Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism -- The political theology of sovereignty -- In the maw of sovereignty -- Benjamin's dissipated eschatology -- Waiting for justice -- Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision -- The Hebrew republic -- Conclusion : the anarchist hypothesis.

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler argues that Walter Benjamin’s concept of divine violence can be related to a technique of nonviolent civil government. To make the argument, Butler relies on Benjamin’s philosophy of translation. This article reviews Benjamin’s concept of divine violence as presented in “Toward the Critique of Violence” in order to show that divine violence is violence. While some forms of nonviolence identified by Butler share common traits with (...) Benjamin’s divine violence in the fact that they may have real force and be “pure means,” nevertheless, the means of Benjamin’s divine violence are violent ones. This article argues that conceiving divine violence as violence is necessary to a rigorous understanding of violence and nonviolence, especially in their revolutionary forms. Appeal is made to recent works by Avram Alpert, Idris Robinson, and Billie Murray who argue against suppressing the study of violence in liberation movements. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to clarify, criticize, and expand upon the ambiguous-yet-influential concept of divine violence introduced by Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. I proceed in three parts: in the first, I outline Benjamin’s argument about the cycle of mythical violence and divine violence’s special role as an interruption of that cycle. Next, I explicate Spinoza’s key concepts of potentia and potestas, which can be used to more clearly define what ought to instead (...) be translated as “divine force”. In the third part, through Benjamin’s brief discussion of Sorel’s theory of the anarchist general strike, I equate potentia as a determinate power of aggregative individuals to divine force, both as a collective action and as an idea itself. I use this renewed and more sophisticated concept of divine force to oppose several interpretations of Benjamin’s concept, including Benjamin’s own quietist stance toward divine force. (shrink)

This paper will bring Žižek’s divine violence as an Act, a means without end, into conversation with Derrida’s divine violence, différance and auto-deconstruction as the impossible possibility of justice. Although Žižek has, in his later works, conceded to his indebtedness to Derrida, there are certain important differences between the two thinkers. The paper will focus on their respective interpretations of divine violence and the link to minimal difference (Žižek) or différance (Derrida). Their respective interpretations (...) of divine violence will be further explored with regards to Derrida’s auto-deconstruction as a kind of Heideggerian Gelassenheit and Žižek’s interpretation of the Lacanian Act. Critchley criticises Žižek for being too Gelassen in his dream of patiently waiting for an absolute, divine, cataclysmic revolutionary act of divine violence. This patient waiting or non-violent violence will be read within the context of Derrida’s auto-deconstruction: a means (an Act/Event) without specific end. The second part of the paper will explore a re-reading or inter-textual reading of John’s Gospel within the context of the above conversation. The reading will specifically focus on the Christ-event, creating an alternative community to the Roman Empire as it transverses the primal fantasy of this empire. This will be translated into the context of the contemporary neo-liberal fantasy, namely John’s alternative Christian community as a community of subjects who enjoy their symptom. As such a community they present a non-violent violent transversion of the primal fantasy of for example neo-liberalism. Such a community could be interpreted as a community of non-action action with an auto-deconstructive ethos: the divine violence of the Christ-event. (shrink)

The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met (...) by major critiques. Most notable is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

In Slavoj Žižek’s work two forms of violence, mythic and divine, are distinguished from one another by virtue of instrumental ends. In the former case violence serves the establishment of the social order, whereas in the latter case, which is non-instrumental, the violence is an expression of pure justice. It is also important to observe that these two forms of violence respond differently to the singularity of our existence, insofar as the instrumental disavows and neutralizes (...) the inhuman dimension that exists within each of us. But if there is something limitless or immeasurable apropos of the inhuman, then such distinctions between the mythic and the divine become problematic. I will therefore contend in the essay below that the catastrophic predictions derived from such distinctions need further interrogation. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that attempts to combine religion and politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade, and sacrifice need to be rooted out, the story goes, for the sake of more bounded and secular understandings of violence. Ted Smith upends this dominant view, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others to trace the ways that seemingly secular politics produce their own forms of violence without limit. He brings this argument to life—and digs deep (...) into the American political imagination—through a string of surprising reflections on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist who took up arms against the state in the name of a higher law. Smith argues that the key to limiting violence is not its separation from religion, but its reconnection to richer and more critical modes of religious reflection. Only political theology can keep secular politics secular. A historical and theoretical intervention, _Weird John Brown_ is also a constructive theological proposal for rethinking the nature, meaning, and exercise of violence, both human and divine. (shrink)

In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that (...) class='Hi'>violence may play in the pedagogical context, and secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. (shrink)

The modern political order rejects any notion of ‘divine violence’. But in refusing the possibility of the category, states obscure their own forms of sacred violence. Carl Schmitt describes the structure of a political theology that can illumine this dynamic. But his account of divine violence would put historical figures in the role of sovereign, and so open the way to theocratic tyranny. Walter Benjamin proposes a more transcendent sovereign power. He describes a divine (...) violence that rejects both the theocracy of Schmitt and the neo-Kantian ‘realism’ critiqued by Gillian Rose. From Benjamin we can develop a notion of divine violence that interrupts the mythologization of the state and makes possible a rightly secular politics. (shrink)

Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers - Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin - in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and (...) philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics by Ted A. Smith, and: Bodies of Peace: Ecclesiology, Nonviolence, and Witness by Myles WerntzRyan Andrew NewsonWeird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics Ted A. Smith Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. 224pp. $22.95Bodies of Peace: Ecclesiology, Nonviolence, and Witness Myles Werntz Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. 272pp. $44.00Arguments about the morality (...) of violence are currently being reinvigorated by a diverse group of theologians who are considering these questions for a world in which the nation-state no longer provides the sole context for political reflection. Both Ted Smith and Myles Werntz have contributed to this budding conversation by reframing the way theological ethicists might approach questions of violence and war.In Weird John Brown, Ted Smith provides an engaging account of the violent abolitionist, examining the theological significance of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Smith uses Brown to question the capacity of ethics as a discipline to assess the significance of every phenomenon. By “ethics,” Smith means those forms of moral reasoning that assume reality to be composed of a closed network of cause and effect. Ethics thus understood exerts a “strong gravitational pull” on the contemporary mind, privileging “universalizable moral obligations” that take precedence over goods like beauty or piety and resisting the suggestion that any act’s significance may lie beyond this-worldly relationships (4–5). In fighting for a just cause by violent, treasonous means, Brown problematizes the sufficiency of such ethical habits of description. [End Page 223]Neither crazed fundamentalist nor freedom fighter, Brown’s significance for Smith lies beyond ordinary ethical considerations. He is a “portent,” following W.E.B. Du Bois—a sign questioning the state’s presumed monopoly on legitimate violence (17), pronouncing judgment over a nation built on chattel slavery, and (perhaps) issuing hope for a new society to emerge in his wake (175). Only as “a flawed prophet who is caught up in a story of redemption that he cannot quite imagine” (88) does Brown’s significance come into view.For Smith, the state executing him is clearly not “less violent” than Brown. Indeed, Brown reveals the particular form of violence to which the “neutral” rule of law gives rise: violence reinforcing the legitimacy of state rule. Following Walter Benjamin, Smith describes a “mythic” cycle whereby an original violence that establishes a state, and the law that later legitimates that founding, reinforce one another (56, 70–71). Justice becomes equated with “law,” with no place for exceptions to law that might contribute to the overall health of the state (57). This cycle cannot be broken by moral imperatives articulated within the system; it is broken only by what Benjamin calls “divine violence”—necessarily exceptional interruptions to the cycle that challenge the system as such (73).Recognizing the possibility of such interruptions to the ethical does not eliminate the need for phronesis. Instead, it transposes practical wisdom to a key “marked by freedom and the love that freedom makes possible” (82); it stresses the importance of cultivating “the capacity for reasoning together about the form of a higher law” (109) that thereby relieves the law from being all in all. And while many fear that phrases like “higher law” only incite irrational, unchecked violence, Smith rightly sees that “mundane” politics can manifest a violence that is equally devastating, while concepts like “higher law” have checked violence as often as inspired it. To respond to violence done in the name of a higher law, we need better and deeper religious reasoning, “the kind that can imagine the higher law as something other than a code to be enforced and history as something more than an endless succession of homogeneous moments to be wrenched into conformity with the law” (88).Smith does not directly address the question of justified violence. His task is more difficult: to reset the parameters of such discussions so that they might continue without being restricted by “intramundane accounts of the good” (35). Smith thus challenges just warriors and pacifists alike not to argue on prudential grounds alone but to risk reasoning beyond the state’s... (shrink)

From a social science perspective, a major purpose of religion is to organize the behavior of the community of believers in order to maximize its success as a collective. The underlying premise of this lecture is that religious authority will sanction violence and aggression when they are assessed to be an effective means of realizing the goals of the collective. Conversely, when violence and aggression become unhelpful or counter- productive for realizing community goals they are forbidden. This phenomenology (...) of religion and violence is applied to the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to demonstrate that none of these religions is inherently more or less apt to engage in violence. Their use of belligerent and irenic behaviors are more profoundly influenced by historical context and social needs than by theology. (shrink)

For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it is the presence of the other that obliges the human to speak. What makes the subject a subject is not only the other’s presence but the compulsion to speak, and that compulsion marks the subject as displaced, called into question. The other—the neighbor, the stranger—makes us responsible and marks the subject as always necessarily in relation, a relation that troubles the subject because while we are compelled to respond, that response inevitably fails to contain, (...) to name, that relation. In Levinas’s formulation, the altogether other—the divine—presents us with the paradigmatic case in which the subject is compelled or called by that which exceeds our capacity to understand .. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article investigates the presentation of state power and affective life in the anime series Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. Juxtaposing the portrayal of the recruitment of female bodies and affects into the defense of the sovereign with the historical context of Imperial Japan, this article elaborates how the series captures the sovereign violence that creates biopolitical subjects in everyday life. It then illustrates how the series appropriates and subverts the genre conventions of the magical girl (mahō shōjo) anime (...) through Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life and the state of exception. This subversion offers an opportunity to rethink the politics of disaster in contemporary Japan. Finally, this article probes into the utopian potential of the series by elucidating its affirmation of the relationality of life in an enchanted world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Commandment against the Law Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”Tracy McNulty (bio)Pierre Legendre has shown that the Romano-canonical legal traditions that form the foundations of Western jurisprudence “are founded in a discourse which denies the essential quality of the relation of the body to writing” [“Masters of Law” 110]. It emerges historically as a repudiation of Jewish legalism and Talmud law, where (...) the rite of circumcision encodes the subject’s entry into law as an “allegiance to the absolute Writing,” or the “relationship between the human subject and the logical place of the Other” [110–11; see also “les juifs”]. In this shift, one understanding of writing is displaced by another: the material inscription of the letter, as an incommunicable limit or cut, is supplanted by the fantasy of what Legendre calls a “living writing,” a writing “in the heart” that promotes an ideal of perfect communication in which nothing is lost, in which meaning is lodged in an absolute Other who guarantees all knowledge. In his words, “we belong to a culture in which a mystically alienated human body stands in the place of the absolute book. The state has emerged from this structure.... Its basic characteristics can be set out by means of a fundamental Romano-pontifical maxim: the Emperor carries all the archives in his breast (omnia scrinia habet in pectore suo)” [“Masters of Law” 109].The ultimate theological source of this Roman maxim is Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law in the Epistle to the Romans. Paul’s polemic is structured by a distinction between two orders of law: the “law of God” and the “law of sin.” The first is associated with the intelligible “spirit” of the law, which is “written in the heart,” the second with the prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law, which compromises or corrupts the first by binding it to a particular representation and consigning it to written form. Paul’s solution is to bypass the law, to bypass representation, and perhaps even language itself. The prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law must be sublated by the law of the spirit, such that “we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” [Romans 7: 6]. Christ, as the living embodiment of the law of God, upholds the spirit of the law by “fulfilling”––and so rendering obsolete–its written form.The doctrine of Christ as the “living law” sustains what Legendre describes as a “banalisation of writing” [“Masters of Law” 111], a disregard for its material inscription that holds the letter to be nothing more than a placeholder, a flawed or incomplete representation of a meaning or truth that is itself beyond words. At the same time, it makes possible the legal and political fantasy of a living writing, located in a single body understood as the site of interpretive authority. The extraction of a meaning or truth from the intractable letter becomes the ultimate aim of the legal order and the most lofty task of its sovereign interpreter, uniquely charged with animating the dead letter. This notion permeates what Peter Goodrich describes as “the most standard protocols of legal reading,” according to [End Page 34] which “it is not the letter but the spirit that determines the meaning of the law”:The text is composed of dead letters (litera mortua); the rule is no more than a “mute judge,” a sleeping form, requiring the interposition, anima legis, of jurist or judge.... [T]he meaning of the law is internal to its living body, viva vox iuris or lex loquens, its image, interpreter, or legislator. In classical terms it is spelled out by reference to something beyond words: “to know the law is not to know the words of the law, but its force and power.” In a renaissance formulation we are similarly told that “no words, forms, niceties, or propriety of language is of any regard in the Civil Law, in comparison to truth, faithfulness and integrity. For verba menti, non verbis servire debet; words, are made as instruments to serve and express the mind, and not to command it.”[229–30]1... (shrink)

The questions of violence, justice and judgment define one of the most resonant and constant concerns of contemporary thought. In part, this is only a reflection of what are often called the ‘realities on the ground’ . In the few years of this century the logic of violence, and even its aestheticisation – whether as terror or as ‘shock and awe,’ or in the citizen’s daily vocation to be ‘alert but not alarmed’ – have become the familiar data (...) of current experience. They are a kind of weather, felt through the colour-coded threat scale of the Homeland Security Advisory System, or in the casual references to the ‘current climate.’ In view of these realities, and of an acclimatisation to them that informs general popular support for extensions of executive power and legislative activity, the urgency of the turn or return to questions of force and law is to be expected. In the fabric of recent debate, they are seams at which confrontations are staged and positions defined; but also, where the thought that remains closest to the ‘realities on the ground’ is forced into juxtaposition with the mythological and theological schemes that violence, justice and judgment inevitably conjure. Thus, contributors to this issue of Colloquy were invited to consider whether it was possible to account for a difference between violence, terror and revolution, without simplification or banalisation of the relationship between law and force. On the one hand, the editors envisaged that this question would be a provocation to reexamine contemporary representations of sovereignty, jurisdiction and the ‘state of exception,’ in a global context dominated by issues of security and the justification of extra-legal and extra-judicial force – occupation, detention, torture. On the other hand, the reference to the mythological and the theological was inevitable, inasmuch as contributors were invited to organise their reflections around two of the most significant interventions in twentieth-century jurisprudence and political theory, Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law.” For as is well-known, Benjamin and Derrida pursue their distinctive lines of questioning in the direction of a ‘divine violence’ or of a ‘mystical foundation of authority.’ The reception of the two texts suggests that these concepts remain, for many, difficult to the point of being indigestible; at least in the ‘current climate.’. (shrink)

This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, (...) I argue that his account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Violence Is Not an Evil”Ambiguity and Violence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Early Philosophical WritingsAnn V. MurphyThe recent translation and compilation of several of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical essays from the 1940s shed new light on Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between ethics and violence. While these essays predate the publication of The Second Sex (1949) and do not concern themselves with the subject of feminism per (...) se, Beauvoir’s philosophy of violence as it is outlined in both “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944) and “An Eye for an Eye” (1948) speaks to one of the more thoroughgoing concerns in contemporary feminist philosophy; namely, the nature of the relation between corporeal vulnerability, violence, and ethics. Together with The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), these early essays probe the difficulties in moving from an ontology in which violence appears to be inexorable to the terrain of ethical prescription. This essay urges recognition of the continuing relevance of Beauvoir’s philosophy in relation to the renaissance of interest in the theme of vulnerability in contemporary feminist theory. I argue that Beauvoir’s philosophy provides one of the most sophisticated accounts to date of the ethical problems posed by the experiential ambiguities of violence, and that her legacy in this regard is as important and redemptive as ever. More precisely, I read Beauvoir’s early conception of ambiguity as the philosophical predecessor to contemporary deconstructive accounts of corporeal vulnerability.Discourse on the body has governed the evolution of feminist philosophy. Recently, however, the nature of the body under investigation has changed. Whereas previously the critique of the nature/culture distinction dominated [End Page 29] feminist debates regarding the social construction of sex and gender, recent feminist work has consolidated around another conceptual pairing; namely, vulnerability and aggression. In reference to Beauvoir’s philosophical corpus, this recent development is interesting. Her magnum opus, The Second Sex, has attracted more attention because of its centrality in the debates over the social construction of sex and gender, a debate that has dominated feminist philosophy for the last several decades. Indeed, many laud this text for being ahead of its time with regard to the acknowledgement that “one is not born a woman,” but rather becomes one. This essay argues that Beauvoir’s early texts are similarly prescient with regard to the current preoccupation with the philosophical themes of violence and vulnerability. By tracing the development of Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity, I argue that her conception of the body as the site of both aggression and vulnerability both anticipates and continues to productively address the problem of how one moves from a descriptive ontology to the terrain of ethics. This is a movement that Beauvoir arguably theorized more rigorously than either Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jean-Paul Sartre, neither of whom published such sustained philosophical work on ethics in his lifetime.1I. Ambiguity in Beauvoir’s Early WorkIn The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir’s reflections on ethics come from a resolutely secular, existentialist perspective. Beauvoir—like her contemporaries in French existential phenomenology—understood human existence to be essentially marked by failure. Importantly, this failure is not vicious; rather, it is the consequence of the fact that human freedom can only ever be determined in scenes of constraint. Despite her resistance to the universal aspirations of Kant’s ethics, Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity as failure is consonant with the Kantian rendering of the ethical agent as a being for whom reason does not infallibly determine the will; indeed, an agent for whom reason is necessarily undone by certain inclinations and contingencies.2 For Kant, it made no sense to speak of the will unless one was referring to a being that had the capacity to act in accord with reason but did not infallibly manage to do so. Hence, ethics is an issue for us precisely to the degree that we are capable of failure. In this sense, ambiguity and failure mark the human condition and our distance from the divine. Only a being whose existence is marked by this inadequacy would ponder right and wrong, would debate the nature of ethical atrocity and recovery, and would anguish over the... (shrink)

The aporia of violence is probably the single most important issue that defines the failure of the leftist revolutionary politics as was experienced in modern history. It is what prevented it from ultimately achieving its goal by entrapping it in the perverse effect of the sovereign violence. As is well known, Slavoj Žižek in his book, Violence, proposes us to return to the practice of messianic or divine violence that Walter Benjamin conceptualized in contrast to (...) that of mythical violence. But, such an idea of messianic violence was not just Benjamin’s, but in fact, a predominant one in the long tradition of Marxism including Marx himself. It is then hard to see how a simple return to the practice of messianic violence will assist us better than it used to in discovering alternative ways to think about violence. In this paper, I would like to engage myself in a close reading of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser’s discussions of violence, hoping to find such alternatives. On the issue of violence Lacan and Althusser both converge and diverge. While examining such a crossroad of sive— in both senses of the term: identity and difference—I will in the end emphasize the need to reconsider the notion of representation, which one may no longer easily put aside as opportunistic. (shrink)

This text examines some parallels between Walter Benjamin’s “critique of violence” and the theory of violence proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever the differences between these two approaches, they both share an important common feature, defining the violence of state and law in terms of a “violence which presupposes itself”. This circular structure of the concept of violence renders utterly problematic the attempts to envisage a wholly other, revolutionary form of violence, which (...) could be opposed to that of the state or its law. Benjamin’s hypothesis of a divine violence which breaks the circle of the mythical one, as well as the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the war machine, have been devised in order to come to terms with this situation. However, these concepts are not intended to serve as a basis for the legitimation of possible acts of counter-violence. What they assert is rather the fundamental and irreducible unavailability of the event in the sphere of social struggles, where our actions can neither be calculated in advance as to their results nor be ultimately justified. (shrink)

This critical reading/dialogue follows a straightforward structure. Firstly, it presents some of the major insights in J.D. Crossan’s book, attending to its inner logic on his critique on the violence which little by little creeps into the biblical texts. Secondly, it engages in a critique of his reading of Revelation, which is Crossan’s starting point for his discussion on violence. He observes here a direct contradiction with the Jesus of history, centre of interpretation for Scripture. This article points (...) to certain lacunae in his reading of Revelation and, finally, moves to a conclusion offering new ways to interpret and question Revelation’s violent imagery within its own literary context.Contribution: This article is a critical dialogue with one of J.D. Crossan’s latest books: How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence From Genesis Through Revelation. This is a vibrant and insightful book about how violence ultimately crept into the canonical texts, tainting even its ‘good news’. Crossan’s concern with this crude violence surfaces as he teaches different groups and he is asked why the Bible ends in Revelation on such a violent note, essentially with ‘a war to end all wars’, somehow buttressing the ‘myth of redemptive violence’. The special focus of this article resides thus on a nuanced reading of Revelation which tries to understand, in context, the function of such violent images. (shrink)

Revolutionary violence stems from the conatus of survival, from the appetite for life and joy rather than from the desire to destroy and the hubristic pretension to punish. It is an incursion of one's desire to affirm life and annihilate pain. Following Laruelle's methodology of nonstandard philosophy, I conclude that revolutionary violence is the product of an intensive expansion of life. Pure violence, conceived in non-philosophical terms, is a pre-lingual, presubjective force affected by the “lived,; analogous to (...) Badiou's void and it is radically revolutionary. It is fundamentally different from Benjamin's lawmaking “divine violence; and its appropriations by Žižek. Revolutionary experience is inevitably translated into language. What preserves the revolutionary substance in a post-revolution political discourse is that it is constantly checked by the sense of fidelity to the experience of the revolutionary event. Agamben, Benjamin, Schmidt and Žižek are discussed from an essentially non-philosophical stance, informed by Laruelle's theory that has been supplemented in some aspects by Badiou's concept of the pre-lingual event. (shrink)

This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’, the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory (...) and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) accepts the post-structuralist critiques of autonomous human agency while liberation theologians embrace Enlightenment ideals ofsubjectivity and the secular political space where agency is exercised. RO theologians think that by accepting these premises, liberation theology fails to resist violence and nihilism that are the inevitable fruit of secular autonomy. I want to formulate a liberationist response to these objections. Liberationists do not see human and divine agency as fundamentally opposed, but rather the deepest strivings of the (...) human spirit for justice are on the same trajectory as the Kingdom of God. Human and divine agency are tied together through the notion of a utopia whereby these strivings for justice are expressed in a finite and historical way. This emancipative use of reason in the construction of a utopia provides a means for divine and human agency to interact without destroying the human autonomy of the secular sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:VIOLENCE, ANARCHY, AND SCRIPTURE: JACQUES ELLUL AND RENÉ GIRARD Matthew Patullo Princeton Theological Seminary This essay will examine the personal and social consequences ofsin, Biblically defined, and will contend that Christian faith necessitates a rejection of the secular political order. Exploring and contrasting the thought of René Girard and Jacques Ellul, we will demonstrate that Girard's mimetic theory supplies crucial theoretical underpinnings for Ellul's theology. Ellul, in turn, (...) sequencing the Biblical narrative somewhat differently, provides Girard the more biblically consistent content of the life of faith. The ethical content ofthe life of faith is a continuation ofthe salvation narrative inaugurated in Genesis 1-2, incarnated and perpetuated in Israel and later, the Church, the universalized community of the Abrahamic blessing. The historical content of this faith demonstrates the incompatibility of political power with freedom in Christ. The Church's ill-fated attempts to maintain an authentic practice of faith while legitimizing the secular order are exposed by the Biblical critique of power. While the growth of the global state has made a total withdrawal from the political order inconceivable, it is precisely its utter domination today that makes critical continued defiance by the Body of Christ. Original Sin Girard observes that when the snake first appears in the Genesis account of the Fall, it is already in conflict with God, opposing him as a jealous rival. Eve is enticed by it to covet divinity, to covet what belongs to God—the knowledge of good and evil—and to herself become God's rival (Girard 1 965, 1 82). Her imitation ofthe serpent's covetousness forms "an alliance of two against one" (Girard 2000, 171-185), and God is 26Matthew Patullo expelled from the relationship. The contagion of metaphysical desire, or mimesis, soon claims Adam and what began as a relationship ofobedience without conflict between God and human beings is forever changed. An acquisitive mimesis turns antagonistic and rivalrous (Girard 1978a, 95). When called to account for her disobedience, Eve blames the snake. Adam in turn blames Eve, implying that God is himselfat least partially culpable: "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me ofthe tree, and I ate" (Gen 3:12, emphasis mine). In the Biblical account of human origins then, rivalry with God produces rivalry between people. Girard argues that although conflict must inevitably lead to violence, here "God takes the violence upon himselfand founds humanity by driving Adam and Eve far away from him" (Girard 1978a, 142). God's banishment of the first humans only mirrors the expulsion implied by human collusion with the snake. "Now we know that covetousness is the crux ofthe whole affair," Ellul writes, "since sin always depends on it. 'You shall not covet' (Ex 20: 1 7) is the last of the commandments because it summarizes everything—all the other sins" (Ellul 1985, 101; see also Girard 1999, 7-12). Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve are not required to choose between good and evil. "AU that counted was the relation to God and its expression in action" (Ellul 1976, 51). Here Ellul understands freedom as obedience to God's commandments within the context ofa relationship with God. Independence from God is mere slavery: "Adam seeks to liberate himself from the limits which God has set for him and in so doing he enters into rivalry with other forces and becomes subject to sin" (Ellul 1976, 49). The knowledge that Adam and Eve covet and usurp from God is "the power to decide on one's own what is gooáanawhat is evil" (Ellul 1985,96?, emphasis Ellul's). Consequently, human morality is ofthe order ofthe Fall, and Girard concurs: the ethical always derives from victimary unanimity (Girard 1978a, 236), in this case the rejection of God. For Ellul "covetousness is equivalent to the spirit of power or domination" (Ellul 1985, 101)' and "no society is possible among people 1 "Sin is a break with God and all that this entails. When I say that people are not good, I am not adopting a Christian or a moral standpoint. I am saying that theirtwo great characteristics, no matterwhattheir society or education, are covetousness and the desire... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Limit Formations:Violence, Philosophy, RhetoricOmedi Ochieng For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.—W. B. Yeats, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"Violence (...) is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal's primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality's arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of "nature"—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked [End Page 330] out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence's cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer:In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma.(1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy's resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy's oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence. [End Page 331]Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality's handmaiden, the "well-ordered society" (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: "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... (shrink)

Aquinas' theology can be understood only if one comes to grips with his metaphysics of being. The relevance of this perspective is exhibited in his treatment of topics like creation, goodness, happiness, truth, freedom of the will, the unity of the human being, prayer and providence, God's personhood, divine love, God and violence, God's unknowablility, the Incarnation, the Trinity, God's existence, theological language and even laughter. This book endeavors to treat these questions in a clear and convincing language. (...) Is there a better method for improving one's own theology than by grappling with the arguments of Thomas Aquinas? (shrink)

This book is about right thinking and right behavior in the light of the Highest Divine Wisdom that permeates the hearts of all living beings. Because there is so much of suffering in the world due to wrong ideas, wrong philosophies, wrong and bad religions that teach violence in the name of some Holy Power, it has been an absolute order to the author from the Highest Wisdom that lives in the hearts of all people to publish this (...) book for the benefit of entire mankind. (shrink)

Faced with the ambiguities of this world, in which ugliness and suffering co-exist with beauty, the article rejects the attribution of disvalues to a Fall-event. Instead it faces God's involvement even in violence and ugliness. It explores the concept of divine glory, understood principally as a sign of the divine reality. This includes both the great theophanies of the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ glorification in his Passion and Crucifixion. It then considers the contemplation of the natural world, (...) using the terminology of “inscape” and “instress.” Divine glory can be discerned even in events as tragic as the Indian Ocean tsunami or the activity of the malarial mosquito. A full Christian contemplation of these events will include scientific understanding and poetic apprehension, and consideration of soteriology and eschatology as well as the theology of creation. Glory is understood to include God's power and sovereignty, and also the divine humility and sacrifice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Collective Violence and Birthday PartiesA Girardian Analysis of the PiñataDominic Pigneri (bio)The piñata is a tradition most commonly associated with Latin America, but this party game has a mysterious origin. Some suppose that the origin of the practice was brought to the Americas by the Spanish, who received the custom from the Italians.1 Some say that the Italians, through Marco Polo, appropriated the ritual from the Chinese.2 Others (...) see the Mexican piñata as originating locally in an Aztec religious ritual.3 But looking at this festival activity through a Girardian lens we can see that wherever a custom came into being, it seems that its origins lie in the lethal practice of collective violence. The following description may serve as an exemplar of the tradition:In Mexico, a plain, round clay cooking pot called an olla is decorated and finally almost entirely concealed by ruffles and streamer coverings shaped into animals, stars, etc. It is filled with nuts, sugar cane, fruits and small toys and is hung overhead from a rope. One participant in the game is blindfolded and given a long stick with which he or she tries to hit the pot. Several people (usually children) take turns at being blindfolded and swinging the stick, and finally when someone hits the pot [End Page 209] hard enough to break it, the other players scramble on the ground for the scattered prizes. It is a kind of noisy and happy version of a grab-bag, and the game goes on for quite a few minutes, since a controlling cord is used to swing the pot out of reach of the batters. There are several sing-song chants which the children say as the game goes on with each new target.4While the clay pot is the most traditional, piñatas are also made from other materials, including papier-mâché and cane plants.5 Furthermore, the piñata has a place in many different festivals; it is especially associated with Christmas, Easter, and birthday parties all over the Americas where there is a Latin influence.While the ritual of the piñata contains no explicit violence, the ritual itself contains many of the elements of the scapegoat mechanism René Girard describes in Violence and the Sacred. What Girard describes here is the banding together of society as they focus their internal animosity onto an arbitrary third-party victim. The peace that arrives after this violence is so profound that it is instinctually associated with the divine. This peace inspires a reenactment of this violence as a religious ritual. Therefore, religion functions as the force that keeps internal violence from turning all members of a society against one another. This controlled violence is the safety valve that releases the violence that would otherwise rend the social fabric of a community.6 Religion also veils the violence, which grants peace. It is important that the violence be expressed, but also hidden. Girard says, "Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding."7 This is the significance of the ritualism of cultic sacrifice.This relates to our current question of the piñata in the sense that the practice is reminiscent of a sacrificial ritual, especially when the piñata takes the shape of a being like an animal or human person. First, destruction is the initial aim of the activity. The piñata, like the oblation, must be destroyed in some way. This is what grants the ritual its efficacy. Second, there is a need for rubrics, a carefully followed procedure for the desired effect to come about. In cultic sacrifice, this can take place in a variety of ways, from ritualistic washing of the priest and the victim to the exact procedure and order for dissecting the victim. Similarly, as we saw in the description of the piñata above, there is a procedure. The piñata is... (shrink)

If we attempt to find signs of messianism within the rebellion as such, if, for example Korah, "contrary to" but always "together with" Benjamin, is the "first left oppositionist in the history of radical politics," then the final and divine violence carried out by God would, in fact, be Benjamin's pure revolutionary violence perpetrated precisely against this first revolutionary. The circulation of the alternative title of this text ("Benjamin's 'Divine Violence' and the case of Korah") (...) within the subtitle ("The Rebellion against Moses as the First Scene of Messianism [Numbers, 16]"), and conversely, is an accurate description of the "misunderstanding" in connection to the understanding of revolution in Benjamin, because the one who carries out revolutionary violence is not found where we, all this time, had expected him to be. Is it precisely this betrayed expectation that constantly brings us back to Benjamin's "Critique of Violence"? But what exactly do we expect? Do we expect a final violence of catastrophic proportions negating every future violence and time of expectation? Do we expect the subject of this positive violence – the noble [edle] subject of the revolution? (shrink)

In response to the challenges presented by violence, war, and capital punishment, For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church argues that foundational liturgical, canonical, and spiritual resources invite the Church to manifest a foretaste of the fullness of God’s peace amidst the brokenness of a world that remains tragically inclined toward taking the lives of those who bear the divine image and likeness. It also summons the Church to engage people and (...) power structures toward the end of enacting practical reforms that ameliorate the underlying causes of violence, a task especially urgent in light of the powerful weapons and technologies employed by governments today. While reflecting distinctive Orthodox sensibilities on the topics it addresses, the document also presents points of commonality with other Christian traditions of theological and moral reflection, especially concerning the obligation to take realistic initiatives in peacemaking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Overcoming Violence in Practice1Sarah K. PinnockIn Christian thought, the classic theological response to evil and suffering, known as "theodicy," operates on a metaphysical level. It aims to elucidate questions about God: God's power to prevent evil, God's goodness and justice, and God's purposes in allowing evil. It also examines questions about humanity: Are humans chronically prone to sin and violence? Does suffering serve good purposes? Does God (...) redeem suffering? In recent Christian attempts at theodicy, attention has focused on divine omnipotence and human freedom in attempts to exculpate God for cruelty in allowing the magnitude of suffering visible in such events as the Holocaust, where six million Jews and five million Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and other noncombatants were killed under Nazi orders. Symmetrical with exploration of the "front end" explanatory questions of why bad things happen in a supposedly good world, theodicies also explore the "back end" justificatory questions of how God can heal the damage, unevenly and unfairly distributed, in this life or the afterlife. Key exemplars of modern theodicy are Leibniz and Hegel, thinkers who have greatly influenced twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy of religion, respectively. Despite the urgency of responding to evil, theodicy has been criticized for its abstract, global approach to suffering and its programmatic focus on justifying God in the face of violence. My own critique of theodicy has epistemic and moral components. Theodicy rests on epistemological hubris, building precarious intellectual systems in pursuing knowledge of God. Additionally, theodicy is guilty of moral turpitude on account of its single-minded focus on explanation, which smooths over the scandal of suffering and overlooks the prevention and alleviation of violence.2Fortunately, there are more promising alternatives than theodicy in Christian thought. Particularly in the twentieth century, existentialist and Marxian philosophical movements have contributed to practical rather than theoretical emphases in response to theodicy questions. Reflection on the situatedness of the subject has prompted this shift as theology becomes more self-conscious of its cultural assumptions. Especially since the 1960s, contextual varieties of theology have emerged that recognize its socially embedded character. Theology is never purely dislocated conceptual reflection, innocent of ethical consequences, but a discourse with practical origins and effects. To use Marxian vocabulary, all theology is an "ideology" expressing the conscious and unconscious interests of a social group or class. This insight [End Page 73] does not dismiss the truth and power of theology, but forces closer examination of its production and implications. As Marx wrote in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "philosophers [and theologians] have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."3 Theology as a discourse must attend to how it functions within society to motivate opposition or acceptance of violence. Also, it must attend to how reliably it exposes and articulates violence within its vocabulary, and what social cases of violence it addresses.I propose that the shift toward practical or contextual Christian anti-theodicy responses to violence resonates with Buddhist attention to practice, rather than speculation, in answer to suffering. To use a well-known image from the Buddha's teaching, all human beings are like persons pierced with poisoned arrows. All suffer grievously because of craving and desire, and desperately long for relief. In such a condition of life, sliding toward death while suffering, what is the most urgent need: to find out how to remove the poisoned arrow and heal the wound, or to find out where the arrow came from and why it was shot?4 Of course, the moral of the story is that the alleviation of suffering is primary and urgent. It would be foolish to searchfor an explanation instead of a cure for the poison. Understanding the cosmic origins of suffering is a distraction, irrelevant to alleviating suffering and detrimental to practice. Preoccupation with metaphysical speculation does not produce wisdom. Such wisdom is the fruit of awareness resulting from meditation training.In presenting my ideas to a forum for Buddhist-Christian dialogue, I am very much aware of the perils of comparative thinking. My understanding of Buddhism reflects the Westernized transmission of Mahayana Zen Buddhist traditions, based on writings intended for an... (shrink)

Derrida's work on hospitality presents particular local conventions of hospitality as in a necessary but impossible relationship with an absolute hospitality, the obligation to welcome the other without conditions. Although this absolute hospitality is commonly read as the aspiration to which all of our practices of hospitality should tend, Derrida proposes a series of examples that show the dangers implicit in an automatic or limitless welcoming. The most famous of these is that of the Old Testament patriarch, Lot. The aim (...) of this paper is to show, however, that the Genesis story is not primarily a parable about correct and incorrect practices of hospitality. In fact, what is at stake in the visit of the angels to Lot is the covenant between Abraham's line and the divine and the coming into the world of God's absolute sovereign violence. Derrida's account of hospitality is thus part of his discussion of sovereignty, its limitlessness, force and danger. (shrink)

This article is about the religious roots of violence, in particular religious terrorism. The author argues that there is a great reluctance to study this relationship. This is unfortunate because only on the basis of a realistic estimate of the facts can a successful counterterrorist strategy be developed. One of the problems with religious violence is that holy scriptures, in some passages, exhort believers to violent acts. In combination with a theory of ethics that is known as “ (...) class='Hi'>divine command morality” this is problematic. Even if the holy book contains only a small percentage of passages invoking violence they pose a problem if the whole book is considered to be holy and the word of God. (shrink)

The films of Bruno Dumont are tied to unwatchability, austerity, and a post-theological seriousness. Recently, however, Dumont has taken a surprising turn towards comedy; and yet these comedies are not without the post-theological despair that characterizes his earlier films. Taking Dumont's comedy seriously, this article frames Dumont's comedic turn not as a deviation but rather as a realignment that requires retroactive reconsideration of his oeuvre's post-theological orientation. We interrogate the philosophical implications of laughter in Dumont's work and argue that it (...) suggests a new trajectory for the post-theological project. The work of Georges Bataille anchors our analysis of violent laughter, while Jean-Luc Nancy's post-theology structures our central argument. We read Nancy's post-theology into the construction of space and subjectivity in Dumont's earlier works, which characterize both human characters and the landscapes they inhabit with a pervasive sense of depthlessness or blankness. These features of absence often lead spectators to project emotions onto Dumont's characters, but we stress this blankness as foregrounding the essential unknowingness of the subject – something which also drives Bataille's notion of laughter. For Bataille, laughter is rooted in nonknowledge, it is a non-productive expenditure that exposes the limits of human existence. It is this horizon of death and nothingness that drives Dumont's comedies. Understood through post-theological laughter, Dumont's comedic films and TV series provide new ways of accounting for the death of God. This laughter in turn operates retroactively to productively reframe post-theological violence in his work. In short, this article contends that none of Dumont's films are meant to be taken seriously. Confronting the ethical and philosophical implications of Dumont's comedic turn, this article investigates the implications of reading his oeuvre through this divinely absurdist, post-theological comedic lens and articulates a theory of post-theology that foregrounds the radicality of laughter. (shrink)

Most readings of Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North have focused on Mustafa Saeed and the nameless narrator, both male characters, and they have largely avoided a politically radical reading of the novel. This article attempts to present the female character, Hosna, as the revolutionary par excellence, following Lacan and Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Antigone. Th rough Žižek’s distinction between the act and action, this article argues that Hosna’s deed at the end of the novel, murder and suicide, (...) is not just an action out of hopelessness but rather an act that aims to make a new social order possible. We will try to connect Žižek’s distinction between act and action to Benjamin’s distinction between divine violence and mythic violence and Lacan’s idea of “Th ing-directed desire” (Marc De Kesel 245). By doing so, this article aims to put the extreme violence of Hosna in a new light and argues against the readings that simply ignore her act as an extreme form of violence and fail to see it in a broader framework of philosophical and sociological understanding. (shrink)

RESUMEN El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reflexionar a partir de las principales ideas filosóficas de Walter Benjamin y Frantz Fanon sobre el problema de la violencia política para luego mostrar las diferencias y posibles relaciones en los planteamientos de los autores. En un primer momento se mostrarán las denuncias hechas por los dos autores al sistema político moderno en cuanto a que la apariencia pacífica de las relaciones sociales se fundamenta en relaciones mediadas por la violencia. Luego, se analizarán (...) los principales planteamientos acerca de la violencia divina y de la violencia revolucionaria o contraviolencia en cada uno de los filósofos. Por último, se aportarán algunas conclusiones que contrasten las propuestas de este diálogo y permitan trazar límites y posibilidades en la lucha política que cada autor en su particularidad está presentando. ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to reflect about the main philosophical ideas of Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon on the problem of political violence and then to present the differences and possible relations in the author's approaches. At the first time, will show the denunciations made by the two authors to the modern political system as a pacific appearance of social relations that are based on relations mediated by violence. Later, the main approaches to divine violence and revolutionary violence or counter-violence in each of the philosopher will be analyzed. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn to contrast with this dialogue and thus allow us to observe the limits and possibilities in the political struggle that each author in his particularity is presenting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 327 Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. By WENDY FARLEY. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. 150 pp. Wendy Farley sets herself an ambitious task in her book. She is dissatisfied with past theodicies, which account for evil and suffering as punishment for sin, as counterpoints in a larger aesthetic cosmic harmony, as means of purification and formation of character, or something that will (...) be as compensated for by other-worldly vindication and reward. These four theories may explain some forms of evil and suffering, but in the face of " radical suffering " they are " unable to exorcise the demons that whisper that life is futile, suffering is meaningless, and the cosmos an empty and evil void " (p. 22). By " radical suffering " Farley means that kind of suffering which debases and destroys the human dignity of the sufferer: " Radical suffering pinches the spirit of the sufferer, numbing it and diminishing its range. The distinctiveness of radical suffering does not lie in its intensity or its injustice but its power over the sufferer" (p. 54). Radical suffering drives the person to self-loathing and despair and therefore destroys her or his capacity to resist it. Despite its massive destructive power radical suffering is not rare; it occurs in familial, cultural, poli· tical, and economic relations under the forms of, e.g., child abuse, sexism, racism, violation of human rights, poverty, and starvation. To account for radical suffering, Farley proposes that (a) one place suffering rather than sin at the center of the problem of evil; (b) one replace the notion of a primordial fall with that of tragedy; (c) one repudiate the idea of divine omnipotence in favor of that of divine compassion (pp. 12-13). The second and third proposals are captured in the title of the book, " Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion." Farley's first proposal leads one to expect that she would do away with the notion of sin altogether, hut this is not the case. Strangely, she devotes a good deal of attention to sin, describing it as " catastrophic because it introduces chaos and disharmony into history " (p. 43). She sees sin as (self)-deception, callousness, bondage, and guilt (pp. 4451 ). Whereas traditional theology perceives a causal link between sin and suffering, the logic of Farley's alternative proposal entails her locating the origin of suffering elsewhere, namely, the tragic character of human existence: "... tragic vision locates the possihilirty of suffering in the conditions of existence and in the fragility of human freedom " (p. 29). A tragic vision of life does not, Farley claims, rationalize (radical) 3~8 BOOK REVIEWS suffering, nor is it atheistic. It recognizes, honestly and bluntly, that " the conditions of finite existence include conflict and fragility " (p. 31). Multiplicity ·and' variety enrich creation hut they inevitably lead to division and.separation; relationships warm the heart hut they must include some and exclude others; values sometimes conflict, such as mercy and justice; embodiment allows us to enjoy the pleasures of life but it leads to decay and death. Even human freedom, Farley points out, is infected with fragility caused by anxiety and desire: "Freedom is the tragic flaw of human existence, at once the stamp of its greatness and its destruction " ·(p. 37). What should one do in face of inevitable suffering? One must have compassion. Farley takes compassion to mean an enduring disposition horn of sympathetic knowledge of another person's suffering leading to love (which is a liberation from egocentrism that enables one to care for others) and working for justice (especially removing social in· justice). In contrast to dominating power, compassion empowers the sufferers to speak and act in their own defenses. It rejects the tempta· tion of passivity before evil and the use of violence to overthrow it. Rather, it empowers sufferers to resist evil. For Farley, God's power must he understood as compassion or love. As a noncoercive form of power, divine love (a) creates a tragic world in which radical suffering is inevitable and (b) because of suffering redeems it. Hence, divine compassion is both creative and redemptive. But why does God go through this seemingly redundant exercise? Why doesn't God create... (shrink)

Anthropological studies have shown that attitudes and behavior of majority of Muslims towards gender and women's issues are influenced by the combined patriarchal culture and patriarchal reading of Islamic teachings which is reflected in conventional fiqh. This creates room for domestic violence; men occupy a dominant position and women are obliged to show their submission to them, such submission being portrayed as divine order. Some of the men interviewed in this study defended their dominant position by exaggerating the (...) interpretation of religious texts that grant special privileges to men. Because of its serious repercussions on women, and because it runs counter to the basic principles of Islam on justice and equality and the overall objective of sharia, i.e. maslahat, such male-biased reading of religious texts should be challenged. Over 30 verses in the Qur'an support equality between women and men and refer to women's rights in various aspects of life. Many of these women-friendly Qur'anic verses are further supported by the Hadith, traditionally attributed to Prophet Muhammad. The question that emerges is: why are Muslims' attitudes quite contradictory to the spirit of gender equality and equity and women's emancipation advocated in the Qur'an's verses? Using three different perspectives: theology, legal, and anthropological case studies, this paper explores the answer to the above question and suggests how the gap between Islamic ideals on gender and their realities can be bridged. (shrink)

We live in an age beset by religiously inspired violence. Terms such as "holy war" are the stock-in-trade of the evening news. But what is the relationship between holiness and violence? Can acts such as murder ever truly be described as holy? In Does Judaism Condone Violence?, Alan Mittleman offers a searching philosophical investigation of such questions in the Jewish tradition. Jewish texts feature episodes of divinely inspired violence, and the position of the Jews as God's (...) chosen people has been invoked to justify violent acts today. Are these justifications valid? Or does our understanding of the holy entail an ethic that argues against violence?Reconstructing the concept of the holy through a philosophical examination of biblical texts, Mittleman finds that the holy and the good are inextricably linked, and that our experience of holiness is authenticated through its moral consequences. Our understanding of the holy develops through reflection on God's creation of the natural world, and our values emerge through our relations with that world. Ultimately, Mittleman concludes, religious justifications for violence cannot be sustained. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:716 BOOK REVIEWS phies for each section (20 in all); (2) the summaries of major conclusions at the end of many chapters; (2) the explanations of how one body of texts (or its traditions) has been re-read (i.e., re-worked) by later texts; and (4) how one body of texts (e.g., the Psalms), provides for understanding a certain perspective other parts of the Old Testament (e.g., the Pentateuch). Some shortcomings (...) are evident. He relies heavily on the prophets for guiding insights, while law, priesthood, temple, and blessing play minor roles. Is this really faithful to the canonical shape of the Old Testament in its pre-Christian witness~ I find particularly inadequate the treatment of purity laws (p. 86) and priestly roles (pp. 150-53), and suspect the author needs to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion to his own Protestant presuppositions! In a similar way, the decalogue gets extended attention because Childs sees its theology as relevant to modern questions of violence, war, etc.; but he never seriously wrestles with those counter-passages whose theology encourages a divine warrior or a conquest motif. A similar problem arises when he ends the book with the theme of "Life under Promise." This is a judicious choice for the summarizing theme of the Old Testament and includes treatment of judgment versus salvation,.eschatology, messianic hope, the promise of the land, and eternal life. But it lacks any reference to liturgy and temple as symbols of hope, the book of the law, or the commandments of Torah, and no mention at all of the " blessing " theology of P that informs the whole Old Testament from Genesis 1 onwards. Clearly Childs has begun an important project, but much more clarity and balance is still needed in his continuing work during the years ahead. Washington Theological Union Silver Spring, Maryland LAWRENCE BOADT, C.S.P. Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish and Christian Perspectives. Edited by TAMAR RUDAVSKY. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1985. Pp. ix + 299. $54 (cloth). Since this book originated from revised papers and commentaries presented at a conference (held at the Ohio State University on March 3 and 4, 1982.), it is not surprising to find that the completed edition displays wide variety both in its subject matter and in the quality of the chapters. The chapters reflect the quality of papers very often presented at conferences -some are excellent, others are not. In addition, some chapters deal BOOK REVIEWS 717 with problems and solutions which help significantly to advance medieval scholarship, while the problems and solutions raised in other chapters do. not add much to medieval research; indeed, some chapters seem to present arguments lacking both in plausibility and in an understanding of the dominant spirit of medieval thought. The book is divided into three specific parts which deal with Islamic, Jewish, and Christian authors respectively, and the chapters in each part are arranged in historical order. There is also an introduction and an extensive bibliography. In chapter 1, Calvin Normore gives a helpful, but tediously written, introduction and overview of the logical and epistemological problems which were involved in medieval discussions of divine omniscience and omnipotence. Chapter 2 focuses upon Boethius's account of the nature of contingency, and adopts a view which i;e:fl.ects a misunderstanding both of Boethius and of the theological spirit of medieval thought in general. Ignoring sage comments from Richard Sorabji (see p. 49, footnote 68), Norman Kretzmann argues that for Boethius free human choice is the source of all contingency. How the Christian, Boethius, could so badly confuse human choice with divine choice, Kretzmann fails to explain. Chapters 3-6 constitute Part Two of the text and contain some of the most scholarly research in the book. In chapters 3 and 4, Josef Van Ess, rightly noting the juridical foundations of Mu'tazilite thought, examines wrongdoing and divine omnipotence in the fragmentary work of Abu Ishaq An-Nazzam. His discussion is particularly helpful in its treatment of the Islamic understanding of God as not physei agathos, but good merely by doing what is good. This understanding is a necessary element for any sound grasp... (shrink)

A recurring complaint in the highly polemical chronicles of the medieval Veneto is that elite families misused marital alliances as instruments of political violence. This concern appears, in particular, in the Cronica in factis et circa facta Marchie Trivixane , by Rolandino da Padova , the most rhetorically coherent and thorough medieval history of the region. Rolandino's interest in abuses of the betrothal system is evident in his account of the serial marriages of Cunizza da Romano. Over fifty years (...) before Cunizza's posthumous celebration in Dante's Divine Comedy, Rolandino's discussion of her amours forms part of a long denunciation of her brother, Ezzelino III da Romano . Cunizza's brother was an imperial vicar who, at the height of his power, controlled the entire mainland of the Veneto, called the Marca Trevigiana in the Middle Ages. The powerful Ezzelino is implied in the chronicle to have manipulated Cunizza's marital alliances, and the suggestion is that the resulting strategic connections enabled him to foment war and injustice. This tale is but one of many in which the chroniclers of the region condemn elite marital practices deemed transgressive in terms of political oppression. The main purpose of this article is to chart the chroniclers' accusations that link misconduct in marriage agreements to violence in factional politics and abuse of power. I contend that the chronicles of the medieval Veneto represent tyranny in terms of the manipulation of marital alliances. (shrink)

Though the work of René Girard has highlighted the interrelations between sacrifice and sacrality in the contemporary world, it has yet to engage the work of Walter Benjamin and his heir, Giorgio Agamben, whose project concerning the Homo Sacer has aroused interest in contemporary political thought. By focusing on Benjamin's early description of mimesis and its relation to language, a position can be elaborated that steers mimesis clear of its indebtedness to language and towards a ‘purer’ realm of gesture. Benjamin's (...) formulation of a more proper ‘divine’ language of gestures could then be said to coalesce with certain historical-religious proclamations, something that Agamben's work challenges us to consider as a viable, albeit ‘profane’, political and ethical option for humanity. (shrink)