Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay “Critique of Violence” offers a powerful and unique examination of the legal justification of violence and state power. Benjamin contends that a critique of violence requires a “philosophy of its history,” 1 and the model he offers challenges traditional approaches to the question of legal violence: instead of considering the circumstances in which violence may be justified legally, he considers the law itself as a kind of violence, and suggests that modern legal systems struggle to do justice to the violence to which they owe their existence. In this paper, I will consider the arguments of “Critique of Violence,” especially the distinction between mythic violence and divine violence, from the perspective of Adorno’s writings on the relationship between nature and progress. I will propose that Adorno’s treatment of the notion of progress, as outlined in his 1962 lecture on the topic, is a dialectical interpretation of Benjamin’s Messianic politics, an interpretation which seeks to tease out the interrelatedness of Benjamin’s opposed concepts of mythic and divine violence. This dialectical reading is justified by its source material, as Benjamin’s distinction between facticity and potentiality foreshadows Adornos’ own brand of negative dialectics. I hope to demonstrate that Benjamin and Adorno’s separate projects converge in a concern about the possibility of emancipatory politics, with a shared pessimism regarding the capacity of revolutionary political programmes to break out of a cycle of domination and oppression. Despite their pessimism, the two writers both leave open the possibility of an emancipatory politics of potentiality, a politics that might do justice to the violence of its eruption