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Of the two kinds of violence mythical and divine that Benjamin distinguishes in Critique of

Violence (CV), he appears to clearly value the latter above the former, but simultaneously
claims it is never recognizable as such and that its power is not visible to men. The way he
phrases this claim, it seems to be rather mystifying if its not possible to identify it at all, then
how is it possible to make a value judgment about it? On what basis can we believe the assertion
that there is such a thing as divine violence, and that its not pernicious like mythical violence?
This paper attempts to explore this question by reading this essay alongside another of
Benjamins essays, Fate and Character (FC).
In order to understand divine violence, which has not been discussed at much length in CV, it
will help to first look at mythical violence, in opposition to which it appears to have been
defined. The relevant set of distinctions is summed up in the following passage (CV):
If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets
boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt
and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if
the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

This implies that the two kinds of violence are characterized by their different associations with
law, boundaries, guilt, expiation, threat, retribution, blood and destruction. Not all of these
things, however, are central to the question at hand. Blood, boundaries and destruction
appear to have been used with specific symbolic or contextual meanings, which cannot be
discussed without first looking at the more fundamental concepts of law and guilt. A
discussion of guilt in the affective sense would include expiation and a discussion of law would
include retribution (as in retributive justice). Law is also associated with the concept of fate
(CV):
[Law] sees [the interest of mankind] in the representation and preservation of an order
imposed by fate that there is only one fate and that what exists, and in particular what
threatens, belongs inviolably to its order.

This point is also made in FC, in a manner that ties together several of the concepts under
consideration:
The laws of fate misfortune and guilt are elevated by law to measures of the person; it
would be false to assume that only guilt is present in a legal context; it is demonstrable
that all legal guilt is nothing other than misfortune.

What Benjamin seems to be saying in these passages is that law as we understand it cannot
exist in isolation from the concept of fate. This is a strong claim to make. There are several other
ways to understand law, the most obvious and oft-cited of which is deterrence. On this view, law
is a human construct that people voluntarily impose upon themselves because doing so means
that society as a whole is better off. The examples generally used to support this view are laws
against murder, theft or rape surely nobody wants to live in a state of what Hobbes called the
war of every man against every man when they could live in more secure, cooperative, nonexploitative conditions simply by agreeing not to harm anyone else in ways that they themselves
would not wish to be harmed. The law, then, is simply an extension of this voluntary social

contract between equals, an external mechanism that by imposing costs on harmful actions
prevents us from attempting to benefit from harming others. Benjamin, however, is dismissive of
this view (CV):
its threat is not intended as the deterrent that uninformed liberal theorists interpret it to
be. A deterrent in the exact sense would require a certainty that contradicts the nature of a
threat and is not attained by any law, since there is always hope of eluding its arm. This
makes it all the more threatening, like fate, on which depends whether the criminal is
apprehended. The deepest purpose of the uncertainty of the legal threat will emerge from
the later consideration of the sphere of fate in which it originates.

The alternative view that Benjamin proposes seems to be that while the reasons that we offer for
submitting to a particular law may simply be that it deters a particular kind of behavior that we
want or need to suppress, in practice law does not work quite like that. Its legitimacy in our eyes
derives less from the conscious rational acceptance of a contract than from a prior implicit
acceptance of the notion of fate.
In reading the passage quoted above, I think its important not to focus too much on the specific
form of the uncertainty that Benjamin points out. If the only relation between the law and fate
derives from the fact that the law, deterministic in principle, is imperfectly enforced, then thats
not a fundamental conceptual relation it just means that the law can be misread as fate, in the
way that any natural disaster (deterministic at the physical level) like an earthquake or a flood
can be misread as fate by those unfamiliar with the natural sciences. A law that was more strictly
enforced would then be less like fate and more like a deterrent. To Benjamin, however, this
uncertainty is not an imperfection in the legal system rather, it forms the very basis of law.
The affective connotations of the words used, on the other hand, may point to something more
substantial. The law is uncertain in that its not automated. The distinction in contemporary
theory between risk and uncertainty is relevant here a risk might be a 25% chance of
getting caught, which would still be a deterrent in the Benjaminian sense, but an uncertainty
would be an unknown risk. Uncertainty could be moral uncertainty on the part of the people
enforcing the law, uncertainty about the extent to which one can make a good case in ones
defence, systemic uncertainty about how seriously the law will be enforced in other words, a
system of judgment that leaves enough room to construct a measure of the person (FC)
through a highly selective reading of their actions and motivations.
This is why the hope of eluding the laws arm cannot be read only as the chance of eluding the
laws arm. My reading of this passage supposes that all the concepts we use to think about the
law are morally ambiguous in a fundamental sense. The non-moral concept of chance does not
have to be read as morally-coloured hope, but it leaves a space for hope. A threat with moral
overtones (in Benjamins sense of an uncertain penalty) does not have to be read as non-moral
deterrence, but it can be by liberal theorists. A definite penalty, which Benjamin would read as
deterrence, can equally well be read as a requirement for moral self-sacrifice. A sacrifice can be
read as a readiness to pay the price to secure something morally significant, or as a calculative
offering that expects something non-moral in exchange. Misfortune does not have to be
interpreted as a sign of sinfulness, but it often is. The list can be extended indefinitely the point

is that the moral meaning of an act is derived not from the form of the act itself but from the way
we read it. And to Benjamin, all law is based on one specific method of reading the reading of
fate.
The discussion of law and boundaries (CV) illuminates this law-fate relationship further:
Laws and unmarked frontiers remain, at least in primeval times, unwritten laws. A man
can unwittingly infringe upon them and thus incur retribution. For each intervention of
law that is provoked by an offense against the unwritten and unknown law is called, in
contradistinction to punishment, retribution. But however unluckily it may befall its
unsuspecting victim, its occurrence is, in the understanding of the law, not chance, but
fate showing itself once again in its deliberate ambiguity. Hermann Cohen, in a brief
reflection on the ancients' conception of fate, has spoken of the "inescapable realization"
that it is "fate's orders themselves that seem to cause and bring about this infringement,
this offense."*

This suggests that in Benjamins view, fate is a kind of inchoate conception of an intrinsically
morally-ordered universe. The law of this universe may be unwritten and unknown, but it is
nevertheless always didactic. Whatever leads to unfortunate consequences must be read as
immoral. Its interesting to compare two different examples of this construction of fate the
inadvertent boundary transgression in the passage above, in which misfortune is read as guilt,
and the following discussion of innocence and happiness (FC):
In the Greek classical development of the idea of fate, the happiness granted to a man is
by no means understood as confirmation of an innocent conduct of life, but as a
temptation to the most grievous offence, hubris. There is, therefore, no relation of fate to
innocence.

Innocence and ignorance, though entirely contingent and even dictated by fate, are both
understood as causes of the eventual absolute moral condemnation of guilt. From this discussion,
it appears that fate is an enforcer of a kind of morality that consists in having an awareness of
which boundaries must not be transgressed, and what ones place in the social order is an
awareness that implies a prior conception of a unique legitimate social order.
Its significant, in light of the above, that the law does not tell us which acts might as a general
rule be most harmful to human interests, and how we are to mitigate those harmful effects it
only tells us which acts are forbidden and what will happen to people who commit them. (Laws
dont generally say things like, Anyone found to be in need of help with overcoming caste
prejudice may, if they are willing, be subjected to three days of solitary confinement in a room
full of copies of The Annihilation of Caste.) This would be a strange way of promoting the
interests of mankind if it were not for the fact that this mechanism is a reflection of a moral
structure that already exists in our minds.
Even outside the ambit of the law, we constantly establish and preserve moral orders by creating
and respecting norms and boundaries, and penalizing deviations or transgressions. Benjamins
general contention seems to be that the sense of fate stems from a moral internalization of a

particular social order, and it is this (largely unconscious) sense and this internalization that is
then formalized into law. The form of the penal code is a reflection of the psychological
structures of social morality. Law cannot itself suppress conflict by penalizing it, because that
would mean there was no unique inviolable order internalized by everyone, but once conflict has
been suppressed through violence, law can testify to this suppression by reading guilt and the
necessity of punishment into acts that have been established or agreed upon as being
transgressive.
A further claim that Benjamin makes, which is essential for the construction of two separate
kinds of violence, is that several particular kinds of affects and motivations are misread or
ignored by fate-based law. He talks about this in the following passage (FC):
Happiness and bliss are therefore no more part of the sphere of fate than is innocence
Another sphere must therefore be sought in which misfortune and guilt alone carry
weight, in which bliss and innocence are found too light and float upward.

Further, he says [emphasis mine]:


Fate is the guilt context of the living. It corresponds to the natural condition of the living,
that illusion not yet wholly dispelled from which man is so far removed that, under its
rule, he was never wholly immersed in it, but only invisible in his best part it is never
man but only the life in him that it strikes, the part involved in natural guilt and
misfortune by virtue of illusion.

This recalls the discussion of fate elevating misfortune and guilt into measures of the person. To
Benjamin, these things are based on valuations and attributions as mistaken as the perceived link
between tarot cards and the future. Guilt is no more than an illusion. Only by erasing, devaluing
or appropriating the things that constitute the best part of man innocence, happiness, bliss,
among others can guilt be given such a central position in human existence, and only by
assuming that man has no higher obligations or desires than to hold on to his life, possessions
and social status can misfortune be said to be the worst thing that could happen to him. The
distinction between man and life is one that he makes in CV as well:
Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with
any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily
person. However sacred man is (or that life in him that is identically present in earthly
life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life
vulnerable to injury by his fellow men.

This makes the earlier reference to blood clearer blood is a symbol of the fact that man is tied
down to his physical body. Its also a sign of retribution, and a warning to others who might
consider transgressing the boundary. I cant go into a detailed psychoanalytic discussion of blood
here, but its definitely implicated in the guilt context Benjamin speaks of, which is important
because it points to the existence of this particular network of emotions that seems to have some
profound connection to fate and law and the moral order.

Benjamins analysis of tragedy sheds further light on this connection between natural life,
guilt and fate (FC) [again, emphasis mine]:
in tragedy pagan man becomes aware that he is better than his god, but the realization
robs him of speech, remains unspoken. Without declaring itself, it seeks secretly to gather
its forces. Guilt and atonement it does not measure justly in the balance, but mixes
indiscriminately. There is no question of the moral world order being restored; instead,
the moral hero, still dumb, not yet of age as such he is called a hero wishes to raise
himself by shaking that tormented world. The paradox of the birth of genius in moral
speechlessness, moral infantility, is the sublimity of tragedy.

I read this as meaning that tragedy exposes the hollowness of what was presumed to be the moral
order, but it does this without being able to reject that order. Benjamins tragic hero is aware of
the things that have been erased by law/fate, but realizes that he is alone in this awareness. He
cannot pit himself against the moral order, because he internalizes it as strongly as anyone else
the only difference is that he knows theres more to him than that order will recognize. The order
and its normative claims are still valid, but their significance is altered. The tragic hero acts on
behalf of his better part knowing that this will condemn him absolutely to guilt and a terrible
fate. His fate is not a punishment for arrogance it is the necessary consequence of recognizing
what lies outside the order of fate.
The tragic hero cannot attack the moral order, but to Benjamin, the revolutionary must see it as
an obligation. He says (CV):
Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythical manifestation of immediate violence
shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion
concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the
destruction of which thus becomes obligatory.

The sense in which he uses obligatory appears, here, to be unrelated to guilt that is, there is no
guilt in not fulfilling this obligation, because the obligation is to destroy that which is premised
on guilt. But what, then, motivates or legitimizes divine violence? Benjamin writes (CV):
All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither
of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.

Divine violence, however, is not a means at all. There is then no question of legitimacy. It
appears to come about only as a response to mythical violence, through a sense that one must
extricate the world from the illusory guilt it is steeped in. Benjamins attack is, here, on law in
general (CV):
On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension of
law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the
abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded. If the rule of myth is broken
occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an
attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence

outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that
revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is
possible, and by what means.

The examples he gives of divine violence are the true war, the judgment of the multitude on
the criminal and the educative power. Read in conjunction with the above passage, this
suggests that he sees divine violence as something like sympathy for a just cause. Whats less
clear is why, after having stated that the revolutionary general strike is violent:
For, however paradoxical this may appear at first sight, even conduct involving the
exercise of a right can nevertheless, under certain circumstances, be described as violent.
More specifically, such conduct, when active, may be called violent if it exercises a right
in order to overthrow the legal system that has conferred it; when passive, it is
nevertheless to be so described if it constitutes extortion in the sense explained above.

he feels the need to also insist that it consists of pure nonviolent means:
Against this deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary conception, no objection can stand
that seeks, on grounds of its possibly catastrophic consequences, to brand such a general
strike as violent. Even if it can rightly be said that the modern economy, seen as a whole,
resembles much less a machine that stands idle when abandoned by its stoker than a beast
that goes berserk as soon as its tamer turns his back, nevertheless the violence of an
action can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the law
of its means.

It seems that the distinction hes making in these passages is between a strike that seeks to
overthrow a legal system in order to establish a new law in its place, and one that seeks to
overthrow that system in order to abolish the state and the legal system entirely. He might,
possibly, read parts of contemporary democratic politics as divine violence (although I cannot
discuss that in this term paper), but aside from that, while I think his analysis of mythical
violence has a lot going for it, Im not very sure that this distinction between the two kinds of
violence is tenable.
References:
1. Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
2. Fate and Character, Walter Benjamin

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