Intervention, Encroachment

Abstract

This article shows that Walter Benjamin's initial characterization of the “sphere of moral relations” as divided by two mutually exclusive poles, law and justice, without a mediating third term such as “ethical life” or “moral education,” generates the basis for his critique of violence. After describing how this characterization of moral relations both reproduces and inverts the underlying schema of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, the article outlines the procedure whereby Benjamin's initial definition of violence as an “intervention” into moral relations is supplemented by a corresponding definition of legal “encroachment”: law presents itself as a resolution or “expiation” of morally ambiguous relations; but insofar as the “sphere of moral relations” is split between the two poles of law and justice, such expiation conceals and thus intensifies the moral ambiguity of the situation on which law encroaches. The article concludes by suggesting that contemporary encroachments of law constitute a danger, akin to the growth of nihilism (in Nietzsche's sense), to which Benjamin's essay seeks to alert its readers.