Violence that is not violence, commentary that is not commentary. On recent interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’

A/Prof. Alison Ross (Monash University)

Abstract: This paper gives a critical account of the currently prevailing interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ essay. The paper falls into two main parts. First, I argue that the position Benjamin’s essay defends regarding violence is not cogent within the terms of the essay itself and that the opaque formulations of this essay can be explained only when other more substantial works of Benjamin are taken into account. In particular, Benjamin’s contemporaneous essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ can be used to elucidate the reasoning behind Benjamin’s view that divine violence provides an escape from myth’s forces of totalisation. This point is significant because in recent scholarship on Benjamin’s essay on Violence the category and functions of divine violence are replaced with an amorphous conception of language. The second part of the paper deals with such scholarship. Recent commentators defend under the category of ‘infinite language’ the very characteristics of formless totality that the Violence essay excoriates; and they do so as if these characteristics were the objects of Benjamin’s veneration. Such ‘commentary’ does not illuminate Benjamin’s position. Rather, it puts forward a parallel text in which Benjamin’s conception of divine violence is transformed into non-violent ‘language’. I show that the presuppositions of such readings are antithetical to the concerns of Benjamin’s early work.