1 Introduction

Benjamin’s essay Toward the Critique of Violence has often irritated readers. This is even more true of his concept of divine violence, which is defined as “law-annihilating”¹ and goes against legally sanctioned state sovereignty. In what follows, I present a new reading of both Benjamin’s essay and divine violence. Against an apocalyptic tendency of Benjamin, I argue that divine violence can only be an instrument of justice if it is understood as violence suffered rather than perpetrated. This is especially the case where people suffer persecution – imprisonment, torture, death – as a result of nonviolent resistance to an oppressive political regime. Only if such resistant suffering occurs, can we consider violence as divine, and thereby obtain a perspective that transcends the never-ending atrocities of human history.

2 The Problem of Divine Violence

Let me begin by situating divine violence within Benjamin’s broader study. Before distinguishing between its forms, he defines a general concept of violence. As he notes, “however effective a cause may be, it becomes violence in the impressive sense of the word only when it intervenes in moral [sittliche] relations.”² This statement is remarkable when one considers what characterizes moral relations. As a minimum criterion, they depend on the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, and, by extension, just and unjust. Two observations follow that indicate the direction of Benjamin’s thought.

First, one should recall his 1916 essay On Language as such and the Language of Man, written five years before Toward the Critique of Violence.³ There, Benjamin turns to Genesis 3 to formulate moral relations in terms of the enduring possibility of being judged. As Benjamin charges:

[t]he tree of knowledge stood in the Garden of God not in order to dispense information on good and evil, but as an emblem of judgement over the questioner. This immense irony marks the mythic origin of the law.⁴

As we shall see, Benjamin is able to link law with power and guilt in his account of mythic violence through this same theological thrust in Toward the Critique of Violence. The judgement of being guilty precedes the distinction of good and evil. Consequently, the whole setting of Benjamin’s discussion on violence is post-lapsarian. It concerns a world after the Fall.

Second, it is crucial that, for Benjamin, “the sphere” of moral relations – and by extension violence – “is designated by the concepts of law and justice.”⁵ However, law and justice do not belong together, but constitute two fundamentally different orders. Here Benjamin explicitly departs from conventional legal theory, be it positivist or natural law theory. According to both positivist and natural law approaches, the law is a public good that enforces justice in the social context. For Benjamin, however, the law is merely a manifestation of power and as such an instrument of domination: “The positing of law is the positing of power.”⁶ Justice, therefore, can only be realized apart from and beyond the law.

Benjamin’s distinction between two basic types of violence – legal and divine – similarly tracks this separation between law and justice.⁷ To begin with, legal violence, as its name suggests, serves the law. Whenever legal violence establishes a new system of law (and power) it is considered “law-positing.” In Benjamin, law-positing violence is strictly decisionist.⁸ It is not based on rational deliberation or contract, but only on the sheer force of deciding what is legal and what is not. On the other hand, legal violence becomes “law-preserving” whenever it enforces an existing law. In this sense, both executive and judicial forms of state power are law-preserving. I will leave aside here the specific dynamic that Benjamin suggests arises between the law-positing and law-preserving aspects of legal violence. Suffice it to say that they form a circle of violence that is self-contained and will never stop turning.⁹

There are certainly good reasons for rejecting Benjamin’s conflation of law and power, as well as his claim that law serves only its own self- preservation. Nevertheless, Benjamin draws attention to an easily overlooked political-theological aspect of the law: its a priori implication of guilt. Once the law exists, being human is characterized by the capacity to transgress the law. Or, even more, the law installs a horizon of guilt into the very nature of human beings. This hamartiological aspect of law in turn sheds light on its relationship to political power. If the law is an instrument of domination, then to be dominated is also to live in the horizon of guilt, to be essentially guilty. It is precisely this connection between law, domination, and guilt that Benjamin understands as mythical. In their mythical reality, human beings are subjected to the arbitrary will of those who are more powerful, and in being subjected they are determined as fundamentally guilty. Since “power is the principle of all mythic law-positing,”¹⁰ the law both expresses and administers this mythical entanglement of power and guilt.¹¹

For Benjamin, all legal violence, whether law-making or law-preserving, is opposed by another form of violence, which he calls divine. Insofar as legal violence is of a mythical nature, divine violence is situated as a special type of counter-violence: “Just as God is opposed to myth in all spheres, so divine violence runs counter to mythic violence. Indeed, divine violence designates in all respects an antithesis to mythic violence.”¹² Benjamin develops this further in a key passage of Toward the Critique of Violence that is almost formulaic in character and that is also central to my reading:

If mythic violence is law-positing, divine violence is law-annihilating; if the former establishes boundaries, the latter boundlessly annihilates them; if mythic violence inculpates [verschuldend] and expiates [sühnend] at the same time, divine violence de-expiates [entsühnend]; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal in a bloodless manner.¹³

For my reading, the first two aspects of divine violence will prove crucial. Divine violence annihilates the law, and it does so boundlessly, that is, without setting new boundaries, in other words, without positing a new law. It puts an end to law and domination. But before I go into this in more detail, allow me to comment briefly on the other points of Benjamin’s formula, some of which are rather ambivalent.

The distinction between “bloody” and “lethal in a bloodless manner” has been congenially taken up by Agamben, who offers his own reading of “the dogma of the sanctity of life” in Homo Sacer.¹⁴ What it actually means to be “lethal in a bloodless manner” is not easy to say. Does it mean killing without violating the very thin surface of the body, its skin? Is it a killing without using weapons? According to Derrida’s critique of Benjamin in Force of Law, this is disturbingly reminiscent of the gas chambers of the Nazi KZ, which also produced death without bloodshed. I will circle back to Derrida’s critique below.

For the moment, I want to highlight the differing temporalities between the “threatening” character of mythic violence and the “striking” character of divine violence. Threatening violence is structured by the fearful anticipation of a deferred event. With such violence, the future is primary. Striking violence, on the other hand, comes unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere. Structurally, it replaces the forward-looking orientation of threatening violence with the primacy of a present concentrated in itself. Experiences of threatening violence and striking violence are both terrible. And yet we can say that the pure unpredictability of striking violence leaves space for a non-factual beyond, which is not a future. This tense combination of transcendence with radical presence is precisely what accounts for the annihilating function of divine violence.

Although divine violence can annihilate the mythic system of guilt and retribution, one might rightly ask, how is such violence de-expiating for those who suffer from it? What are the actual consequences for its victims? And what have they done to be struck by it? Benjamin’s reference to God’s judgment on the house of Korah in Numbers 16 attempts to provide an answer. As Benjamin writes, and I think he writes it very consciously, God’s judgment “strikes privileged ones, Levites.”¹⁵ By “privileged,” he denotes those who are favored by the law, the law (lat. lex, genitive legis) which gives them a special (lat. privus) rank and a prominent position. By allowing the ground to swallow up the Levites, along with all their families and possessions, God annihilates the law that gave them this privilege. At that moment, no one is guilty, not even the house of Korah. But why are they struck by divine violence in the first place? Not because they are guilty, for guilt comes only with the law. Divine violence comes upon them precisely because they are privileged and seek more privilege, thus supporting the system of legal power and domination. The problem with this interpretation, however, is it misses an important point in the biblical text. In Numbers 16:3, the house of Korah opposes the theocratic system of Moses and Aaron by advocating the equality of all Israelites before God. By using God’s judgment on the house of Korah as an example of divine violence, Benjamin seems to be siding with theocracy. Whether he does or not, Numbers 16 and the rebellious house of Korah do not exemplify the annihilation of existing systems of power but rather the decision to uphold, by force, the theocratic order.

Is divine violence then, in the end, just another form of mythic violence? Commentators such as Axel Honneth have reached precisely this conclusion. As Honneth charges, in Benjamin’s essay the “concept of law is terroristic, [its] ideal of violence theocratic, and [its] idea of revolution eschatological.”¹⁶ Going further, Derrida observes that Benjamin’s notion of an extermination of the privileged that is “lethal in a bloodless manner” implies an eschatology that is uncomfortably close to the eschatology of the Nazi Final Solution.¹⁷ And: “One is terrified at the idea of an interpretation that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God.”¹⁸ Of course, Derrida says, following Benjamin, that one can clearly identify the mythical character of Nazi legal violence.¹⁹ Benjamin also emphasizes that no one can claim divine violence for themselves and thus make themselves an instrument of divine action. This is true, with one exception. Alluding to the curious similarity of Benjamin’s first name, Walter, and to the fact that he characterizes divine violence as “waltend,”²⁰ Derrida notes that the “signature” of Toward the Critique of Violence “signs by pretending to let God himself sign.”²¹ To put it less elegantly, Benjamin’s philosophy of history itself makes use of divine violence, reckoning with it as the power that, as pure and purifying, will establish “a new historical era.”²² So there is a reckoning with an eschatological violence in Benjamin, a violence of ultimate decision, and it is highly questionable whether such a violence, precisely because it can be reckoned with, can ever be anything other than mythical. There is an aporia here in Benjamin that Derrida clearly delineates.

3 Divine Violence Suffered

Given the uncomfortable complications surrounding previous commentaries on Benjamin’s notion of divine violence, an alternative interpretation is left wanting. So far, divine violence has only ever been discussed as violence that is perpetrated, as violence from the perspective of the offender. But violence unfolds in a relationship. There is violence that is perpetrated, but there is also violence that is suffered. My contention is that violence is always mythical when it is perpetrated. But when violence is suffered, it can take on the divine characteristics that Benjamin describes. So, it may be the case that violence cannot be “excluded in principle”²³ when it comes to “a redemption from the spell encircling all previous world-historical existential situations.”²⁴ “Other kinds of violence than those envisaged by all legal theory,”²⁵ however, may in fact have nothing to do with the objective character of violence, which depends on its purpose, that is, whether it is law-positing, law-preserving, or law-annihilating. Rather, violence is changed solely by the subjective way in which one relates to it, and in which it is not perpetrated, but suffered. This implies that what annihilates mythical violence (i.e., divine violence) is not a transcendent God who suddenly and unpredictably intervenes in this world. Rather, it is something of which we ourselves are capable – capable in that we suffer a certain form of violence.

As mentioned, the two qualities of divine violence that interest me here are, first, its annihilation of law and, second, the boundless nature of that annihilation. As suffered, divine violence most commonly occurs when some people take it upon themselves to endure the violence of others, whose power they nonviolently oppose. Its paradigmatic case, which I will also use for illustration, is nonviolent political resistance. Whenever people resist an oppressive system without committing acts of violence themselves – and are willing to resist despite further persecution – they are proving themselves ready for divine violence. And when, in fact, they are beaten, imprisoned, tortured, or killed by their persecutors, it is divine violence that befalls them. In order to prove my point, I will first present, following the example of political resistance, what might be the prototypical or, if the term is even appropriate, the ideal case of divine violence suffered. After that, I will discuss some of the questions that are likely to arise from such an interpretation.

In the prototypical case, there is first political oppression, followed by nonviolent resistance, followed once more by persecutory violence to counter that resistance. Now, sometimes when this particular sequence of violence and suffering finds its way to the public (and in the ideal case it does) something remarkable happens. Outrage begins to spread among the people. Open resistance grows. Not only does the resistance of the core opposition intensify. Even those who previously preferred to keep a low profile are now more and more willing to openly resist. They, too, may now take to the streets and turn their voices and bodies against the ruling regime. To be sure, mass protests and huge public uprisings, have a logic of their own in their development. But one of their starting points is often the violence suffered by those who, as a kind of avant-garde of resistance, were willing to accept violent persecution. One may speak here of a détournement or deflection of the meaning of violence.²⁶ Originally, violent persecution was meant to protect the ruling system from its enemies, to uphold, to preserve the law. But now, in the aftermath of the act of violence, in the aftermath of the suffering, this very violence testifies against the ruling system and destabilizes it. It exposes the injustice of the ruling system, and causes people to revolt against it. The first law-annihilating characteristic of Benjaminian divine violence is manifested here. For by demonstrating that the prevailing legal system is responsible for suffering and death, the suffering of those who have resisted nonviolently delegitimizes and thus annihilates it, at least on an ethical level, which – sticking to Benjamin’s definition – is distinguished from the moral. Divine violence in this case turns the law into something that is as if nothing (lat. nihil). It suspends the force and authority of law. And this is enough to demand that the law should also be annihilated in reality, that it should be truly and effectively swept away. Let me add to Benjamin here that every law may be based on an act of violence, and that with it comes the a priori verdict of guilt. What legitimates the law, however, is not violence but the claim to justice that people hope to see realized in it. The moment a legal system proves to be unjust, people turn away from it, and from that moment on, it is only violence that keeps it upright. When this comes to light, as in the case of the suffering of those who have resisted nonviolently, the existing law is de-legitimized.

How, then, does this annihilating capacity of divine violence suffered also entail an annihilation that is boundless? This second characteristic of boundlessness emerges, I contend, because those who are suffering persecutory violence are the least capable of establishing new political rule. The victims of divine violence are not in contention for seizing power but are rather perpetually subjugated by the current order. Of course, when a protest is successful, when rebellion becomes revolution and the old regime is replaced by a new one, there will also be a new law. The meaning of the violence suffered in resistance will now be that it served this new regime, this new law. It will then be integrated into its history, and there will be days of remembrance framed by flags, commemorative speeches, and the like. But all this does not exist in the suffering itself, in the pain and despair that comes with persecution. In the final moment, in which both the violence perpetrated and the violence suffered culminate, there is nothing but a boundless suffering and surrendering to nothing but suffering, which means continuing to resist with this body that is soon nothing but a single wound. The law is annihilated in this body. For the law may destroy the integrity of the body, but not the integrity of resistance. Perpetrated violence can neither reclaim justice nor force it from the hands of those who resist. Where this happens, in the suffering, resisting body, there is no new law. There is only the beyond of law, a claim to justice that can never be fully answered by any future order.

This beyond of law, which arises when people willingly suffer violent injustice, can also provide an answer to some questions that may arise about divine violence suffered. For what about those cases where people are persecuted with little to no reaction? Perhaps the regime’s grip on the people is still too strong, or it has found ways to make most people accept its terms. Or, even worse, those who resist are silenced and their suffering does not reach the public at all. Of course, violent regimes know that producing political martyrs can be fatal to them. This also applies to those dubious cases when those who suffer persecution are themselves pursuing a political agenda of total and therefore mythical power. In these cases, too, persecution can lead to the destabilization and eventual overthrow of the existing order. Again, the difference between a liberal and an oppressive system is that in the former, law enforcement is more or less transparent, while the latter tries to make persecution as invisible as possible, especially in the political case. The only sign it allows is a disturbing sign, a sign ex-negativo, a sudden absence. Someone used to live here. Now, suddenly, and usually overnight, they are gone, and no one knows where. Even if someone does know, no one wants to talk about it. What about the suffering of those who have disappeared, who resist but are buried in silence? Does their suffering still annihilate the law? Imagine, as an extreme case, the suffering of the last few humans on earth who are to be terminated by a regime of machines. Would nonviolent resistance even make sense in this case? Would it annihilate the law of the machines, which is not even a law but an algorithmic function? To answer this, consider that even the last human being on earth would see the misery that has befallen her as evil, and that she, or at least something in her, would raise the claim of justice even to an empty sky. As Simone Weil writes, “at the bottom of the heart of every human being, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him.”²⁷ Weil gets to the heart of the matter here, by suggesting a universal orientation to justice that defies erasure by contravening experiences on injustice. That is why even the last human being on earth can imagine another being, be it a god or other human survivors, who learn of her suffering and deplore what has happened to her as unjust. There is something like a non-factual hope, a hope that, again, is linked neither to a future nor a new law.

4 Marks of Transcendence

We can now elaborate on Benjamin’s divine violence, with Benjamin himself, but also beyond him. Resistant suffering can be called divine because it is marked by transcendence, and in two ways. First, resistant suffering is a claim to justice in the face of unjust violence. Even without onlookers who witness, endorse, and advance such claims to justice, the suffering itself bears witness to its own claim through the manifestation of a non-factual hope. When unjust suffering is willingly endured, the experience of non-factual hope transcends violent injustice without establishing its own order of justice. Therefore, in the moment of unjust suffering, justice is present in its purest form. It is both present yet beyond the law, as indicated earlier. The second sense in which resistant suffering is divine follows from the way people surpass themselves when resisting unjust violence. They forego what is minimally expected of life – security and safety – living instead in constant insecurity and fear. There is a renunciation of oneself and for the sake of something more valuable than one’s own life, a movement that can certainly be called transcendent and even divine in that it is beyond the norm of human behavior and in some sense belongs to another order of existence.

In Benjamin, both aspects, self-transcendence and justice, come together in what he calls “the living,”²⁸ or more precisely, “the soul of the living,”²⁹ which can be understood as the inner core of the living. As he writes, divine violence, like legal violence, is lethal and destructive. But “it is annihilating only in a relative sense, with regard to goods, law, life, and the like.”³⁰ Divine violence does not destroy “the soul of the living.”³¹ This is so because divine violence actually serves the living. It is “for the sake of the living.”³² At first this may seem impertinent, as Benjamin himself knows.³³ For the claim is that there is a violence that benefits the living while destroying what belongs to the living: the earthly persona and the conditions that allow that persona to persist. What remains is something beyond this world, a transcendent life, or “that life […], which stays identical in earthly life, death, and living-on.”³⁴ But what if this is expressed from a perpetrator’s perspective? Who can ever claim to be committing an act of divine violence, even if they wrestle in singular “responsibility”³⁵ with divine commandments, such as “Thou shalt not kill”? Who can claim that the wounding or killing of another person brings salvation to that person?

However, the situation is different once we shift the perspective to those who willingly suffer persecution. In this case, there is no superior agent who violently brings salvation. Under unjust law enforcement, deprived of all rights, there is ultimately nothing left but the “soul of the living,” or that which resists all reification in human existence, something beyond which is never a thing. This non-object remains beyond the law. Both in suffering and resisting – resisting in suffering, suffering in resisting – law, power, and guilt, in their mythical connection, are suspended. They are suspended by the suffering body, which lays claim to justice amid its pain and terror. However, this non-object is also beyond the self, or the earthly persona. It is as if through the bodily experience of resistant suffering, the soul of the living emerges with its boundless claim to justice and as that which cannot be harmed by any objective means, not even violent ones. Benjamin may have something like this in mind when he notes that human beings do not coincide “with the mere life in [their] being as with any of [their] states and qualities, indeed not even with the uniqueness of [their] bodily person.”³⁶ Their non-objectivity makes them differ from themselves, so that they are constitutively both beyond their earthly personae and the law. Consequently, they are charged with a law-annihilating meaning.

5 The Alien Element

There is much in Benjamin’s Toward the Critique of Violence that suggests it is written from the perspective of the perpetrator. Other texts by Benjamin have a stronger focus on suffering. To take just a few examples, in the Theological- Political Fragment “the immediate messianic intensity of the heart […] passes through […] suffering.”³⁷ In Origin of the German Trauerspiel there is the remarkable figure of the “tyrant as martyr, martyr as tyrant”³⁸ that goes along with a “repudiation of eschatology.”³⁹ In On the Concept of History those who suffer from history are at the center of Benjamin’s weak messianism. It would certainly be instructive to explore the relationship between suffering, the suspension of political power and redemption in Benjamin’s other texts. It seems, however, that Toward the Critique of Violence is more influenced by Georges Sorel’s On Violence, and the question of whether the active use of violence in a revolutionary context could be just, even if illegal. This Sorelian framing of the problem is why Benjamin regards “just war” or “the divine judgment of the multitude”⁴⁰ as possible manifestations of divine violence. Except, rather than to simply locate justified albeit outlawed means for revolutionary violence, Benjamin goes on to fuse a profound theological problem with the political discussions of insurrectional resistance. He identifies the law as a manifestation of mythic guilt sustained by mythic violence. Hence, his task entails more than carving out a space for extra-legal resistance, but rather finding liberation from this mythical entanglement of guilt and domination. The real question, then, is what form violence must take in order to abolish the established mythic-legal order. We can see here a theological transposition of the Sorelian problem. But what “pure violence” can really “de-pos[e] law together with all the forms of violence on which it depends”?⁴¹ If history shows one thing very clearly, it is that violence always begets more violence. It is illusory to think that there could be any form of perpetrated violence that could break this never-ending chain of destruction.

Consequently, the answer to Benjamin’s problem does not consist in finding another way to commit acts of violence. It is a different attitude toward violence, not an active one, but not a passive one either. Perhaps it can be called a willingly receptive attitude. Violence can be both revolutionary and redemptive only when it is suffered in nonviolent resistance. This is the only violence that can rightly be called just violence, or even a truly just form of political action. Of course, unconditional non-violent resistance sounds just as unlikely to solve human misery as Benjamin’s hope for a pure, law-annihilating violence. Nonviolent resistance may serve as a guideline, a regulative idea. And yet it seems to be part of the “spell encircling”⁴² humanity that most people may wish for peace, just as most are unable to keep peace in all circumstances. There are simply transgressions of the other that cannot be left unanswered, even if it would be possible in principle to refrain from violent defense. But even if there is nonviolent resistance, and even if it is politically successful as in the case of the Indian independence movement and Gandhi’s particular form of nonviolent resistance, satyagraha, it will be followed by another state power and, accordingly, another politics of violence, which among other things will establish a new law or preserve an old one. There is a paradox here. Nonviolent action may be a form of truly just politics. Yet it remains an alien element in political reality.

How to deal with this paradox? Should it be disqualified as fruitless? Should it be put aside for the sake of political realism? The answer is the opposite. The paradox must be taken even further. Precisely because nonviolent resistance is an alien element, it can de-pose the usual political machinery and show that there is justice beyond this violence. The main point, however, is not that justice will be realized as a new order. One should uphold the idea of justice, yet in suffering violent persecution, one’s hands are literally tied. The experience of divine violence suffered does not lie in an act of building something new, but in revealing what is most real and beyond violence. One name for it is justice. Worldly power cannot reach what is non-objective. In the midst of violence, justice escapes violence. Emmanuel Levinas testifies to this when he writes of the face of the other and its commandment, “Thou shall not commit murder.”⁴³ But the non-objective is beyond even the ethical imperative. It is the absolute integrity beyond the face. It is what says: “You cannot kill me.”⁴⁴

Wherever the non-objective appears the total closure of violence is torn open. One cannot reverse the claim to justice and the realization that justice can withstand violence. To withstand violence means both to be willing to endure it and to refrain from using it. Every commitment to justice is an exception to the usual political mechanism. The exception of nonviolent resistance, that is, of the willingness to suffer violence in resistance, does not establish a future where justice rules. It is capable of something else. It can abstain from, and point beyond, violence, and it can thus annihilate the law, and with it the sovereign power, which the law’s mythical structure protects.