Critchley ( Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , 64- 8) gives a lucid analysis of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ), organized around Benjamin’s distinctions between law-making and law-preserving violence, between political and the general strike, and between mythic and divine violence.

Regarding the first: For Benjamin, all law is ” law-making or law-preserving ,” both of which are violent. All contract takes a pound of flesh, and all constitutional law “requires a violent cut, a moment of decision, and the assertion of power, say, for example, in a revolution or a period of dramatic social transformation.” Benjamin does believe that nonviolent resolutions of conflict are possible, “among private persons” through acts of courtesy, sympathy, and trust. The sphere of nonviolence, he says, is a region “wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ die Sprache ” (Benjamin’s words).

Regarding the political v. the general strike:

Benjamin claims that the political strike merely reinforces state violence while the general strike aims to undermine the state. The general strike is thus “anarchistic,” expressing a commitment to nonviolence in opposition to the inherent violence of the law. The general strike thus aims at peaceful resolution, “on the analogy of agreement between private persons” (Benjamin again).

Finally, mythic v. divine violence. Benjamin sets this up by pointing out that “every conceivable solution to human problems not to speak of deliverance from the confines of all the world-historical conditions” is impossible without violence and by asking if there are forms of violence “other than those envisaged by legal theory” (all Benjamin). No radical change is possible if violence is excluded in principle. This is because “it is never reason that decides on the justification of means and the justness of ends: fateful violence decides on the former, and God on the latter” (Benjamin). Critchley takes the reference to God as “sudden” and part of a “throwaway remark,” and quickly moves on. (For a view that places theology more at the center of Benjamin’s work, see Eric Jacobson’s Metaphysics of the Profane , which highlights Benjamin’s relationship with Gershom Scholem.)

In any case, Critchley lines up justification of means with fateful violence or mythic violence; the justness of ends is determined in the realm of divine violence. Mythic violence is linked in turn to the violence of law-making, which is necessarily power-making; it is violence that underwrites state power. Benjamin sees mythic power in Greek tragedy, vainly attempting to escape the cycle of violence. Critchley says, “The only thing that can put a halt to the logic of mythic violence, Benjamin thinks, is divine violence, which is not law-making but law-destroying [ rechtsvernichtend ].” Korah’s death in the wilderness is an example of “bloodless” divine violence. Divine violence breaks out in revolutionary moments that, in contrast to the bloody violence of law, exerts “bloodless power over life for the sake of the living, for the sake of life’s sacredness” (Critchley’s wording). Critchley sees Benjamin trying to “open a space between law and life,” a space that Critchley labels “politics.” On his own reading of Benjamin, I’m skeptical.

Critchley ends with a discussion of Benjamin’s conclusion that the sixth commandment does not condemn “all violent killing of one person by another” (Benjamin). It is not a “categorical imperative” but a Richtschnur des Handelns , a plumbline for people who “have to wrestle with it in solitude, and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility for ignoring it” (Benjamin). The commandment that defends peace and life’s sanctity doesn’t exclude killing. We have to follow the guide, yet we are simultaneously bound to responsibly ignore it, for the very sake of keeping to the plumbline.

This is all, as I say, lucid as far as Benjamin goes. Yet he ends up in tangles. The “divine” of divine violence is “God” (his quotation marks) as the “first anarchist, calling us into a struggle with the mythic violence of law, the state, and politics by allowing us to glimpse the possibility of something that stands apart.” This thing that stands apart is summed up in Jesus’ command to love enemies. Since Jesus “was not stupid,” He surely realized that “this is a ridiculous demand.” Sounding like a law-gospel Lutheran of the old school, Critchley says that Jesus gives these commands to put us in a situation of “ethical overload,” which, he says, is precisely what ethics is: “ethics is all about overload” (69).

Much better, much more coherent, to say God (not “God”) does indeed tear down structures of law and violence, that Jesus meant what he said and expected his disciples to do it, and (insert Girard) that God undoes mythic violence precisely by sending His Son to love enemies and bless those who cursed and calling us to follow Him.