Benjamin, Critique of Violence 1921

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238 Cr tique of Violence

li ht is thrown on the nature of violence by the fact that such a criterion ordistinct on can be applied to it at all? I other words, what is the meaningof this dis nction? That th s dist nction supplied by posi ve law is meaningful, based on the nature of violence, and rreplaceable by any otherdist nct on will soon enough be shown, but at the same t e light will beshed on the sphere in wh ch alone such a d stinc on n be made. To sum

up: if the criterion es ablished by positive law to assess the legality ofviolence can be anal zed with regard to its meaning, then the sphere of itsapplication must be criticized with regard to its value For this critique astandpo nt outside positive legal philosophy but also ou side natural lawmust be found. The extent to wh ch it can be fu ished on y by a ph osophico-historical view of law will emerge

The meaning of the distinction between leg timate and illegitimate violence is not mmediately obvious. The m sunders anding natural law bywhich a dist nction is drawn be ween violence used for just ends andviolence used for unjust ends must be emphat cally rejected Rather, it hasalready b en ndicated that positive law demands of all violence a proof ofits historical origin, which under cer ain cond tions is eclared legal, sanc

t oned Since the acknowledgment of legal violence is most tangibly evidentin a deliberate submission to its ends, a hypothetical dist nction be weenkinds of violence must be bas d on the presence or absence of a generalhistorical acknowled ment of its ends Ends that lack such acknowledgmentmay be called nat al ends; the other type may be called legal ends. Thediffer ng function of violence, depending on whether it serves natural orlegal ends, can be most clearly traced against a background of speci c legalconditions For the sake of s mplicit , he follow g discussion will relate tocontemporary European conditions.

Characteristic of these, so far as the individual as legal subject is concerned, is the tendency to deny the natural ends of such ind viduals in allthose cases in wh ch such ends could, in a given situation, be usefully

pursued by violence This means this legal system tries to erect, in all areaswhere individual ends could be usefully pu sued by violence, legal ends thatc n be realized only by legal powe Indeed, the system strives to limit bylegal ends even those areas in which natural ends are admi ted in principlewith n wide boundaries, like that of educat on, as soon as these natural endsare pursued with an excessive measure of violence, as in the laws relatingto the limits of educational authority to pun sh It can be formulated as ageneral maxim of present day European leg slation that all the natural ndsof nd viduals must collide with legal ends if pursued with a greater or lesserdegree of violence. (The contradict on between this and he right to selfdefense will be resolved n what follows.) From this max m it follows thatlaw sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger underm n ng the

legal system. As a danger nul fy g legal ends and the legal executive?

Crit que of Violence 9

Ce tainly not; for then what would be condemned would not be violenceas such but only that which is d rec ed to illegal ends It will be argued thata system of legal ends cannot be m intained if nat ral en are an wherestill pu sued violently I the st place, however, this is mere dogma Tocounter i t one might perhaps consider he su prising possibil ity hat he law'sinterest a monopoly of violence vis vis ndividuals is expla ned not by

the inten ion of prese ing l gal ends but, ra her, by the tention of prese v g the law itself; hat violence, when not in the hands of the law,threatens it not by the ends that it may pu sue but by its mere existenceoutside the law The same may be more d astically sugg sted, for one re ec show often the gure of the "great cr minal, however rep llent h s ends mayhave been, has aroused the secret adm ation of the public. This can r sultnot om his deed but only om the v olence to wh ch it bears witn s I

this case, therefore, the violence that present day law is s ek ng in al ar asof act vity to deny the individual app ars really th eatening, and arous seven in defeat the sympathy of the masses aga st the law By what func onviolence can wi h reason seem so threaten ng to the law, and be so fearedby it, must especially evident where i s application, even in the pr sent

legal system, is still rmissible.This is above all the case in the class struggle, n the form of the workersguaranteed right to strike. Today organ zed labor is, apa t from the state,probably the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence Against th sview there is certainly the ob ec on that an omission of act ions, a nonac ion,wh ch a s ike really is, can ot be de ri d as violence Such a considerationdoubtless made it easier for a state power to concede the right to strike,once this was no longer avoidable But its tru h is not unconditional, andtherefore not unrestricted. It is true hat the om ssion of an action, or s v ce,where it mounts s mply to a "severing of relations, can be an entirelynonviolent, pure means And as in the view of the s ate, or the law, the rightto strike conceded to labor is certa nly a right not to exercise v olence but,

rather, to escape om a violence directly exercised by the employer, s ikesconform ng to this may undoubtedly cur from time to t e and involveonly a "withd awal or "es rangement om the employe The momentof violence, however, is necessa ily troduced, in the form of ex or on, tosuch an omission, if it takes place in the context of a conscious read nessto res e the suspended action under cer a c cumstances that ei her havenothing whatever to do with th s action or only supe cially mod fy itUnderstood in th s way, the right to st ke constitutes in the view of labor,wh ch is opposed to that of the state, the r ght to us force in attainingce tain ends The antithesis between he two conceptions emerg s in all ibit e ess in the face of a revolu ona y general s ike In th s, labor willalways appeal to its right to s ike, and he state will call h s ap a an

abus (since the right to s ke was not "so ntended and will ke emer



242 Critique of Violence

nevertheless all at acks that are made merely in the name of a formle�sfreedom" without being able to specif this h gher order of eedom rema

impotent against it. A d they are most impotet of all when, instea ofattacking the legal system root and branch, they 1mpugn part culr laws?rlegal practices that the law, of course, takes under the prote on of Itspower, which resi es in the fact that there is onlyne fate a that whatexists, and in particular what threatens, belongs v lably

to ItS or For

law-preservi g violence is a threatening iolence A 1ts thre t IS notintended as the deterrent that uninformed beral theo sts terpret 1t to be.A deterrent in the exact sense woul require a certainty that contradicts thenature of a threat and is not attaine by any law, since there is always hpeof eluding its arm. This makes it all the more threatening, like fate, wh chdeterm es whether the criminal is apprehended The deepest purpose of theuncertainty of the legal threat w l emerge fromthe later coni eratio fthe sphere of fate in which it originates. There 1s a us

ef l po te o 1t

the sphere of punishments Among them, since the a d1ty of pos t ve1�has been called into question, capital pun shment has provokd more c tcism than all others Howe er super cial the arguments may most casesha e been their motives were and are rooted in principle. The opponentsof these c;itics felt, perhaps without knowi g why and probably involuntarily , that an attack on capital punishment assail�not legal measure, notlaws but law itself in its origin For if violence, v lence crowned by fate,is th origin of law, then it may be readily supposed that where the h�ghestviolence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, theg s flaw jut manifestly and fearsomely into ex stenceI ag e ent w1th th1s Sthe fact that the death penalty i primitive legal systems 1s mposed even forsuch crimes as offenses against property, to which it seems q te out of

proportion ts purpose is not to pu ish the infringe ent of law but toestablish new law. For in the exercise of violence over fe an death, morethan in any other legal act, the law rea rms itself. But in this very vil cesomething rotten in the law is revealed, above all to a ner se1b1

,

because the latter knows itself to be in tely remote from cond t ons which fate might imperiously have shown itself in such a sentence. Reasonmust, however, at empt to approach such con itions all the mre resolutely,if it is to bring to a conclusion its critique of both lawmak g and lawpreserving violence.

.n a far more unnatural combination than the death penalt , a k dof spectral mixt re, these two forms of violence arepresent in anotherinstitution of the modern state: the police. True, th1s IS v1olence for legalends (it includes the right of disposition), but with the simultaneous authorit to decide these ends itself within wilimits(it ncludes the ght of

ecree The ignominy of such an autho y wh ch s felt by few s mplybecause its ordinances suf ce only seldom, even for the crudest acts, but are

Critique of Violence 43

therefore allowed to rampage all the more blindly in the most vulnerableareas and against thi kers, from whom the state is not prote te by lawlies in the fa t that in this authority the separation of lawmaking andlaw preserving violence is suspen ed f the rst is requ re to proveworth i victory, the se on is sub ect to the restriction that it may not sitsel new ends Police violence is emancipated from both conditions lawmaking, because its chara teristic fu ction is not the promu gation oflaws but the assertion of legal claims for any ecree, an law preser g,be use it is at e isposal of these en s The assertion that the ends ofpolice violence are always i entical or even conne ted to those of generlaw is ent ely untrue Rather, the law" of the police really marks the poiat which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanentcon ections within any legal system, can no longer gu antee through thelegal system the emp ical en s that it desires at any price to a tain. Therefore, the police inter ene for security reasons" in countless cas s where noclear legal sit ation exists, when they are not merely, without the slightestrelation to legal ends, accompa ying the citizen as a brutal encumbrancethrough a life regulated by or inances, or si ply supervising him Un klaw, which acknowledges in the de ision" determined by place and time ametaphysic l categor that gives it a claim to critical evaluation, a consieration of the police instit tion encounters nothing essential at all ts poweris formless, like its nowhere tangible, all pervasive, ghostly presence in thlife of civilized states. And though the police may, in particulars, appear thesame ever where, it cannot nally be enied that in absolute monarchy,where they represent the power of a ruler in which legislative and executivesupremacy are united, their sp rit is less de astating than in dem racies,where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to thegreatest conceivable degeneration of violence.

All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law preser ing. f it laysclaim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all vali ity t follows, however, that all violence as a means, even in the most favorable case, isimplicated in the problematic nature of law itself A d if the importance ofthese problems cannot be assessed with certainty at th s stage of the investigation, law nevertheless appears, from what has been said, in so ambiguousa moral light that the question poses itself whether there are no other thanviolent means for regulating conf icting human interests We are above allobligate to note that a totally nonviolent resolution of conf cts can neverlea to a legal contract For the la ter, however peacefully it may have beenentered i to by the parties, lea s nally to possible violence t confers oneach party the right to resort to violence in some form against the other,should he break the agreement Not only that; like the outcome, the orig nof every contract also po ts toward violence t need not be directly presentin it as lawmaking violence, but is represented in it insofar as the power



250 Critique of Violence

spilling blood The legend of Niobe may be contrasted with God's judgmenton the company of Korah, as an example of such violence. God s jud entstrikes privileged vites, strikes them without wa ng without threat, anddoes not stop short of an ihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, anda profound connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatorycharacter of th s violence is unmistakable For blood is the symbol of mere

life. The dissolut on of legal violence stems (as cannot be shown in detailhere) from the guilt of more natural life which consigns the living innocentand unhappy to a retribution that "expiates the guilt of mere life anddoubtless also puri es the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law For withmere life, the r e of law over the living ceases. Mythic violence is bloodypower over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power overall life for the sake of the living The rst demands sacr ce; the secondaccepts it

This divine power is not only attested by religious tradition but is alsofound in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. Theeducative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is oneof its manifestations These are de ned, therefore, not by miracles directly

performed by God but by the expiating moment in them that strikes withoutbloodshed and, nally, by the absence of all lawmaking To this extent itis justi able to call this violence, too an hilating; but it is so on y relativelywith regard to goods right, life and suchl ke never absolutely with regardto the soul of the living. The premi e of such an extension of pure or divinepower is sure to provoke par icularly today the most violent reactions andto be countered by the argument that, if taken to its logical conclusion, itconfers on men even lethal power against one another This, howevercannot be conceded. For the question May I kill? meets its rreducibleanswer in the commandment "Thou s alt not kilL This commandmentprecedes the deed, just as God was preventing the deed. But just as it maynot be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes

inapplicable incommensurable once the deed is accomplished No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment And so neitherthe divine judgment nor the grounds for this judgment can be known inadvance Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one personby another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as acriterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons orcommunities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and in exceptionalcases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it Thus it wasunderstood by Judaism, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self defense But those thinkers who take the opposite view refer toa more distant theorem, on which they possibly propose to base even theco mandment itself This is the doctrine of the sanctity of life w ch they

either apply to all animal and even vegetable life or limit to human lifeTheir argument exempli ed in an extreme case by the revolutiona y killing

ti

Critique of Violence 2 1

of the oppressor, runs as follows: If I do not kill I shall never establish theworld dominion of justice that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist . We however, profess that higher even than the happiness and justiceof existence stands existence itself "8 As ce inly as this last proposition isfalse, indeed i oble it shows the necessity of seeking the reason for thecommandment no longer in what the deed does to the vict m but in what

it does to God and the doer The proposition that ex stence stands higherthan a just existence is false and ignomin ous if existence is to mean nothingother than mere life and it has this meaning in the arg ment referred toIt contains a might truth however, if existence or, better "life (wordswhose ambigu ty is readily dispelled like that of freedom, when they a eused with reference to two dist nct spheres) means the irreducible, totacondit on that is man ; if the proposition is intended to mean that thenonexistence of man is something more t rrible than the (admitted y subordinate) not y et attained condition of the just man The proposition quotedabove owes its plausibilit to this ambigu ty Man cannot, at any price, besaid to coincide with the mere life in him, any more than it can be said tocoincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even the

iqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or however sacredthat life in him which is identically present in earthly life, death andafterlife), there is no sacredness in his condit on in his bodily life vulnerableto inj ry by his fellow men What, then, distinguishes it essentially from thelife of animals and plants And even if the e were sacred, they could not beso by vir ue only of being alive of being in life It might be well worthwhileto track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps,indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken at empt of theweakened Weste tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmolo calimpenetrabilit . (The antiquit of all religious commandments against m rder is no counterargument because these are based on ideas other than themode theorem ) Finally this idea o f man s sacredness gives gro nds forre lection that what is here pronounced sacred was, according to ancientmythic thought, the marked bearer of g t life itself.

The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history the "philosophyof this histo y because only the idea of its development makes po ible acritical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data A gazedirected only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a dialectical risingand falling in the lawmaking and law pre erving forms of violence. The lawgoverning their oscillation rests on the circumstance that all law prese vingviolence, in its duration indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence it represents, by suppressing host le counte violence. (Va ous symptoms of thishave been referred to in the co se of this st dy.) This lasts until either newforces or those earlier suppres ed triumph over the hitherto lawmak ngviolence and thus found a new law, dest ned in it tu to decay. On ebreaking of th s cycle maintained by m thic forms of law on the suspension



5 itiqu of Viol nc

of law with all th fo c s on which it d p nds as th y d p nd on it nallyth fo on th abolition of stat pow a n w histo i al po h is found dIf th ul of myth is b ok n o casionally in th p s nt ag th coming agis not so unimaginably mot that an attack on law is altog th util Butif th ist nc of viol nc outsid th law as pur imm diat viol nc isassu d this nish s p oof that volutiona y viol nc th h gh st manif station of unalloy d viol nc by man is possibl and shows by whatm ans. L ss possibl and also l ss u g nt fo humankind how v is tod cid wh n unalloy d viol nc has b n ali d in pa ticula cas s. Foonly mythic viol nc not divin will b cogni abl as such with c taintyunl ss it b in incompa abl ff cts b caus th piato y p w of viol ncis invisibl to m n Onc again all th t al fo ms a op n to pu divinviol nc which myth basta di d with law Divin viol nc may manif stits lf in a t u wa actly as it do s in th c owd s divin judgm nt on ac iminal But all mythic lawmaking viol nc which w may call cutiv is p nicious icious to is th law-p s ing ad inist ativviol nc that s v s it. Divin viol nc which is th sign and s al but n vth m ans of sac d dispatch may b call d sov ign viol nc .

W itten in 19 1; published in Archiv fur Sozialw ssenscha nd Sozia po it k,1 21.Translated by E und Jephcott.

Notes

1 Benjamin's te m isG wa t which means both "violence and fo ce. he la emeaning should be kept in mind when Ben amin tu ns to elationships betweenstates.- Trans.

2 One might athe , doubt whethe this famous demand does not contain toolittle-that is whethe it is pe missible to use o allow to be used oneself oanothe in any espect as a means Ve good g ounds fo such doubt could beadduced.

3 ich Unge P t k nd M taphy k[Politics and Metaphysics] (Be lin, 1921)p 8

4 But see Unge pp 18ff.5 So e!R x n r a v n[Ref ections on Violence] 5th ed (Pa is 1919

p 2506. Ibid. pp. 265 195 249 2007 He mann Cohen Eth k d s r n n W ll ns[ thics of the Pu e Will , 2nd ed.

Be lin 190 , p 362 Cohen 1842 1918 , a leading membe of the Ma bu gschool of Neo Kantianism combined wo k on ewish theolog and Kantianphilosophy His w itings on philosophy and on eligion exe ed an impo tantinf uence on Benjamin Trans.

8 Ku t Hille Anti Cain inDa Z l: ]ahrb h r f r g t g P khe Goal:Yea book o Spi itual Politics (Munich 191 ) p 25

I e Task of the Translato r

I the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideratio n of there eiver never pro ves fruit ul. N ot only is any reference to a part icular public

or ts representati ves misleading, bu t even the concept of an "ideal receiveris detrimental in the theo retical considerati on of art since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such Art, in the same way, posits man' sphysical and spirit al existence but i none of its works i s it conce ed withhis attentiveness No poem is intended for the reader, no pi ture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience

Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original?Th1s would seem to explain adequat ely the fact th at th e trans lation and the original have very diff erent stand ing in the realm of ar t. M oreover, i t seems to be the only conceivable reason f or saying "the same thing over againFor what d oes a litera ry work "

say ? What does it communicate? It "tells very little to t hose who understand it. Its essential quality is not communi-catio n or the mparting of inf ormatio n Y et any translation that intends toperfor m a transmitting f unct ion cannot transmit anyth ing but com unication -h ence, something inessential. This is the ha llmark of bad t ranslationsBut do we not generally regard that which lies be ond communicatio n in aliterary work- and even a poor trans lato r will admit th at th s is its essentia lsubstance - as the unfathomable the mysterious, the "p tic ? And is thisnot something that a translator can reproduce only if he is als - a poet?Such, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inf erior translation which consequently we may de ne as the inaccurate transmission of a� inessential cont ent. Whenever a translation undert akes to serve the reader it demonstr ates this However, if it

were intended for the reader the sam;

Benjamin, Critique of Violence 1921

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