Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”

A political reading

Abstract

It is currently common for some texts by Walter Benjamin to be circumscribed to a cannonical reading and interpretation that academic philosophy has established for the purpose. Many readers and commentators have focused, above all, in a (profoundly anti-benjaminian) discussion about what the author from Berlin really said or wanted to say. With this are lost the essential points and what matters most: the surprising validity of Benjamin’s thought, its prophetic character with respect to what today is affirmed as the “rule-of-law” and what it teaches us with respect to our own present, in which the evident exhaustion and future breaking-point of modern political culture confronts us with old and new forms of political, cultural or criminal violence. Faced with this type of reception, what we will try here is to propose a political reading of the essay “For a critique of violence”. This reading consists of the shaping of a relatively complex epistemic-critical prism, which contains three different but complementary moments or developments: the Benjaminian “moment”; the German “moment”; and what results from the intersection of the last two, that is, the way in which Benjamin recovers and critically interprets what happened in Germany between 1918 and 1921.