Abstract
I would like to take up the question of violence, more specifically, the question of what a critique of violence might be. What meaning does the term critique take on when it becomes a critique of violence? A critique of violence is an inquiry into the conditions for violence, but it is also an interrogation of how violence is circumscribed in advance by the questions we pose of it. What is violence, then, such that we can pose this question of it, and do we not need to know how to handle this question before we ask, as we must, what are the legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence? I understand Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ written in 1921, to provide a critique of legal violence, the kind of violence that the state wields through instating and maintaining the binding status that law exercises on its subjects (abstract and keywords by the editor).
Keywords:
Walter Benjamin; Law; Violence; Divine Violence