DIVINE VIOLENCE: WALTER BENJAMIN & THE

ESCHATOLOGY OF SOVEREIGNTY
JAMES R. MARTEL

Divine Violence is a book about the way that sovereignty, taken

both as a political practice and a theoretical notion, has proven
itself to be very resilient, almost impossible to do away with. In
this book, I look to the work of Walter Benjamin as a way to
engage with sovereignty in order to subvert this system of rule. In
Benjamins work we find a way, not so much to get rid of
sovereignty (because, as I will show, such attempts tend to
reproduce sovereignty in new guises) but rather to reoccupy it, to
create space for political actions that are not merely reflections of
sovereign authority. The goal of such an endeavor is to radically
undermine

sovereigntys

claims

for

absolute

power

and

exclusivity, to make sovereignty something unrecognizable from

the perspective of its current iterations.
In practice, despite many announcements in recent years that
sovereignty was being undone by new non-state actors such as
terrorist organizations and the effects of globalization, we find
that sovereignty has survived and even thrived in our current
moment (albeit in new and complicated forms). In theoretical
terms, while many leftists ranging from Hannah Arendt to Jacques
Derrida have sought to do away with sovereignty, we find that

they prove curiously reluctant or unable to finally do so. Although

she tells us that sovereignty is nothing but the will of one or a few
individuals superimposed on the rest of a community in the name
of representing them, Arendt goes on to make a space for
sovereignty in part because she doesnt see us as having any
alternatives. Derrida too finds sovereignty both bloody and
patriarchal and yet he too hesitates to call for its elimination (in
part because he fears what would replace it more than he fears
its own pernicious effects).
In seeking to eliminate sovereignty, these thinkers come up
against a kind of trap described by Carl Schmitt in his own
writings on the subject. For Schmitt, when the political subject is
faced with sovereignty, she seems to have only one choice, that
between sovereignty and anarchy. Even if the subject chooses
anarchy, Schmitt goes on to say, she must decide against the
decision. An anarchist politics, Schmitt says, can only serve to
produce a dictator of the antidictatorship. For Schmitt, as for
many other thinkers, there is a secret (or even not so secret)
theology to sovereignty; it comes to us as a secularized version of
divine sovereignty and, as such, is written deeply into the most
basic aspects of our political foundations. Against this trap, it
seems we have no choice but to accept and learn to live with
sovereignty, as both Arendt and Derrida do, albeit with great
reluctance.

In the work of Walter Benjamin, I find an alternative to the forced

choice or trap that Schmitt presents to us. Unlike Arendt and
Derrida,

Benjamin

does

not

try

to

eliminate

sovereignty

altogether. Instead he subjects sovereignty to the kind of anti

progressive historical materialism that comes out of his larger
theorizing. Rather than seeing sovereignty as being the inevitable
result of long teleological chain from Gods own sovereignty,
down to human kings and eventually to modern political systems
(a genealogy that lies at the heart of traditional understandings of
sovereignty as handed down to us by thinkers like Ernst
Kantorowicz), Benjamin sees sovereignty as a partaking in a kind
of rebellion against Gods authority. In his strongly theologically
inflected language, Benjamin sees sovereignty as being part of
what he calls (after Marx) the phantasmagoria, a network of
fallacious ideas that are wrongly projected onto God, or given
divine attributes when they are in fact entirely of human
derivation.

For Benjamin, in paradise, Adam had an original

relationship to the objects in the garden; he saw and basked in

the divine truth that lay all around him. By choosing knowledge
over truth (through the serpents temptation), Adam chose false,
human derived notions over a genuine relationship to the things
of the world.
In this way, in a postlapsarian world, human beings are
ensconced in what Benjamin calls mythic forms of violence. We
are cut off from truth and have no recourse but to representation
and symbolism. Our institutions, sovereignty very much included,

reflect this fallen state and so those things that we attribute to

God are in fact a sign of our distance from God, of our mortal
rebellion against divine truth and divine law. Sovereignty, in this
view, is a thoroughly idolatrous political system where we project
our own desires onto the screen of God and in this way alienate
our own power (in effect to a small group of individuals who are
willing to speak for God.). In sovereignty, we see a practice that
is true of representation more generally for Benjamin. Here, the
symbol (manifested in this case as the idea of a representational
government) actually supplants what it is meant to stand for. It
becomes an idol which ensures that ordinary human politics are
not recognized, overshadowed as they are by the sovereign idol.
Yet all is not lost for Benjamin. Crucially, in his view, we have a
vital ally in our struggle against idolatry, namely God. In his
Critique of Violence, Benjamin contrasts mythic violence with
divine violence. The example he offers there of divine violence is
the story of Korah, an idolator who, along with his followers,
rebelled against the authority of Moses. In consequence, God
opened up the earth and swallowed up Korah and his followers,
leaving no blood, no trace of their existence or of the act that
unmade them. In this way, we see that acts of divine violence do
not introduce new truths into the world (which would then
instantly become idols themselves). Instead it simply removes
false truths, leaving us radically alone and on our own. Insofar as
such acts of divine violence can be presumed to be happening at
all times (Benjamin tells us that each generation is endowed with

a weak messianic power,) human beings can opt out of

idolatrous forms of authority.
This does not mean that human beings can freely say no to
sovereignty; idols and mythic violence will always be asserting
and reasserting themselves in our postlapsarian state. If we think
we can be free from such delusions, we set ourselves up for new
forms of sovereignty that we do not even recognize as such (for
Benjamin, this helps to explain the failure of so many leftist
revolutions). But we can understand that the assertion of
sovereignty is itself vulnerable and troubled, potentially unmade
by the very deity in whose name it is proffered.
This insight offers us a chance to think differently about our
options as political subjects. In Divine Violence, I use the
metaphor of a fountain to explain our situation in respect to
sovereignty. If we think of sovereignty as a fountain (a metaphor
that we find Hobbes using at one point), we can see it as an
awesome display. But we can also see that the fountain is
composed of water, which is akin, I would argue, with ordinary
politics. Normally we think of the two as being the same thing; the
water that composes the fountain is simply part of its production.
For this reason, we tend to think of politics and sovereignty as
being synonymous terms, indistinguishable from one another.
But, if we can learn to see the political as distinct from
sovereignty, if, for example, we can see the waters resting at the
perimeter of a fountain as being itself, it can help us to think

about a human politics that is not itself entirely determined by

sovereignty idolatry. Furthermore, if we think about the fountain
being disrupted by acts of divine violence (not undone once and
for all, but exposed, however temporarily, as being something
other than what its form suggests) we might learn to see and give
better credit to those kinds of human political acts that are not
entirely caught up in sovereignty. In this way, we might begin to
reclaim from sovereignty an entire network of political practices
that sovereignty gets all the credit for but which it has little or
nothing to do with (leading us to think that without sovereignty
politics is entirely impossible).
In my reading, these practices--that is those political practices
that become legible to us as a result of looking at sovereignty
through the lens of Walter Benjamins writing and theorizing-amount to a kind of anarchism that escapes from Schmitts trap.
Rather than being an anarchism that is reduced to deciding
against the decision, these practices are to be found at the
perimeter of the decision; such practices are not the basis for
some utopia to be found in a post sovereign world but are actually
already undertaken all the time even as we, bedazzled by
sovereign authority as we are, do not recognize our own distinct
politics as such.
Divine Violence engages with the work of Arendt and Derrida,
along with other thinkers such as tienne Balibar and Alain
Badiou, in order to delineate a long theoretical struggle with

sovereignty (and a concomitant political struggle as well). By

engaging with Walter Benjamin and reading him as an ally of
these various thinkers, I seek both to give these thinkers a way to
escape some of the conundrums of sovereignty that they have
encountered, as well as a way to engage Benjamins own work
with an explicitly political vocabulary that he himself does not
always offer us. The point of this engagement (what Benjamin
himself would call a constellation,) is to show that we are not in
fact trapped by sovereignty, that, even (or perhaps especially)
from deep within its maw, we are not totally determined by
sovereign or mythic power.
In the penultimate chapter of the book, I look at Hobbes and
Spinozas respective treatments of the so called Hebrew
Republic, that is the time when God was said to be the king of
Ancient Israel, as a potential model to think further about the
kinds of dissipated and reoccupied form that sovereignty might
take when it is not distinctly idolatrous. In that time, these
authors tell us that Gods authority was spoken for by priests,
thus

offering

another

example

of

an

idolatrous

form

of

representational politics. Yet, at the same time, the reign of the

priests was periodically disrupted by the eruption of prophecy, of
claims to speak for God directly. The authority generated by such
prophecy, both Hobbes and Spinoza tell us, came from a decision
by the community as to whether to believe that a given prophet
did indeed speak for God (sometimes they held that a prophet
was speaking falsely).

In effect, the ultimate interpretive power, the power to speak for

God, thus belonged not to the priests but to the political
community

itself.

In

this

way,

sovereignty

was

diffused,

effectively suspended as a centralized form of rule, by relegating

it beyond the realm of human law. Here, sovereignty is not
eliminated but rendered (at least at times) anti-idolatrous. The
effect of prophecyakin to acts of divine violence--is to disrupt
the idolatrous forms of interpretation that the idea of God as king
normally produces and to allow a decentralized and political form
of authority to emerge in its stead. While this model of theocracy
may not seem all that connected or relevant for the idea of an
anarchist politics that I promote elsewhere in the book, I argue
that it offers us a model for how sovereignty can be decentered,
how the distinct politics of a human community can be recovered
without recourse to a sense of absolute (and hence, false)
freedom from idolatry. By thinking of such a possibility in line with
the larger works of Benjamin and the constellations that he forms
with other authors, we get glimpses of how to engage in a
subversion of sovereign authority.
James Martel is a Professor of Political Theory at San Francisco
State University. His research areas include early modern
contemporary thought. Recent books by the author include
Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political
Theory (2011) and Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas
Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (2007).