Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708323
J. Ng
{"title":"Rechtsphilosophie after the War","authors":"J. Ng","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708323","url":null,"abstract":"What resources does philosophy have at its disposal for a critical analysis of the role of violence in a war of all against all? Faced with this question, Walter Benjamin discovers that legal positivism, which believes in the capacity to derive how law ought to be from the sheer concept of a “correct” law, is constitutively blind to the possibility that values may be misaligned with law, and that the basic structures of law and consensus might come after the fact of power. Drawing on the work of contemporaneous legal theorist Leonard Nelson, this article argues that Benjamin developed a potent critique of the dialectic of recognition at work in the legitimation of violence, making way instead for an analysis of what remains unrecognizable to the normative order: power, loitering as a “nonvalue” in the gap between values and legal ends.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116931584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708331
Marc Crépon, Micol Bez
{"title":"The Right to Strike and Legal War in Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence”","authors":"Marc Crépon, Micol Bez","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708331","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The object of this article is to show how, at the beginning of his essay “Toward the Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin uses the questions of the right to strike and law of war to exemplify the way in which the state monopoly has no other goal than to preserve the law itself. In so doing, the question of the boundary between violence and nonviolence is put into conversation with the distinction made by Georges Sorel between the political strike and the general revolutionary strike.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117078801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708379
Petar Bojanic, Edward Ðjordević
{"title":"“Leben und Gewalt” or “Gewalt und Leben”","authors":"Petar Bojanic, Edward Ðjordević","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708379","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In paragraph 18 of “Toward the Critique of Violence,” the terms life, living, and violence, and the relations among them, complicate Walter Benjamin's justification of divine violence—his text's main discovery. This article seeks to reconstruct Benjamin's uses of life and living in earlier texts and to consider the potential influence of various authors he was reading at the time (Heinrich Rickert, Erich Unger, Kurt Hiller, Gershom Scholem). Benjamin's distinction between life and living is crucial for his critique of pacifism and for his shift in perspective: he moves the focus from the victim to the one committing murder, but whose violent act just might bring justice.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121725717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708307
Peter Fenves
{"title":"Intervention, Encroachment","authors":"Peter Fenves","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708307","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"5 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114015920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708387
P. Oyarzún
{"title":"Law, Violence, History","authors":"P. Oyarzún","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708387","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article offers a reading of the concluding paragraph of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” It discusses Benjamin's assertion that only a philosophical-historical approach can provide the key to a critique of violence in light of his essay's discussion of legal violence, and in light of his discovery of radically different types of violence. Benjamin argues that the legal order remains enclosed in a cycle of law-positing and law-preserving violence. Moreover, the legal order inherits the essential trait of myth and of mythic violence: ambiguity. This article shows that guilt is the destiny of those subjected to mythic (and legal) forms of violence. The fateful cycle of legal violence can be undone only by the irruption of an absolutely heterogeneous type of violence, which Benjamin calls divine violence. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that, in deposing legal violence (and the legal order as a whole), divine violence also deposes itself as violence. Although divine violence cannot be attested to as a fact or as a force unequivocally acting in the profane—that is, the human—context, it is nevertheless immanent to the profane world. Its immanence is the immanence of the messianic.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131985545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708371
M. Ty
{"title":"Benjamin on the Border","authors":"M. Ty","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708371","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a critique of contemporary regimes of migrant repression in light of Walter Benjamin's reflections on borders and their constitutive relation to legal violence. In paragraphs 15–17 of “Toward the Critique of Violence,” Benjamin evokes the legend of Niobe, who, in a fatal stroke of retaliation by the gods, is turned into stone—transformed at once into the grief-stricken precipitate of mythic violence and into an enduring marker of the boundary between two separate and unequal worlds. From this tale, Benjamin unfolds an understanding of the border, not as the mere backdrop for the use of force nor as a territorial demarcation that states may justifiably defend, but as the very instantiation of legal violence (in its originary form). He contends, further, that establishing borders is a technic of ambiguity, designed to represent inequality as a single line that may not be transgressed, and produces, too, a nexus of guilt in relation to which one who “steps over” becomes fated to illegality and to the violence that the latter ostensibly warrants. In drawing attention to the inextricability of borders and the violence that they instantiate, and in exposing the identity between mythic retribution and Grenzsetzung (border-positing), Benjamin offers insight into current practices of criminalizing border crossers and militarizing borderlands. Some promise for the negation of the order that secures those who traverse the border as fatalities of law is found in the essay's final moments, when Benjamin imagines extralegal justice, or divine violence, as a de-creative force that annihilates the borders that confer the sentence of life-destroying guilt.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"183 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120946652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708315
Massimo Palma
{"title":"The Curious Case of Baruch Spinoza in Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence”","authors":"Massimo Palma","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708315","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Although Baruch Spinoza was important for thinkers of his generation, Walter Benjamin seems to have completely ignored the philosopher. Spinoza's name appears just a few times in Benjamin's works, and Spinoza's thought never seems to have been relevant to him. The only place where Benjamin quotes a text of Spinoza's, albeit between the lines, is in “Toward the Critique of Violence” (1921). Still, in this essay Benjamin is far from enthusiastic about the author of the Ethics. He names Spinoza as a proponent of natural law theory, which Benjamin dismisses in his search for a criterion with which to judge Gewalt. This article seeks to investigate Benjamin's apparent hostility to Spinoza and to reexamine the relationship between the two, from both a theoretical and a political perspective.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126538904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708355
Anne-Lise François
{"title":"“. . . and will do none”","authors":"Anne-Lise François","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708355","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a partial commentary on the figures of parenthetical or bracketed power in paragraphs 12 and 13 of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” Performing its own bracketing of the central question of the general strike, it focuses instead on Benjamin's interest in these paragraphs in the technique of open-ended discussion on a case-by-case basis. Technique, so understood, assumes, without necessarily exercising, the power to lie and be lied to.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114345409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-7708339
Dario Gentili
{"title":"The Politics of Pure Means","authors":"Dario Gentili","doi":"10.1215/26410478-7708339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-7708339","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is focused on the analysis of paragraphs 10 and 11 of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” The article focuses on two sets of fundamental claims: those addressing the function of the police within the legal order of the state and those addressing what Benjamin calls the “politics of pure means.” Benjamin considers both the police and the politics of pure means as belonging to “the realm of means,” but they represent two alternative configurations of politics. The police state exemplifies the art of government when “the state of emergency is the rule,” that is, when the constantly reproduced fear of violence performs a disciplinary function. By contrast, the politics of pure means names the possibility of a politicization of human beings living together on the basis of subjective dispositions other than fear (which traditionally was thought to justify the creation of the legal order of the state).","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123882650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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