 'Man' will mediate its own affairs without immediate (retributive) intervention by

the gods. Benjamin identifies four interconnected elements of this paradoxical process; it isantagonistic, juridicial, theatrical, and linguistic. There is inherent antagonism by virtue of the heros

refusal to engage with the gods on the previously performed terms (of the gods) which is destructive

of the relational quality previously persistent as fate. It is juridical through taking the form of a trial

by myth, in which the hero is involved 'in an as it were contractual process of atonement' and both

the 're-establishment but also the undermining of an older legal order in the linguistic consciousness of

54

55 Benjamin, Walter. (2003) The Origin of German Tragic Dramatrans. Osborne, John, London: Verso. p. 109 (Hereafter

'Origin')

56 Origin, 10757 Origin, 107


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a renewed community'.58 This simultaneous re-establishment and undermining reveals that the border

between the two worlds, although discontinuous, should not be understood as a clean break.59 Through

entering into a 'contractual process' the hero reveals to himself and to the gods that they are dependent

upon man to maintain their own position in a master-slave relation, and thus the hero transforms therelationship the gods had required to sustain incontestable authority over men. But the language of the

hero is not legal; for in his performative act of falling silent, of refusing to speak, he opens up the

possibility of a judgement upon the law which is not that of the judge or the lawyer. This act of

refusal announces both the possibility and the need for a new language and a new social space.

The new language to emerge is Socratic and the new social space is the amphitheater, whose model is

the juridicial court but where occupying the role of the judge is no longer the law-making and external

demonic gods, but the communal crowd. 'The community attends this appeals trial as controlling

instance, even as judge...But a non liquetalways resounds in the conclusion of tragedy. The solution

to be sure is always resolution or redemption, but it is only ad hoc, problematic, limited'. 60 The

redemption is limited (like all redemptions) since it occurs only in the singular case of the hero,

whose falling silent announces not a new language itself, but the possibilityof a new language. It

constitutes what has been referred to in the previous chapter as a 'caesura of allowing', or generative

interruption without teleological end or determinate image of the future. In the opening of this caesura,

fate is undone, but whether the new language or space will fulfil the possibility inherent within the

break is indeterminate. While our present concerns will focus on the generative opening in inherent intragedy's challenge to mythic law and fate, Benjamin's answer, which takes in the relationship to

Socrates's ironic death as much as the German Tragic Drama itself, will be that limitation and

separation will persist all the way to the present. Socratic irony will be the 'irrevocable epilogue of

tragedy', where 'in place of the sacrificial death of the hero, Socrates provides the example of the

pedagogue', who finds not horror in death but who self-consciously chooses to die in order to produce

a meaningful, transmittable effect.61 However, the 'purely dramatic language' of the Platonic dialogues

undermine the process of secularisation at work in Greek tragic dramas through a reinstatement of the

'Mysterium' of Man that will come ultimately to be institutionalised in Christianity.

62

Tragedy does notbring mythic nexus of fate and guilt to an end; Christianity's dogmatic doctrine of original sin and

atonement returns us to the heart of the mythic in which guilt and fate returns and pervades its belief,

action, and its self-conception. Even underlying the apparently secular system of Capitalism, Benjamin

58 Origin, 11559 Rather there is an interaction between the two worlds in which that which had defined the previous

world undergoes a transformation on the basis of the...

60

Origin, 11761 Origin, 118

62 and then problematised once again in the 'fallen' world that gives rise to the German tragic drama (Origin, 118).


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will identify a 'cultic' core of guilt (schuld), debt, exchange, trade. 63 Nevertheless classical tragedy will

stage for us an interruption of fate that allows us to delineate a conception of justice not linked to law,

guilt, fate or violent retribution.

To what Benjamin calls a 'mystical enslavement' to fate, 'character gives the answer of genius'.64 While

the order of law is the context of fate and mythic violence's efficacy, it is 'in tragedy that the head of

genius lifted itself for the first time from the mist of guilt, for in tragedy demonic fate is breached'. 65

This formulation sets up an opposition between 'genius' and the 'demonic fate' characteristic of the

mythic world. It is not the tragedy itself that constitutes the interruption of fate, but rather it is 'in'tragedy that genius emerges and demonic fate is 'breached'. Inscribed into Benjamin's formulation are

the centrality of forms of activity, signalled by the use of two verbs, lifting and breaching. The

activity which achieves this is the active repetition of myth as tragedy within the amphitheater, and the

active response of the audience to the tragedy. It is in the awakening that tragedy produces that the

mythic, pagan world of polytheistic, ambiguous power is suspended. While 'Man' as 'mysterium'

signals a return to forms of myth and fate, what interests Benjamin's historico-philosophical

perspective is that this is the 'first time' demonic fate suffers defeat, that the possibility of being un-

fated is awakened to.

What is at stake in tragedy is 'demonic fate' and the order of mythic law, violence, and power which

stands behind it. The amphitheater names one expression of the re-distribution of legal power that

occurs in tragedy. The other, is the possibility of what is named in Sophocles' Antigoneas 'wisdom'.66

The story ofAntigoneis well known: Creon, the new King of Thebes decrees that the body of the

rebel Polyneices will not be sanctified by holy rites and will lie exposed where he fell on the

battlefield. Polyneices' sister Antigone, on pain of death, goes against Creon's edict and removes the

body. A furious Creon sentences Antigone to be buried alive. Haemon, the son of Creon, tries andfails to persuade him to spare Antigone. However, after a blind prophet warns Creon that because of

his choices he will 'lose a son of his own loins' for the crimes of leaving Polyneices unburied and for

keeping the living body Antigone under the ground. After initially refusing, a shaken Creon decides to

repent but it is too late and fate is 'crushing': Antigone has taken her own life in the cave. Haemon, in

response, has stabbed himself to death. His mother, Creon's wife, upon learning this also takes her

own life, leaving Creon heart broken at the losses his own action has brought about. The play is

63 See Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Capitalism as Religion' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

64 FC, 20565 FC, 20466 Thanks to Andrew Benjamin for pointing out the productive relationship between Antigoneand Benjamin in his as yet

un-published Life Beyond Violence: Notes on Walter Benjamin's 'Zur Kritik die Gewalt'.


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structured around the contradictory laws to which protagonists declare allegiance: Creon deals out

retribution because of his allegiance to the laws of the (his) polis, and Antigone acts as she does

because of her relation to the law of the family that does not allow her to watch her brother's body

decay. It is through maintaining a relationship to these laws that the misfortune of fate befalls all theprotagonists. However, the last lines of the play illustrate another conflict at work;

Of happiness the chiefest part

Is a wise heart:

And to defraud the gods in aught

With peril's fraught.

Swelling words of high-flown might

Mightily the gods do smite.Chastisement for errors past

Wisdom brings to age at last.67

As opposed to a conflict between particular instances of law, the positioning of wisdom establishes the

determining tension as between law and violent retributive justice on the one hand, and the obtainment

of wisdom through experience on the other. Creon, grief stricken, realises that had he listened to

wisdom he would not have acted in immediate accordance with the law. But wisdom was only present

retrospectively; had wisdom been present before the tragedy, retributive violence (conflated with'justice') would not have been strictly entailed by the law. Where wisdom is present, a different

relationship to the order of law and thus to fate becomes possible.

The presence of wisdom in human being undoes the hold of law in its incontestable link to a pre-

given course of action, and thus 'breaches' fate. As its stands however, the characters of the tragedy

were blind to this; the realisation of the efficacy of wisdom occurs only after it is too late, after fate

has befallen the characters. It is through the blindness of the main representatives of the two opposing

laws; Creon to the law of the polis and Antigone to the law of the family, that fate befalls. This is the

tragedy; that fate became subject to interruption after it was already too late. Wisdom here is the name

of that which occurs from the experience of, in this case, tragedy. Creon learns that undoing fate

would have required the suspension of the order of law in its immediacy. Had mythic law been

contested, the violent retribution of fate could have been held back. The characters are fated because

the possibility of self-transformation, of awakening to the need to suspend the law in its immediacy, is

not available to them when they need it most. This is what distinguishes the amphitheaters audience

from the characters; the audience have access to wisdom before it is already too late. This is what

defines Tragedy, not as an occurrence within a play but as an artistic form with socio-political and

67 Sophocles. (2009) Antigonetrans. Storr. F. Available Online at: www.royaltyfreeplays.com, 42


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historical dimensions. The tragedy is tragic because it repeats mythic violence before the characters

can awaken to wisdom. InTragedy as that which occurs within an amphitheater, repetition takes on an

additional character. 'If myth is a trial', Benjamin writes, 'tragedy is its depiction and revision in one'.68

In repeating within a space where the communal crowd take over the role of the gods as observers,'wisdom', understood as what exists where incontestable law is suspended in its immediacy, becomes

possible before it is too late. The audience already know that wisdom will have been required. What

had appeared inevitably subject to the immediate determinations of fate and law, becomes other than it

was. For the audience, the tragedy is a repetition in which the possibility of wisdom becomes

retroactively inserted into the past. The inevitability of fate could have been undone. By repeating

(depicting and revising) the myth in the amphitheater, the wisdom that becomes available after

experience, after it is too late, becomes always already available. In tragedy, as the staging of the

discontinuity between two times; the inauthentic time of guilt and the 'authentic' historical time of

human activity, 'awakening' occurs. The motif of awakening is not without significance in Benjamin's

work. Years later, in the Paris Arcades ProjectBenjamin will write that 'The genuine liberation from

an epoch...has the structure of awakening in this respect as well; it is entirely ruled by cunning. Only

with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream'.69 The 'cunning' of the

awakening in tragedy is the intervention of the audience into the time of myth. Myth, like tragedy is

defined by repetition. The difference however is that in tragedy the active construction of this

repetition in some sense tricks, fools, myth into revealing, through repetition within an alternative site

(the amphitheater), its contingent, artificial production as fate.

This awakening figures in Fate and Character as the the 'head of genius' that 'lifted itself from the

mist of guilt'.70 While what Benjamin means exactly by 'genius' is unclear from the text, a distinction

gestured toward inGoethe's Elective Affinitiesbetween 'Genius' and 'Genie' forms the beginning of

an answer. 'Genie' relates to what in english would be called the individual genius, (the heroic artist-

creator), while 'Genius', by contrast, catches a more essential relation 'of a human being to art'. 71

Genius then is never an individual person, but always rather a capacity to create. However, the most

crucial comment on 'genius' occurs in a book of writings Benjamin had collected from 1923 namedOne Way Street. 'Genius' figures in a short section titled Standard Clock

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work

throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in

closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each68 Origin, 11669 Benjamin, Walter. (1999) The Arcades Project. Trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press. G1, 7

70 FC, 20371Benjamin, Walter (1996) Goethe's Elective Affinities in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press. p. 329


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caesura and the heavy blows of fate fall like gentle sleep into his workshop labour. Around it

he draws a charmed circle of fragments. 'Genius is application'72

Crucial to this formulation is the emphasis upon the productive nature of the uncompleted fragment.

For genius, the state of non-completion is not a form of disheartening failure, but rather is significant

of the presence of possibility and contingency and thus of freedom. This is why Benjamin writes in

Fate and Characterthat in genius, 'Complication [of demonic guilt] becomes simplicity, fate

freedom'.73 The uncompleted fragment is not what remains after failure, but is rather an originary

condition for the further creation of novelty that is not constrained by an already determinate structure.

On the other hand, finality and closure signifies determination, the absence of possibility. Once a work

is designated as 'finished', the contingency and possibility that characterises a work in its uncompleted,

fragmentary state is eradicated. It is in the light of this that the wonderful saying of Paul Valery that 'a

poem is never finished, only abandoned' has its greatest currency. What is incomplete and in process

retains the productive possibility of not yet being subsumed into what is given as 'fate,' 'nature', or

self-evident.

If the dominance of incontestable mythic forms of law and always brings with it an already given and

determinate fate, the 'wisdom' that results from the 'lifting' of the 'head of genius' brings with it the

ever present possibility of revision, difference, and indeterminacy. Wisdom occurs through a 'caesura

of allowing' in which the immediate determinations of fate and law are suspended. For example, a

condition of philosophy, understood as a love of wisdom, is laws suspension in its immediacy. This is

to say, philosophy in its most general sense, can only occur where that which is already given has

become subject to contestation. Only where the laws of the gods is not absolute can philosophy occur.

The same, as will be shown, is the case with justice. It is only where the law is suspended in its

immediate link to guilt, fate, and 'justice' that an alternative justice becomes thinkable. This suspension,

as already alluded, is the motive of 'divine violence'.

Late in the Critique of Violence divine violence receives a crucial formulation that fundamentally

separates it from the 'barbarism' of mythic violence:

The divine power is attested not only by the religious tradition but is also found in present-day

life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form

stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations. These are defined, therefore, not by

miracles directly performed by God, but by the expiating moment in them that strikes without

72

Benjamin, Walter (1996) One Way Street in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press. p. 446

73 FC, 205


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bloodshed and finally, by the absence of all law-making. To this extent it is justifiable to call

this violence, too, annihilating; but it is so only relatively, with regard to goods, right, life, and

suchlike, never absolutely, with regard to the soul of the living 74

Many things have to be noted from this formulation. What does Benjamin mean here by the 'educative

power' as an instance of divine violence? The wager here is that the educative power should be

understood as thepowerof wisdom or of genius. Wisdom or genius can be violent to the extent that

they are implicated in a struggle with the order of law and the mystical fate it imposes on life. 'In its

perfected form', that is, uncompromised by polemical purposes, the educative power is free of all law-

making. This means it does not have a stake in any sanctioning forms of existence that are tied up

with power (macht) and all its products of goods, right, and life. 75 While it is implicated in this

struggle, this is not its purpose; it does not exist as a means to annihilate mythic law. Rather it is what

it is and it does what it does. It is purposive without purpose, and as such, in this paradoxical,undecidable vagueness Benjamin associates it with the divine. What the educative power, as instance

of divine violence effects, is the possibility of contesting anylaw that is presented as incontestable. As

pure and bloodless, the educative power violently undermines, 'annihilates' the validity of any law that

is given as a-priori just. The educative power, proximate to wisdom and genius, is a 'pure means' that,

by virtue of its relation to a time of human activity whose structure is not already determined in

advance, allows the fated, inevitable link between law and violent, retributive 'justice', to be un-fated,

that is, to be contested. It introduces a human mediacy into law, one that both opens up the question

of a justice that exceeds law, and to the concept of historical time in which such a justice, emerging

on the basis of the suspension of the order of mythic law, can emerge.

Both genius, wisdom, and the 'educative power' occur in and through the suspension of the mythic

apparatus of law, fate, guilt, and violence. They constitute processes that have no finality inscribed

within them. On the one hand wisdom is not something which comes to an end but which must be

perpetually re-constituted on the basis of experience. Genius, on the other hand,

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