Hope in Theory and Praxis: From Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to Benjamin’s ‘Divine Violence’ Fotini Vaki Abstract The aim of the paper is to reveal how T.W. Adorno’s and W. Benjamin’s criticisms of the Hegelian dialectic lead directly to two divergent accounts of history which also imply different answers as to whether the hope for a better world might still exist. Both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s starting points have been the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of history, the motto of which is the famous Cunning of Reason. According to that, violence and antagonisms are always aufgehoben, that is, ‘converted’ into an instrument of historical reason, contributing thereby, to the overall harmony of historical progress. However, although Adorno remains loyal to the Hegelian negativity and tries to correct its ‘closure’ by means of its own method, namely that of immanent critique, Benjamin subverts it by developing his concept of the ‘now-time.’ Although the Adornian insights on the ‘totally administered world’ can hardly signify the hope for the possibility of a better world, yet his Negative Dialectics, as the effort to disclose and ‘correct’ the inconsistency of the Hegelian dialectics by insisting on its open, never-ending and hence, subversive character, becomes the exercise of hope par excellence. By identifying itself however with the never-ending work of consciousness’s critical self-reflection which unmasks the false harmony of the Hegelian system, Adorno’s hope becomes an intellectual exercise. Benjamin’s critique of Hegel on the contrary, leads to his materialist historiography of the dialectical images according to which historical fragments are removed from a context in which they were recorded as insignificant and constitute a constellation i.e. an image suggesting a new interpretation. The political synonym of the dialectical image which at the same is the historical token of hope is his idea of revolution interpreted in terms of ‘Divine Violence.’ Key Words: Negative Dialectic, history, Hegel, Marx, dialectical images, Jetztzeit, mythic violence, ‘Divine Violence’, hope. ***** 1. From Voltaire to Adorno or Why our World is Not the Best of All Possible Worlds Lisbon’s tremendous earthquake in 1755, throughout which, thousands of people died, motivated Voltaire to write his famous Candid 1 which is a bitter comment –almost a parody- on Leibniz’s ultra-optimism that ‘our world is the best of all possible worlds.’ Leibniz’s optimism, on the one
Transcript
Hope in Theory and Praxis: From Adorno’s NegativeDialectics to Benjamin’s ‘Divine Violence’
Fotini Vaki
AbstractThe aim of the paper is to reveal how T.W. Adorno’s and W. Benjamin’scriticisms of the Hegelian dialectic lead directly to two divergent accounts ofhistory which also imply different answers as to whether the hope for a betterworld might still exist. Both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s starting points havebeen the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of history, the motto of whichis the famous Cunning of Reason. According to that, violence andantagonisms are always aufgehoben, that is, ‘converted’ into an instrument ofhistorical reason, contributing thereby, to the overall harmony of historicalprogress. However, although Adorno remains loyal to the Hegelian negativityand tries to correct its ‘closure’ by means of its own method, namely that ofimmanent critique, Benjamin subverts it by developing his concept of the‘now-time.’ Although the Adornian insights on the ‘totally administeredworld’ can hardly signify the hope for the possibility of a better world, yet hisNegative Dialectics, as the effort to disclose and ‘correct’ the inconsistencyof the Hegelian dialectics by insisting on its open, never-ending and hence,subversive character, becomes the exercise of hope par excellence. Byidentifying itself however with the never-ending work of consciousness’scritical self-reflection which unmasks the false harmony of the Hegeliansystem, Adorno’s hope becomes an intellectual exercise. Benjamin’s critiqueof Hegel on the contrary, leads to his materialist historiography of thedialectical images according to which historical fragments are removed froma context in which they were recorded as insignificant and constitute aconstellation i.e. an image suggesting a new interpretation. The politicalsynonym of the dialectical image which at the same is the historical token ofhope is his idea of revolution interpreted in terms of ‘Divine Violence.’
1. From Voltaire to Adorno or Why our World is Not the Best ofAll Possible Worlds
Lisbon’s tremendous earthquake in 1755, throughout which,thousands of people died, motivated Voltaire to write his famous Candid1which is a bitter comment –almost a parody- on Leibniz’s ultra-optimism that‘our world is the best of all possible worlds.’ Leibniz’s optimism, on the one
hand, constitutes a more articulate and sophisticated version of A. Pope’sphilosophical poem ‘An Essay on Man’ in which the world is represented asa perfect, harmonious structure, as the ‘great chain of Being’ where evil isassimilated by the Good, since ‘whatever is, is right.’
On the other, the optimism of the ‘pre-established’ harmony of theLeibnizian world is guaranteed by the existence of an omnipotent and themost merciful God. For, if our world is not the best of the possible ones,either God could not make it such, and, hence, his omnipotence is beingundermined, or He did not want to, which starkly contradicts his being mostmerciful.
Almost two centuries later, the signifier, the event which becomes asort of hallmark biding forever farewell to the various versions of thetheodicies of progress is named: ‘Auschwitz.’ While Lisbon’s earthquake is anatural disaster, it has been occasioned by first nature, Auschwitz is the by-product of human evil or of the so-called second nature.
Drawing a comparison between the 18th century Lisbon earthquakeand the 20th century Auschwitz, Adorno writes in his last chapter of NegativeDialectics, entitled, ‘Meditations of Metaphysics’:
The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of thetheodicy of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the firstnature was insignificant in comparison with the second,social one, which defies human imagination as it distills areal hell from human evil.2
Adorno’s Negative Dialectic is a work on mourning or –better awork on guilt by those who survived, by the saved vis-à-vis the drowned –torecall the title of the famous work by Primo Levi.3 In Adorno’s words:
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as atortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrongto say that after Auschwitz you could no longer writepoems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural questionwhether after Auschwitz you can go on living.4
Negative Dialectics might be seen as a ‘survival exercise’ or thetoken of the wrecked hopes for the ‘happy days’ of a noble and all-the-moreprogressing humanity as well as of the missed revolution, which left the gapbetween theory and praxis, philosophy and society unbridged. It is not a merecoincidence that Adorno opens up his Negative Dialectics with the followingwords: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because themoment to realize it was missed.’5
The statement is an allusion to the young Marx’s claim thatphilosophy is not an autonomous activity but one determined by the positionit occupies in the field of social practices. In fact, philosophy is a theory ofsociety that does not know itself as such. Thus, philosophy as the theoreticalself-reflection of the social and political antinomies cannot be the locus oftheir resolution. It is only revolution that will bring about the realization ofphilosophy, its very transcendence, namely, its abolition. Negative Dialecticsbears witness to the failed promise to change the world and becomes thereminder to what Adorno bitterly asserted in his Minima Moralia, ‘Wronglife cannot be lived rightly.’6
2. Towards a ‘Totally Administered Society’Adorno’s work in its entirety is governed by the theme of ‘total
integration.’ Inspired, to a major extent by the categories of late Marx’swork, such as Capital and Grundrisse, the Adornian texts aspire to show thatthe principium individuationis, the autonomous individual which is theideological ground of liberalism and capitalism as well as the protagonist, thequintessence of the philosophical discourse of modernity, i.e., GermanIdealism, becomes an anachronism. It has already disappeared or merelysurvives at the fringes of depersonalized systems. For Adorno, ‘the individualis another late and fragile evolutionary product,’7 in whose name the dialecticof Enlightenment took place. To be more specific: The ideological hegemonyof capitalism could not be achieved unless the concept of individual had beeninvoked. But conversely: capitalism could survive and function only byliquidating the very principle of individual upon which it was grounded in itsstruggle against feudalism. Recalling the late Marxian categories, ifcapitalism is not only understood with reference to the market and privateproperty alone but in terms of the commodity and capital as quasi-objectiveforms of social mediation, then, capitalism is identified with an abstract formof domination. Late Marx does posit a Subject but identifies it with theimpersonal alienated structures of social mediation, which, in turn, constituteforms of social practice. That subject has no ego. It may induce self-consciousness but it does not possess self-consciousness. It is a non-anthropomorphic subject or complex of activities, which by producingcommodified objects, it produces at the same time, commodifiedsubjectivities. It is this ‘non-subject. . . which produces social representationsof objects at the same time as it produces representable objects.’8
The profit interest as society’s law of motion degrades, in Adorno’swords, the individual subjects into ‘mere executors, mere partners in socialwealth and social struggle.’9 As Marx writes, quoted by Adorno in the sameparagraph, ‘only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable.’10
While in his analysis of the transition from manufacture to the large-scaleindustry, Marx formulates the following thesis: ‘In manufacture. . . the
worker makes use of a tool. In the factory, the machine makes use of him.’11
Apparently, the workers become the objects of a process that itself hasbecome the ‘subject.’12
Adorno persistently delineates the contours of the above dialectic ofEnlightenment or capitalist society, which, as we will see, becomes themodern version of fate or myth. In his own words:
the principle of the barter society was realized only throughthe individuation of the several contracting parties –because, in other words, the principium individuationisliterally was the principle of that society, its universal.(However-F.V), in the total functional context whichrequires the form of individuation, individuals are relegatedto the role of mere executive organs of the universal.13
If pre-modern metaphysics implies the ‘projection of the wretchedcultural wish that in all change things must stay the same,’14 if myth is‘nothing else than the closed system of. . . that which is,’15 the immutable,inalterable and eternal, then, it seems that the pre-modern opponentinsinuates himself amidst the modern territory and ‘haunts’it: For Adorno,human beings, individual subjects, are under a spell now as ever.16 But whatis that ‘spell’ Adorno refers to? As he himself writes:
Spell is the fetish character of merchandise… The self-made thing becomes a thing in itself from which the selfcannot escape any more…In the spell, the reifiedconsciousness has become total.’17 Is then, the modernversion of fate, the spell cast upon modern individuals theso-called ‘fetishism of commodity’, according to which, torecall the famous quote by Marx, ‘the commodity reflectsthe social characteristics of men’s own labour as objectivecharacteristics of the products of labour themselves, as thesocial-natural properties of these things?18
In a way quite reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, onecould argue that Adorno, speaking the idiom of the Marxian politicaleconomy, wants to put forward the following thesis:
The form of domination that characterizes modernity does notconsist in the domination of the working class by the capitalist class; it is notfinally a function of private property. Domination in capitalist societies isgrounded instead, in the domination of people by abstract structures that theythemselves constitute. People do indeed ‘make’ the world around them. Yet,in such a way, that people are controlled by what they make. Thus, the
supposedly ‘free’ and ‘self-determining’ humanity is confronted by a quasi-natural structure of domination constituted by labor or the law of value,which becomes a ‘second nature.’ It is precisely at this point that the barrierbetween nature and history breaks down. Freedom as the modern ideal parexcellence is nothing but the façade of an all-too-powerful necessity, whichhas the effect of a natural law. According to Adorno, the ‘law is naturalbecause of its inevitable character under the prevailing conditions ofproduction.’19
3. ‘The Whole is Untrue:’ Adorno’s Criticism of HegelIt is within the above context that Adorno reads and criticizes the
Hegelian philosophy of history whose leit motif is the famous ‘Cunning ofReason.’ For Hegel, universal history is unified ‘merely on account of itscontradictions.’20 History advances towards its end via the negative. Progresstakes place by means of its opposite: violence, bloodshed, passions, interestsand competition. Or differently put: irrational intentions bring about arational outcome. Private vices transform themselves into public virtues. Theindividual is nothing but an agent of the universal. The question Adornoimplies throughout his works is the following: Is the Hegelian cunning ofreason the philosophical corollary of the hope that society will remain alivedespite its antagonisms or he is merely an apologist of his society and hence,a proponent of the thesis that society reproduces itself only by means ofantagonisms?21 For, we would rightly ask the following question: should wecome through all this suffering in order to build up a well-ordered society? Isso much violence the ransom history has to pay to reason? As Adorno puts itin Negative Dialectics: (Hegel) stoops to offering victims decorative comfortwithout touching on the substantiality of the condition whose victims theyare. What spooks there, behind his superior declarations, had previously beenpetty cash in the bourgeois till of Schiller, in whose ‘Song of the bell’ thepater familias burned out of house and home is not only sent wandering, i.e.,begging, but told to do it merrily, to boot; for a nation –said to be worthlessotherwise- Schiller prescribes joy in committing its all to its horror.’22
The question remains: Does Hegel’s preponderance to the universalconstitutes a mockery of the practice of his society that ‘tolerates theparticular only as a category of the universal’ or does he finally legitimate thestatus quo, contradicting thereby, his own dialectics? Adorno seems tosubscribe to the latter. What bears witness to that, namely Hegel’slegitimation of the universal and the suppression of the individual is hisattitude vis-à-vis the state. His famous phrase ‘whatever man is he owes tothe state,’23 as well as his famous passage of the Philosophy of Law, in whichhe cites the famous saying of Pythagoras, according to which ‘the best waymorally to educate a son is to make him a citizen of a state with good law’clearly demonstrate Hegel’s decision to put the state above dialectics and this
is characteristic, for Adorno, of his mistrust to dialectics’s subversivecharacter, since, maybe dialectics would lead men one day beyond bourgeoissociety. In his famous ‘Three Studies on Hegel,’ Adorno writes on the abovepoint:
Civil society is an antagonistic society. It survives only inand through its antagonisms and is not able to resolve them. . . Hegel’s idolization of the state is itself produced by thefact that the contradictions of civil society cannot beresolved by its self-movement.24
But that constitutes the scandal of the Hegelian dialectics, namelybringing it to a standstill, asserting a seemingly full reconciliation in worldrent by contradictions and antagonisms. For Adorno, there is a moment oftruth and untruth at the same time in the Hegelian diagnosis of modernity: themoment of untruth in Hegel is the affirmation of absolute identity betweenidea and reality, universal and particular in favour of the universal andthrough stifling the particular, depriving it of its own voice. The moment oftruth by contrast, is that Hegel in opposition to the naiveté of nominalism orthe humanism of the classical liberal discourses, is that even implicitly, evenunwittingly, he unmasks the supposedly all-too-powerful modernPrometheus, the autonomous emancipated bourgeois producer and semi-divine legislator to be a nothing but a mere appendage of the huge andimpersonal mechanism of the social production. Hegel ‘explicitly andimplicitly orders human beings, as those who perform socially necessarylabour, to subject themselves to an alien necessity. He thereby embodies, intheoretical form, the antinomy of the universal and the particular in bourgeoissociety. . . Hegel disdains the illusion of freedom, the individual who in themidst of universal unfreedom, behaves as though he were already free anduniversal.’25
There is however, another moment of truth in the Hegelian ideal ofreconciliation which cancels his dialectical impetus by transformingdialectics into a sheer identity: The Hegelian coup-d’- etat seems to verifytoday more than ever the claustrophobic, Kafkian inspired character of thesystem in the cogwheels of which we are all trapped. In Adorno’s words, ‘theunity of the system derives from irreconcilable violence. Satanically, theworld as grasped by the Hegelian system has now, 150 years later, proveditself to be a system in the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalisedsociety’26 which asserts the primacy of the whole over its parts and hence,leaves the individual impotent.
Having formulated Adorno’s thesis on the ‘totally administeredworld’ which finds its genuine philosophical expression or, at least forAdorno’s analysis, its ideal apologist in the Hegelian philosophy of the worldhistory, the question which inevitably arises is the following:
If we live in a ‘totally administered world,’ if according to Adorno,‘the more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind andthe more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own,’27 where ishope to be traced? Can we illuminate those cracks in the totality, thosefissures in the social net, those moments of disharmony and discrepancythrough which the untruth of the whole, the ‘infinite agony of the finiteworld’ is revealed and glimmers of another life become visible?
4. Tracing Hope in Negative DialecticsHope is to be found precisely in that never-ending work of
consciousness’s critical self-reflection which relentlessly unmasks the falseharmony of the Hegelian system. Hope is traced in the very moment ofdissonance between idea and reality. It is the awareness that behind thesemblance of reconciliation, brought about by the Hegelian omnipotence ofthe universal lies hidden the brutality of coercion, the compulsion of theparticular, without which the universal would be unthinkable.28
At this point, however, lies the paradox: Adorno’s NegativeDialectics as an intellectual exercise of reflection and hope is nothing but animmanent criticism of the Hegelian dialectic. It turns against it by means ofits own premises. Adorno thinks with Hegel against him. Negative Dialecticswould be impossible without the conceptual and methodological premises ofthe Hegelian idealism, which is exploded through taking recourse to its ownarsenal.
It is true that Hegel’s philosophy is an incessant negativity. Whatthis means is that Hegel denounces passionately every self-absolutisingparticular, every first principle squeezed into a fixed concept, everyimmutable, eternal, deadly rigid reality. For Hegel, ‘is’ is a prelude to abecoming or, to put it in another way- every term derives its identity via itsopposite.
This has been demonstrated, for Adorno, more than anywhere else,in Hegel’s criticism of the abstract epistemology, of the a priorisms of theKantian system. As is well-known, Kant grounded the conditions of thepossibility of experience on an ultimate, a priori principle, i.e., the a prioricategories of the understanding which seek to shape and transform thesensual manifold into a concept. No world, no constitutum is ever possiblewithout the priorisms of subjective reasons, for Kant. But for the Hegeliandialectics, a constituens abstracted from the ‘actual’ world, a first principlefrom which everything else must be derivable becomes meaningless. AsAdorno pointedly puts in Negative Dialectics: ‘A thought in which we do notthink something is not a thought.’29 Reflection abolishes the Kantian opposedpoles –constituens/constitutum, form and content, nature and spirit, theoryand praxis, phenomenon and things-in-itself, freedom and necessity, by
revealing that in order to be thought each requires the other. Nodetermination is left standing as ultimate.
Accordingly, although Hegel recognized the primacy of the wholeover its parts, he did not glorify it as an abstract principle or a maxim, assomething unmediated. The whole poses its worth as such, that is, as atotality via its opposite: in and through its parts, ‘only through discontinuity,alienation and reflection.’30 If the whole exists at all, it is only as thequintessence of its partial moments and not as something beyond them.31
By surrendering, however, in his late writings to a mere identity ofuniversal and particular, of the whole and its parts, of individual and the state,Hegel the dialectician contradicted himself. The false harmony he putforward deprived his own method of any subversive potential.
Negative Dialectics as a discourse of hope lies not only, asmentioned before, on the awareness of ‘hopelessness,’ namely on the spell –albeit a modern and ‘post-metaphysical one- that has been cast upon us buton the struggle to resuscitate, to salvage dialectics –brought to a standstill- byresetting it to move. Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, ‘will not come torest in itself as if it were total. This is its form of hope.’32
By cracking the shell of what ‘is’ under a fixed concept and showingthat the being of things is a context of their becoming, Adorno writes in thelast pages of Negative Dialectics:
Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective contextof delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from thatcontext. Its objective goal is to break out of the contextfrom within. The strength requires from the break grows indialectics from the context of immanence; what wouldapply to it once more is Hegel’s dictum that in dialectics anopponent’s strength is absorbed and turned against him.33
Without fleeing to the arms of a quasi-religious, redemptivediscourse but without at the same time resigning itself to the role of theisolated estet, Negative Dialectics remains loyal to the Hegelian dialectics asthe ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’ par excellence, denouncing itsinconsistencies, revealing its kernel of truth, its subversive potential in virtueof its own language.
Transcendence is not dismissed, however, out of hand. It is seen,instead, under the light of Negative dialectics. For ‘transcendence feeds,’ hewrites ‘on nothing but the experience we have in immanence.’ Metaphysicsderives its justification from its very opposite: the wrong of death and theunthinkability of despair. Like Negative Dialectics, it is not only a discourseof consolation for the hopeless but a protest against the existent and the hopethat things could be different. And this is why ‘there is solidarity between
such thinking [i.e., Negative Dialectics-F.V] and metaphysics at the time ofits fall.34
The above is the very last sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.The epilogue of a book but a prelude to hope.
5. Walter Benjamin on HistoryIf there are any common motives uniting Adorno and Walter
Benjamin, those would be admittedly their criticism of the Hegeliandialectics on the one hand, and the diagnosis of the commodity-based societyas the modern ‘spell’ or ‘magic’ which makes a parody of the very principleupon which it was founded: the principium individuationis.
Like Adorno, Benjamin denounces the Hegelian ‘pervert’ Cunningof Reason, according to which the march of history towards happy and justends transcends finite human intentions, legitimates or excuses crimes andsuffering as not just a justified choice but also an inevitable one. UnlikeAdorno however, Benjamin does not ‘correct’ the inconsistencies of theHegelian dialectic by its own means. He is not overcoming the deficit ofHegel by its very own method, i.e., that of immanent critique. The aftermathof Benjamin’s critique of Hegel is the subversion rather than correction ofdialectics. Let me explicate further:
Benjamin’s sound denunciation of the Hegelian merciless Cunningof Reason is Paul Klee’s painting of ‘Angelus Novus,’ whose face is turnedtoward the past. As Benjamin writes:
the ‘angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and makewhole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowingfrom Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with suchviolence that the angel can no longer close them. Thisstorm irresistibly propels him into the future to which hisback is turned, while the pile of debris before him growsskyward. This storm is what we call progress.’35
Contra Hegel, Benjamin views history as the permanence of theunbearable or the eternal return of catastrophe. History becomes synonymouswith its opposite: myth or nature, namely, as that which never changes. It isprecisely at this point that Benjamin takes sides with Adorno’s analysis inNegative Dialectics –sustained, by Marxist categories- about the permanenceof the mythic amidst modernity. The autonomous, emancipated individual,capable of shaping all aspects of human life by means of his own Reasonalone, is in fact, thrall to the alienated structures of capitalist society, which,though, constituted by human, historical practices, such as commodifiedlabour, they develop into a quasi-independent, abstract, universal Other thatstands opposed to the individuals and increasingly determines the means and
goals of their activity. If the mythic is identified with the inescapability offate, then, modernity’s myth, its ‘re-enchantment’ becomes the set ofactivities of production, exchange and consumption the combined effect ofwhich is perceptible to each person outside himself, as a ‘natural’ property ofthings. The social relations, in other words, structured by the commodity-determined labour give rise to an ‘thing-like,’ ‘a-social’ framework thatseems to be ontologically given rather than socially or contextuallyconstituted. The modern fate is therefore, that complex of activities which byproducing commodified objects, at the same time produces commodifiedsubjectivities. At the same time it produces representable objects, it producessocial representations of objects. The magic, or the spells cast upon themodern subject is what Marx has called ‘commodity fetishism,’ which isnothing but ‘the definite social relation between men themselves whichassumes. . . the fantastic form of a relation between things.’36
The question arising however at this point, is how can one accountfor the compatibility of the interpretation of history as the eternal repetitionwith the storm of progress, that ‘pile of debris’ growing skyward to which theangel can no longer resist?
There is apparently a peculiar dialectic of progress taking placehere. The explosion of productivity, knowledge, skills, objects, services,technology, etc which marks capitalist modernity is simultaneouslyaccompanied by the monotonous compulsion of the necessary labour time asthe Newtonian ‘absolute, true, and mathematical time which flows equablywithout relation to anything external.’37 By being incorporated in theproduction process as an attribute of capital, the enormous potential ofsocially general knowledge and power is affected at the expense of humanbeings. The enormous material wealth produced entails the impoverishmentand emptying of human labour which is disintegrated into an appendage ofthe mechanism of production. Behind the dazzling appearance of thecommodities as particular objects lies the alienated subjectivity of the workerwho has become the object of a process that itself has become the ‘subject.’ Itseems that the ‘storm of progress’ implying the linearity and the ever-increased movement of historical time is the ideological correlate of thespatiotemporal expansion of capital which can be brought about only by thesimultaneous mutilation and alienation of the individual.
Benjamin re-inscribes the above Marxian dialectic of progress in theimages and personae occupying the space of the Parisian Arcades. Thus thefetishism of commodities is translated into the phantasmagoria as thedreamscape amidst the city, the aesthetics of the commodity culture thatemerged in post-revolutionary France. Phantasmagoria is the litany of goodson sale produced by the alienated subjectivity of the worker.
Just as for Marx, the commodity is at the same time, a use value andan exchange value to the extent that it is the product of the dual nature of
labour in capitalism as concrete and abstract labour, for Benjamin the fantasyworld of the commodity is at the same time a Hell and a utopia; it oscillatesbetween doom and hope. On the one hand, it bears within itself the promiseof progress and novelty, while on the other, it becomes the indubitable tokenof the mythic compulsion towards endless repetition. On the one hand, itbears within itself the seed of the new, inscribed in technological innovationswhile on the other, it is the monument or the reminder of the archaic essenceof capitalism as the compulsion to monotony.38
What can break the magic spell of capitalism? What can break thecircle of repetition which is the sine qua non, the condition of possibility ofthe seemingly linearity of progress? For Benjamin it is the constant resistanceto the ‘recruitment’ of the trash. of History in the service of Reason’srealization –if we follow Hegel- and capital’s motion, according to Marx.The trash of history, the defeated, the unnameable, the mutilated, thedamaged lives all of which were the pray to the meaningful whole should beblasted out of its integration into a meaningful whole.
Benjamin’s view is not to the future but to the past. The realprogress as the happiness of mankind is redemption. The latter will occuronly when the past will be citable in all its moments; when voice will begiven to all that was neglected, forgotten, contempted or consideredworthless as a meaning candidate.
‘I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin novaluables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But showthe rags, the refuse –these I will not inventory but allow, inthe only way possible, to some into their own: by makinguse of them.’39
In terms of methodology, this is translated to the materialisthistoriography whose cornerstone is the dialectical image. By implying a newconception of temporality identified with discontinuities, interruptions andrepetitions, the very term ‘dialectical image’ signifies the complete breakwith the Hegelian dialectic.
If, for Hegel, dialectic refers to a constant becoming, Benjamin’sdialectic springs forth as a ‘stop.’ It is the ‘now-time shot through withsplinters of messianic time’. And if, for Hegel, dialectics is the incessant andrelentless reflection of the concept upon the object or the conceptualmediateness of every ‘first’ or ‘given’, Benjamin’s history is imaged-based.Dialectical image is the employment of the Surrealist technique of montagein historiography. Historical fragments are reconstructed when they areremoved from a context in which they were recorded as insignificant andconstitute a constellation, i.e., an image suggesting a new interpretation of
their interrelations. That interpretation produces a shocking effect insofar asit awakens a subject from a dream state.
If the methodological corollary of Benjamin’s redemption is thematerialist historiography of the dialectical images, its political synonym isrevolution. In thesis III on history, Benjamin writes:
‘only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citablein all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes acitation a l’ ordre du jour –and that day is Judgment Day’.40
Benjamin thesis should not be taken as an expression of a modernJewish Messianism for which redemption appears either as the end of historyor as the apocalyptic event of the coming of the Messiah in history. Even ifredemption is the negation of the old, the creation of a new calendar such asthat of 1793, it is always an event produced by history. The moment of theJudgment Day is the moment of Revolution.41 Revolution becomes an end inand for itself. It is neither a step towards the future or a new beginning butthe very fact of revolt interrupting the gloomy continuum of history.Revolution is the very instant it occurs. Nowhere is revolution given a morevivid expression than in Benjamin’s text Critique of Violence.
6. Divine Violence as the political synonym of HopeFor Benjamin, the use of violence, rather than violence, as a
principle from the standpoint of both natural and positive law acquires itsmoral legitimacy only if seen as the means to a just or unjust end. However,and this is the first claim Benjamin puts forward, violence becomes aconstitutive moment or integral part of law in general.
‘Law’s interest in the monopoly of violence vis-à-visindividuals is explained not by the intention of preservinglegal ends but, rather, by the intention of preserving the lawitself; that the violence not in the hands of law, threatens itnot by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existenceoutside the law.’42
Benjamin reveals furthermore, violence to be the quintessence oflaw and state power by resorting to the theoretical foundations of the statepower as it has been formulated by the so-called social contract theories. Theawareness of the necessity of the conclusion of a contract stems from seriousmalfunctions of the so-called state of nature, i.e., the pre-political state. Thevery content of the state of nature is decisive for the form of the state power.Hence, if violence, Benjamin maintains is the product of nature or the naturalright par excellence just as the right of man to move his body in the direction
of a desired goal, then people should give all their violence for the sake of thestate.43
Thus violence is the very origin not only of law in general but alsoof the procedure that gave rise to that, namely contract –at least according toa considerable tradition such as that of the modern social contract theories.As he himself writes:
‘a totally non-violent resolution of conflicts can never leadto a legal contract. The origin of every contract also pointstowards violence. It is represented in it insofar as the powerthat guarantees a legal contract is, in turn, of violent origineven if violence is not introduced into the contract itself…in our time, parliaments provide an example of this. Theyoffer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have notremained conscious of the revolutionary forces to whichthey owe their existence.’44
Insofar as violence is both the means to the realization of legal endsas well as an integral part of law, the very condition of its possibility, thenviolence is not only law making but also law preserving. For Benjamin,military violence as the ‘primordial and paradigmatic of all violence’45
becomes the exemplar of lawmaking violence insofar as the end of the formeris the conclusion of a peace treaty sanctioning a new law. Ironically enough,in other words, the peace treaty as the institution of a new legal orderbecomes the sole purpose of the war. Unlike the Kantian definition of peaceas the perpetual cessation not only of all hostilities but also of ‘all existingreasons for a future war,’46 peace in this context, is paradoxically the raisond’ etre of the war. The peace treaties in question in fact, constitute a‘continuation of the war with other means,’ namely, the institution of a newlaw. As Benjamin himself points out, ‘. . . the establishment of frontiers, thetask of peace after all the wars of the mythic age, is the primal phenomenonof all lawmaking violence. . . where frontiers are decided, the adversary is notsimply annihilated; indeed he is accorded rights even when the victor’ssuperiority in power is complete.’47
On the other hand, the subordination of the citizens to the law ofgeneral conscription regarding militarism as well as the imposition of deathpenalty even for offences against private property, to which it seems out ofproportion, are the outright demonstrations of the function of the stateviolence as law preserving. For the issue in question regarding especially theexample of the death penalty as ‘the highest violence, that over life anddeath,’48 is not merely the punishment of the infringement of law but on thecontrary, law’s affirmation of itself as such.
Apparently the above twofold dimension of violence as lawmakingand law preserving explicitly demonstrates its crucial role in the making ofpower. Violence becomes the very birthplace of the state power, the verycondition of its possibility. Benjamin claims that that form of violenceexceeds to a great extent its commonsensical definition as the sheer means tothe promotion and realization of a just end and appertains to the so-calledmythic violence.
Insofar as lawmaking violence is first and foremost power makingviolence since it relies on the sheer affirmation and assumption of power, itresembles to the mythic violence which, far from being the means to thepursuit of an end, in its archetypical form is the mere manifestation of theexistence of Gods. Benjamin cites the myth of Niobe, who was boasting thather children’s beauty is by far superior to that of Zeus and Lito’s children,namely Artemis and Apolon. Niobe’s arrogance calls down fate not becauseshe infringes the law but first and foremost because it challenges it.
The crucial question however, Benjamin addresses at this pointconcerns the existence of other kinds of violence than those envisaged bylegal theory. Is there any kind of violence whose principle is not power butjustice? Is there any kind of violence which might be able to call a halt to the‘pernicious’49 all mythic, law-making, violence as well as to the law-preserving, ‘administrative’ violence that serves it?
To the mythic violence, Benjamin juxtaposes divine violence. As hebeautifully puts it:
‘If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latterboundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings atonce guilt and retribution, divine violence only expiates. Ifthe former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former isbloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood… Mythicviolence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake;divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake ofthe living.’50
Last but not least, is the ‘sign and seal but never the means of sacreddispatch.’51
By arguing that divine violence never serves any means, not eventhat of recovering justice, but is a mere sign of an unjust and immoral world,Benjamin seems to bypass a long Marxist tradition, which excuses violenceby viewing it as the means of bringing into existence a non-violent,communist society, which realizes human creative powers and their fairdistribution. There is a common thread uniting such divergent thinkers asMarcuse, Merlau-Ponty, Lukacs and Trotsky. Thus for Marcuse, violence is
justified as the instrument necessary for conducting a revolution,52 while forMerleau-Ponty violence is justified to the extent that paradoxically becomesthe sole means of bringing about a non-violent society.53 Lukacs in his essay‘Tactics and Ethics,’ published in 1919 maintains that if revolutionaries areforced to pursue moral ends with amoral means like murder, they should notconsider them justified, Instead, they ought to regard them as ‘tragicchoices.’54
Finally, Leon Trotsky in his ‘Their Morals and Ours’, written in1938, also claims that a means ‘can be justified only by its end. But the endin its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, whichexpresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if itleads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of thepower of man over man.’55
Benjamin’s divine violence is not the violence of all those who areacting in the name of Revolution, the historical mission of the proletariat orPeople’s will. By distancing himself from a considerable portion of Marxistthinking, Benjamin takes side with G. Sorel’s account of violence. A politicalincarnation of Benjamin’s account of divine violence could be the idea ofgeneral proletarian strike as opposed to the general political strike, broughtforth by Sorel in his Reflections on Violence. For Sorel, if the political strikeaims at the ‘strengthening of the state,’ the proletarian general strike ‘setsitself the sole task of destroying state power.’ And if the political generalstrike demonstrates ‘how the state will lose none of its strength, how power istransferred from the privileged to the privileged, how the mass of producerswill change its masters,’ the proletarian general strike ‘announces itsindifference towards material gain through conquest by declaring its intentionto abolish the state,’ since ‘the state was really the basis of the existence ofthe ruling group.’56
The significance of violence for Sorel, is not to be found in its valueas an instrument of revolution interpreted in terms of a new state of affairsbut in the revolutionizing of the proletarian consciousness. Violence becomesa constitutive element of the moral transformation of humanity. In Sorel’swords:
Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simplemanifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appearsthus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service ofthe immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhapsthe most appropriate method of obtaining immediatematerial advantages, but it may save the world frombarbarism.’57
Nevertheless, having disentangled itself from the context of themeans-ends discussion and by being reduced to the absolute moment of itsirruption or manifestation interrupting human history, a kind of Vox Populi,Benjamin’s divine violence runs the risk of being solely identified with theEvent rather than to the objective changes that led to.58 Yet a revolution orinsurrection, the divine violence as the sign and seal should be assessed bythe way its utopia is enacted by the revolutionaries themselves after the bigEvent. That does not delegitimate the very Event itself; what it seeks to avoidis the quasi-messianic apotheosis of the moment.
Furthermore, divine violence seems to disregard completely theEnlightenment legacy of a reasoned political discourse on ethical norms andcivil liberties without which, as Ferenc Feher once pointedly remarked, ‘thereis no way of forecasting whether the romantic rebellion will follow Lukacs’sor Heidegger’s political path.’59 Admittedly, liberalism never emphasized thenecessary amount of violence constituting law but at least it attempted thenormative evaluation of better or worse kinds of force.60 In case of the divineviolence there is no criterion to delimit different degrees and cases ofviolence. The only legitimating principle is the subject of violence, i.e., theoppressed. Can however, every kind of violence, excesses anddisproportions, be not merely justified or excused but legitimated only bymeans of its being conducted by the privileged class which by redeemingitself will also redeem humanity?
Last, in his ‘force of law,’ in which he goes together with the maininsight of Benjamin that the garn of law is violence, J. Derrida, surprisinglyargues that ‘nothing seems to be less outdated than the classical emancipatoryideal.’61 By that Derrida means nothing but the 18th century as the apex ofthe Enlightenment optimism. For it is that tradition which inaugurated therights of man and the rights of citizen, the abolition of slavery, etc. Derridarefuses to abandon the Enlightenment element of what perhaps Benjamin’sanalysis would condemn as law-making and hence, mythic violence; Butwould have been better really not to have enforced the Declaration of Rightsor the abolition of slavery? Would not the rejection of the above as mereepiphenomena of mythic violence would turn into complicity with theexistent forms of injustice?
But is that the case really? Is Benjamin’s politics a kind ofapocalyptic Messianism or a romantic irrationalism at its best? WasBenjamin despite the Enlightenment education he received in WyneckenSchool a passionate anti-Enlightenment rebel?
The very last part of his ‘Critique of Violence’ bears witness to theopposite. In a much provocative and iconoclastic way, Benjamin attempts tograpple with the right to kill which always impinges upon the Commandment‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Nevertheless, ‘no judgment of the deed can be derived
from the commandment.’ The commandment for Benjamin, serves only as aguideline of action rather than as a normative criterion of judgment.
If not the Commandment then, should the doctrine of the sanctity oflife be a criterion of excluding taking someone’s life? For Benjamin, the‘proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false andignominious if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life.’62
It would be a rather implausible hypothesis to assume that Benjaminhad Rousseau’s famous phrase of the social contract in mind. According tothat, ‘To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rightsof humanity and even its duties.’63 What is certain, however, is that herefuses to identify man with the mere life in him, with the mere fact, in otherwords, of his biological existence. Mere life is the life of the Homo Sacer,that figure of the Roman Law recently resuscitated by G. Agamben, which isoutside both divine and human law since it cannot be sacrificed to the Godsand anyone call him without being punished.64
The life of the various Homini Sacer, the detainees in concentrationscamps, the illegal immigrants, all those who were living in Hitler’s NaziGermany or in Schmitt’s Ausnahmezustand, for Benjamin, can never besacred. Does not, however, mean that a life deprived of civil rights andliberties is a life that does not deserve to be lived? Or somewhat differentlyput: that death is not necessarily identified with a biological fact but with alife as mere biological facticity. That is the life of the infinite detention in aconcentration camp or the life of sans-papers or the life in Nazi Germanywhere through the immense mechanism of information-giving the Sovereigncould be the next-door neighbour with the absolute right over the life anddeath.
Does Benjamin then, imply that the citizen gives birth to man ratherthan the man to citizen? That life that deserves its name and is endowed withsanctity is only the life of a citizen?
Just as the application of the technique of montage in historiographyintents to retrieve discarded, supposedly useless objects from oblivion, togive them a conspicuous position, similarly, divine violence could be thevoice of the excluded, of the ‘vanquished,’ who fell by the wayside, ‘of thewaste products and blind spots that have escaped dialectics.’65 Divineviolence is the sign and seal of the resistance against mere life. In his words:‘Mythic Violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divineviolence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living.’66 Divineviolence is the manifestation of the despair of the hopeless. But for the sakeof the hopeless we are given hope.
Notes1 Voltaire, Candid, trans. J Butt, Penguin Classics, London, 1947.2 TW Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. EB Ashton, Routledge, London,1973, p. 361 (my emphasis).3 P Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. from the Italian by R Rosenthal.Abacus, London, 1991.4 Negative Dialectics, p. 363.5 Ibid., p. 3.6 TW Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. from the German by EFN Jephcott,Verso, London, 1991, p. 39.7 Negative Dialectics, p. 339.8 E Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. from the French by C Turner,Verso, London, 1995, p. 67.9 Negative dialectics, p. 304.10 Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1, p. 621f.11 Marx, Capital, trans. B Fowkes, p. 548.12 Ibid., pp. 544-5.13 Negative Dialectics, p. 243.14 Ibid, p. 368.15 Ibid., p. 400.16 Ibid., p. 344.17 Ibid., p. 346.18 Capital, vol. 1, pp. 164-5.19 Negative Dialectics, p. 354.20 Ibid., pp. 319-20.21 Ibid., p. 320.22 Ibid., p. 325.23 Ibid., p. 33724 W Adorno, Three Studies on Hegel, p. 27.25 Ibid., p. 45.26 Ibid., p. 27.27 TW Adorno, Prisms, trans. S Weber & S Weber, MIT Press, Cambridge,Mass., 1981, p. 34.28 Negative Dialectics, p. 328.29 Ibid., p. 391.30 Three Studies on Hegel, p.4.31 Ibid., p.4.32 Negative Dialectics, p. 406.33 Ibid., p. 406.34 Ibid., p. 408.
35 W Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, HArendt (ed), Schocken Books, New York, 1968, pp. 257-258 (IX Thesis).36 K Marx, Capital, volume 1, pp. 164-165.37 I Newton, Principia, as quoted by LR Heath, The Concept of Time,Chicago, 1936. p. 88.38 For a brilliant exposition of that dialectic, see M Pensky, ‘Method andTime: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’, Cambridge Companion to Benjamin,p. 184, 187.39 W Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H Eiland & K McLaughlin.Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, N1, 10.40 Illuminations, p. 254.41 My thesis on this point is differentiated from that developed by ARabinbach, who attempts to demonstrate that Benjamin’s account of politicsechoes what he terms ‘a new Jewish sensibility’ which emerges in the yearsapproaching the first World War and can be described as radical, Messianicand anti-Enlightenment opposing thereby the older Jewish generationeducated on the culture of the Enlightenment ideals. See A Rabinbach,‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and ModernGerman Jewish Messianism’, New German Critique, 34, Winter 1985, pp.78-124.42 W Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writingsvolume 1, 1913-1926, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, p.238.43 Ibid., p. 236.44 Ibid., p. 243.45 Ibid., 240.46 I Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, Kant’s PoliticalWritings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 93.47 ‘Critique of Violence,’ p. 248.48 Ibid., p. 242.49 Ibid., p. 252.50 Ibid., p. 249.51 Ibid., p. 252.52 H Marcuse, ‘Ethics and Revolution’, Revolution and the Rule of Law, EKent, (ed), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971, pp. 52 et passim.53 M Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, p.xviii-xix.54 G Lukacs, ‘Tactics and Ethics,’ Political Writings, 1919-1929: TheQuestion of Parliamentarism and Other Essays, R. Livingstone, (ed), trans.M McColgan, pp. 10-11.55 L Trotsky, ‘Their Morals and Ours’, 1938, p. 22.
56 Quoted from Benjamin, p. 245.57 G Sorel, Reflections of Violence, J Jennings (ed), Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 2008, p. 85.58 This is the line of criticism addressed by Habermas regarding Benjamin’sattitude vis-à-vis the French Revolution. See J Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of WalterBenjamin,’ New German Critique, No. 17, Special Walter Benjamin IssueSpring, 1979, pp. 30-59, p. 50.59 F Feher, ‘Arato, Breines and Lowy on Lukacs,’ New German Critique 23Spring-Summer 1981, p. 184.60 That point has been raised by McCormick with respect to Derrida’sdeconstruction but it could well be applied in the case of Benjamin. See JPMcCormick, ‘Derrida on Law or Poststructuralism Gets Serious’, PoliticalTheory, Vol. 29 no3, June 2001, pp. 395-423.p. 404.61 J Derrida, ‘Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority’,Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, D Cornell & M Rosenfeld,(eds), Routlege, New York, 1992, p. 28.62 Critique of Violence, p. 250.63 JJ Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 4.64 G Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford University Press 1998.65 W Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 151.66 ‘Critique of Violence,’ p. 249.
Derrida, J., ‘Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority’.Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. D. Cornell & M. Rosenfeld,(eds), Routlege, New York, 1992.
Feher, F., ‘Arato, Breines and Lowy on Lukacs’. New German Critique 23Spring-Summer, 1981.
Habermas, J., ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: TheContemporaneity of Walter Benjamin’. NewGerman Critique, No. 17,Special Walter Benjamin Issue, Spring, 1979, pp. 30-59.
Heath, L.R, The Concept of Time. (Chicago 1936).
Kant, I., ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’. Kant’s PoliticalWritings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Levi, P., The Drowned and the Saved. trans. R. Rosenthal, Abacus, London,1991.
Lukacs, G., ‘Tactics and Ethics’. Political Writings, 1919-1929: TheQuestion of Parliamentarism and Other Essays. R. Livingstone, (ed), trans.M. McColgan.
Marcuse, H., ‘Ethics and Revolution’. Revolution and the Rule of Law. E.Kent (ed), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971.
Marx, K., The Capital. Vol. 1, trans. B. Fawkes, Penguin Classics, London,1990.
McCormick, P.J., ‘Derrida on Law or Poststructuralism Gets Serious’.Political Theory. Vol. 29 no. 3, June 2001, pp. 395-423.
Merleau-Ponty, M., Humanism and Terror. Beacon Press, Boston, 1969.
Pensky, M., ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’. CambridgeCompanion to Benjamin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.
Rabinbach, A., ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Blochand Modern German Jewish Messianism’. New German Critique. 34, Winter1985, pp. 78-124.
Rousseau, J.J., The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 4.
Trotsky, L., ‘Their Morals and Ours’. 1938.
Voltaire, Candid. trans. J. Butt, Penguin Classics, London, 1947.
Fontini Vaki, works in the Department of History, Ionian University, Corfu,Greece.
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