Benjamin’s Divine Violence: Unjustifiable Justice

Luis Guzmán

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 Benjamin’s Divine Violence
Unjustifiable Justice

Luis Guzmán
The New School for Social Research and New York University, New York

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied,
and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of
the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Genera-
tions, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had
been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was
it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts
of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals
and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geogra-
phy.—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida,
1658
—Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Collected Fictions

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2014, pp. 49–64. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

 49
50  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

If one believes that violence is necessary to overcome certain situations of

oppression and injustice on Earth, and yet that it is never justifiable (since as
a means to an end its justification is dependent on a specific end that cannot
avoid, to preserve itself, reproducing the conditions that were to be elimi-
nated), then one finds oneself in a paradox. Walter Benjamin’s concept of
divine violence is an attempt at working through this paradox. It is an attempt
at avoiding resignation toward the injustice and suffering encountered in the
world while simultaneously being wary of any discourse of the legitimation of
violence, since such discourse will manipulate the binary sanctioned/unsanc-
tioned violence (violence as means) to preserve itself. The difficulty and,
perhaps, perturbing character, of Benjamin’s text lies in the fact that he does
not attempt to resolve or dissolve the paradox before him. How can one accept
the impossibility of justifying violence, of reaching a normative framework
from which guidelines are issued that sanction the use of violence, and yet
accept the need for such violence? Would not Benjamin suffer the fate of
Borges’s college of cartographers, offering a useless map for action, a map that
does not translate into directives for action but just tracks its contours?
In Critique of Violence (2007), Benjamin aims his gaze at the connection
between violence, on the one hand, and law and justice, on the other.
Throughout the text, he offers various examples of violence that fall within the
means/end relation: violence used as a means for a certain end or purpose
external to it. In the second half of the text, he groups these forms of violence
under the categories of law-making and law-preserving violence. The former
founds a state or institution; it imposes law. The latter preserves an already-
established law. Both will fall under the concept of mythical violence.1 Their
main characteristic is that they are means to an end; violence is exercised to
impose law, or to preserve it. The problem with this violence is that it cannot
be justified without question-begging, without already presupposing what it
needs to justify. It can only be justified by the conditions it sets out to impose
or maintain. In this manner, it does not have an ultimate justification. This is
what Jacques Derrida, in Force of Law, calls the “mystical foundation of au-
thority”: “Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position
of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are them-
selves a violence without ground. . . . They are neither legal nor illegal in their
 Luis Guzmán  51

founding moment” (1990, 943). Thus, the concept of violence, understood as a

means, seems to lead to a paradox. Benjamin says: “All violence as a means is
either law-making or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predi-
cates, it forfeits all validity. It follows, however, that all violence as a means,
even in the most favorable case, is implicated in the problematic nature of law
itself” (2007, 287). Violence exercised as a means (mythical violence) needs
to—but cannot—be justified. The moment it attempts to be justified, its
ungrounded nature will be revealed. And if it does not bother in being justi-
fied, it loses all validity. A possible way out of the paradox is to ask “whether
there are no other than violent means for regulating conflicting human inter-
ests” (287). Five pages later, after enumerating and discussing various possible
nonviolent ways of resolving conflict (technique, understanding, language,
diplomacy), Benjamin gives a negative answer: “every conceivable solution to
human problems, not to speak of deliverance from the confines of all the
world-historical conditions of existence obtaining hitherto, remains impossi-
ble if violence is totally excluded in principle” (293). This paradoxical situation
of the need for something unjustifiable leads to his notion of divine violence.
Its main trait is that it is not a means to an end; it is not exercised “to.” It lies
outside of law insofar as it seeks neither to ground nor to preserve it. None-
theless, it is not unrelated to law: it destroys it. Thus, the distinction between
mythical and divine violence can be superimposed on that between law-
making or law-preserving, on the one hand, and law-destroying violence, on
the other.
I shall attempt to shed light on this concept of divine violence, through the
prism of the enigmatic last paragraph of Benjamin’s Critique of Violence,
where in three dense sentences he asserts the possibility of its occurrence, the
impossibility of its recognition as such by humankind, the lack of urgency for
humankind of said recognition, and the invisibility of its expiatory power.2
Before beginning, let us succinctly restate the paradox Benjamin finds in the
concept of violence. Violence, in its relation to law, is usually framed within a
means/end relation. It is exercised as a means to make or preserve law. As
means, it can only be justified by the end aimed for. However, given the
ungrounded and ungroundable nature of law (law has only itself to hold on to
in its attempt to stand on firm ground), no violent act can be justified. Given
52  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

the self-justificatory nature of law, it ends up being a matter of power and not
of justice: “Lawmaking is power making, and, to that extent, an immediate
manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine end making,
power the principle of all mythical lawmaking” (Benjamin 2007, 295). How-
ever, given the conditions under which humans live, they need to resort to
violence to attempt to achieve justice. Only through power can justice be
achieved. But precisely insofar as it is power, it is unjust. For Benjamin, the
concepts of power and justice are mutually exclusive insofar as power is
equivalent to force and violence.3
Divine violence is possible. Benjamin seems to distinguish between two
kinds of divine violence: pure, immediate violence, on the one hand, and
revolutionary violence, on the other. Their difference is temporal. The former
occasionally occurs in the present age. It breaks the rule of myth (though not
the mythical cycle between law-making and law-preserving violence) by de-
stroying current law, before being absorbed again into the mythical cycle.4
This immediacy of the destruction of law momentarily determines it as stand-
ing outside the law. It is not revolutionary violence since it does not yet abolish
state power, and thus it does not found a new historical epoch in which our
relation to law would be fundamentally altered and the cycle of mythical
violence disrupted. The latter’s occurrence is in the “coming age.” This revo-
lutionary violence would be the highest manifestation of divine violence. The
paradox lies in that this highest manifestation of divine violence cannot be
recognized as such by mankind. Its value lies, then, in the promise of the
coming age, which removes the apparent futility of present attacks on law.
Present attacks on law, despite their absorption into the mythical cycle of
violence once they have destroyed law and begun to institute a new law, are
not futile, since they point beyond themselves to the possibility of revolution-
ary violence in the coming age.
This possibility of revolutionary violence lies, therefore, in the existence of
occasional immediate violence in the present. Divine violence lies hidden, so
to speak, under the surface of current acts of violence against law, at the
precise moment when they disrupt present law, before settling into the myth-
ical cycle of instituting new law and then preserving it. As long as these acts
keep occurring, the possibility, the promise of the highest kind of divine
 Luis Guzmán  53

violence, remains alive. However, it is a possibility that seems to always lie in

the coming age, in the future. This is similar to Derrida’s à venir regarding
justice: “But for this very reason, it (justice) may have an à venir, a ‘to-come,’
which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the
present. Justice remains, is yet to come, à venir, it has an, it is à venir, the very
dimension of events irreducibly to come. It will always have it, this à venir, and
always has” (Derrida 1990, 969). Why can’t it be fulfilled or actualized? Be-
cause it would cease being justice or divine violence. It would fall into the field
of instrumentality, into an economy of means-end, sucked into the cycle of
mythical violence. A violence that destroys law to found a new law on its ruins
falls into the orbit of the cycle of mythical violence. It would need to justify
itself, thereby exemplifying once again the “problematic nature of law.” This is
what Benjamin calls the “ultimate insolubility of all legal problems,” the
“problematic nature of all legal violence” (Benjamin 2007, 293). To actualize
the possibility of divine violence, in its highest manifestation, is to transform it
into mythical violence. The actualization of divine violence is its demise.
This parallels the first step of G. F. W. Hegel’s critique of the dualism
is/ought in his Science of Logic (1995): if the ought is realized or fulfilled, it
ceases to be an “ought” and devolves into a mere “is.”5 The coming age plays its
role insofar as it is a coming age, not insofar as it becomes actualized at some
particular point in history. But what role can a pure possibility as possibility
play if it is never actualized? Herein lies the second step of Hegel’s critique of
the dualism is/ought: if it is never fulfilled, it is a perennial “ought,” lying
permanently beyond our reach, leaving reality unaffected. Hegel’s solution to
the unstable nature of the “ought” is to assert that it is already achieved in its
being striven for as “ought.” Thus, the fulfillment of an “ought” lies not in its
actualization in reality, but rather in our attempts to actualize it, in our moral
struggle to do our duty for the sake of duty. The “ought” is actualized, fulfilled,
in its (impossible) possibility. Revolutionary violence is possible because it
comes into being as a projection, a shadow, of the present attacks on law. We
catch a glimpse of it through the mist of these attacks, just before they are
inexorably drawn into the orbit of mythical violence in their grounding of new
laws after having destroyed the old ones.6 The actualization of divine violence
would be, then, the revelation of the limits of law (its self-grounding and
54  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

therefore ungrounded character) and the promise of the coming age this
revelation brings. Divine violence is actual as possible. As Judith Butler says:

I would suggest that the anarchism or destruction that Benjamin refers to is to

be understood neither as another kind of political state nor as an alternative to
positive law. Rather, it constantly recurs as the condition of positive law and as
its necessary limit. It does not portend an epoch yet to come, but underlies
legal violence of all kinds, constituting the potential for destruction that
underwrites every act by which the subject is bound by law. (2006, 214)

Divine violence cannot be recognized. We cannot recognize divine violence

in particular cases because any particular case, insofar as particular, is already
dragged into the orbit of mythical violence, into the economy of means/end.
The identification of a historical event as a manifestation of divine violence is
already the unmasking of it as merely mythical. Any claim to revolution
already implies a (necessarily) failed attempt at justifying violence. As Marc de
Wilde says, “As soon as the revolutionary begins to think of his law-destroying
violence as an instrument of salvation, redeeming history through the direct
intervention of the divine violence it supposedly represents, he is bound to
cause the worst, that is, a senseless sacrifice of ‘mere life’ to myth” (2006, 198).7
The certainty of the recognition of mythical violence lies in its belonging to the
means/end structure, in other words, in its necessarily failed attempt at
justification. All violence exercised on Earth attempts to justify itself. The first
sentences of Benjamin’s text state that “the task of a critique of violence can be
summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice. For a cause,
however effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only
when it bears on moral issues . . . the most elementary relationship within
any legal system is that of ends to means” (2007, 277). Any act of violence that
makes a normative claim, or, in Benjamin’s words, “bears on moral issues,” falls
into the trap of its self-legitimation, attempting to pull itself up from its own
bootstraps.8 Neither natural nor positive law can be grounded. Natural law
posits its end as presupposed (as part of human nature) and attempts to
justify the means through the justness of this end, whereas positive law con-
structs the end and so can only ground it through the means used to attain it.
 Luis Guzmán  55

“Natural law attempts, by the justness of the ends, to ‘justify’ the means,
positive law to ‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justification of
the means” (278). Both attempts fail in their justifying efforts: “For if positive
law is blind to the absoluteness of ends, natural law is equally so to the
contingency of means” (279). Failure lies in the circularity of any attempt at
justification or grounding insofar as the standpoints from which they are
attempted lie within what is to be justified. What is needed would be “a
standpoint outside positive legal philosophy but also outside natural law”
(279). This is an impossible standpoint to inhabit: it is the point of view from
nowhere. But only from this standpoint could divine violence be recognized.
For this reason, only mythical violence can be recognized with certainty. To
recognize or decide on certain present violence as divine would be to
misrecognize it. There is no possible justification of violence that does not
come undone in the precise act of justification. “All violence as a means, even
in the most favorable case, is implicated in the problematic nature of law
itself” (287).9
And yet, Benjamin cannot do away with violence and offer nonviolent
resolutions of conflict, which he admits exist. He mentions the sphere of
understanding, language, as a place where conflicts can be resolved through
nonviolent agreement among private citizens. However, there are certain
human problems and world-historical conditions that require violence to be
dealt with. We reach a point of tension here between the need for violence and
the impossibility of justifying it. The moment we attempt to solve certain
human problems, or deliver ourselves from certain conditions of existence, we
necessarily fall into mythical violence, which we recognize with certainty as it
attempts and fails to ground itself.10 What role can something that is not
recognizable with certainty play for humankind? Divine violence is not only
possible, as was explained above; it is also necessary given the circumstances
under which humans live. However, its actualization is impossible to recog-
nize. It is important to note here that Benjamin is not denying the actualiza-
tion of divine violence, but only its recognition by humankind. As was said
above, divine violence is already actualized, though as possibility. This ex-
plains why attacks on law are not futile, despite ending up absorbed within the
cycle of mythical violence. They hint at the fragility, the self-justificatory
56  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

nature of law, thus offering us glimpses of the coming age. We need to be able
to perceive the coming age as coming, as possible, to confront and attack the
law in the present, despite the fact that any attack on present law will institute
future ungrounded law, falling thus into the mythical cycle.
The recognition of divine violence is not urgent. The lack of urgency regard-
ing the recognition of the realization of divine violence in particular cases is
parasitic on the impossibility of the task at hand insofar as its urgency would
lead to despair and inaction. If it were urgent for us to point to certain events
in history as examples of divine violence, we would come up empty-handed,
since all examples offered would end up absorbed into the cycle of mythical
violence the moment they destroy existing law and begin to found new law.
This would have as a consequence the loss of all faith in the possibility itself of
divine violence, and the coming age would then lose its power. And since the
actualization of divine violence is its possibility, it would never be able to be
actualized. Therefore, the urgency of deciding when divine violence has been
exercised could only lead to the impossibility of divine violence itself.
The expiatory power of violence is not visible to men. There are three under-
lying assertions in this statement. Expiation is needed; divine violence offers
it; it is invisible to men. This expiatory power of divine violence is, in my
opinion, the most fundamental trait Benjamin ascribes to it. Why is expiation
needed? One need only look at the past. As Benjamin himself describes it in
the ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, the past is a pile of wreckage
upon wreckage. His view of the past echoes Hegel’s, who, in the introduction
to the Philosophy of History, calls it “the slaughter-bench at which the happi-
ness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been
victimized (1956, 21). This we recognize with certainty: the pernicious charac-
ter of law-making and law-preserving, executive and administrative, violence.
Benjamin says: “If mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution
[sühnend], divine power only expiates [entsühnend]” (2007, 297). Before focus-
ing on why divine violence has expiatory power, let us try to understand why it
is not visible to men. Its invisibility runs parallel to the unrecognizability of
divine violence itself. If its expiatory power were visible to us, this would work
as a sign or trace of divine violence, by which we could recognize it. The
reasons offered above as to the impossibility of deciding when divine violence
 Luis Guzmán  57

has occurred also explain why its expiatory power is not visible to us. To be
able to recognize violence as divine is to inhabit a standpoint inaccessible to
us, to achieve a certainty that lies beyond our power. In the same manner, for
the expiatory power of divine violence to become visible to us would mean
that we would cease being guilty, standing thus beyond good and evil. This
expiatory power expiates the guilt without ridding the guilty of it. As Hegel
puts it regarding the “ought,” once it is fulfilled or actualized, it ceases being an
“ought”; it self-destructs. It is part of the nature of divine violence not to be
recognizable, and of its expiatory power to be invisible. Otherwise, we would
cease being human by having our guilt washed away.
This brings us to the expiatory power of divine violence. One must have
either a pessimistic or an optimistic view of the emancipatory potential of
human beings. To have a pessimistic view would mean that one does not
believe in the capacity of humankind to bring itself to a point where injustice
and inequality are greatly reduced. In other words, one does not believe in the
possibility of either progress or revolution. Looking back upon history, it is not
difficult to justify holding this position. To have an optimistic view would
imply believing either that we are moving forward on a path of increasing
enlightenment, progressing toward an ideal of justice and equality, on the one
hand; or, on the other, that a break with the current state of affairs can be
established via revolution, which would bring a qualitative change to human-
ity and create a new world, so to speak.11 The danger of pessimism lies in
quietism (Hegel’s beautiful soul, amor fati, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “living in
the present” from Tractatus 6.4311 [1922]); the danger of belief in progress lies
in disingenuousness regarding the current state of affairs in the world; and the
danger of the belief in revolution lies in blindness to the bloody aftermath of
past so-called revolutions (a different kind of disingenuousness). Benjamin is
aware of the track record of the past, including its revolutions: wreckage upon
wreckage. He also views progress as simply the growth of debris piling upon
itself. The whole Critique of Violence is a direct attack on one of the pillars of
the modern world he lives in: the instrumentalization of its relations, what
Axel Honneth calls “the perspective of means-ends calculation” (2009, 90).
Nonetheless, Benjamin does not assume a quietist position. He talks about
revolution, a new historical epoch, a coming age. Benjamin points toward a
58  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

break in history, a caesura in temporality, which would usher in the suspen-

sion of law and the abolition of state power.
Herein lies the paradox Benjamin finds in violence: we need this caesura in
history, the new, revolutionary violence. We do so because “every conceivable
solution to human problems, not to speak of deliverance from the confines of
all the world-historical conditions of existence obtaining hitherto, remains
impossible if violence is totally excluded in principle” (292). Yet we cannot
recognize it without unmasking it as the old, as part of the cycle of mythical
violence, as the bearer of suffering, injustice, and guilt. This is the paradox of
the necessary, yet impossible, relation between power and justice. Can one be
a skeptical revolutionary? How can one be a moral agent if doing one’s duty for
the sake of duty lies beyond one’s capacities? Above, we attempted to solve
this paradox by making use of Hegel’s critique of the “ought,” finitude and the
bad infinite in his Science of Logic. For Hegel, one is already a moral agent,
acting for the sake of duty, insofar as one strives to be a moral agent. Being
moral lies in striving or struggling to be moral. The “ought” is achieved, not in
its realization as “ought” (since this would downgrade it to a mere “is”), but in
the struggle to achieve it. In a similar way, Benjamin’s revolution, the ushering
of the new, is achieved, though not in the fulfillment of a particular revolution
in history, since the moment it takes place it will in time be absorbed into the
cycle of mythical violence in its attempt to justify and preserve itself. We can
catch a glimpse of divine violence: it is fulfilled, in its appearance as mere
possibility, say, at the beginning of a revolution. It is actualized as ideal, as
possibility, lying like a shadow just beyond our reach. Its value lies in how it
feeds the desire and impulse for transforming the current world-historical
conditions of existence into a more just and equal society. It takes place not in
the bloody, physical manifestations of mythical violence exercised at partic-
ular historical junctures, but in the purity of the thirst for justice that leads
humans to attempt to change their conditions. It thus avoids falling into what
Slavoj Žižek calls an “obscurantist mystification” of divine violence, which
reduces it to a “pure event which never takes place,” while at the same time
avoiding pinning acts of divine violence down to specific historical moments,
an exercise from which Žižek does not shy away: he cites the revolutionary
terror of 1792–94, the red terror of 1917, etc. (2008, 196–97). For Benjamin,
 Luis Guzmán  59

these historical events could not be acts of divine violence, first because they
would not be able to be recognized as such; second, because of their subse-
quent insertion into the cycle of law-founding and law-preserving mythical
violence. They are a perfect example of what Benjamin has in mind when he
says: “This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph
over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its
turn to decay” (300). They are also, certainly, not bloodless, which would
contravene what Benjamin explicitly states regarding the bloodless character
of divine violence: “But in annihilating it [divine violence] also expiates [en-
tsühnend], and a deep connection between a lack of bloodshed and the expi-
atory character of this violence is unmistakable” (297).
The need for expiation lies in the wreckage left by humanity. It is invisible
to us since we keep piling up more wreckage. It comes to us in the form of
divine violence, which itself cannot be recognized by us without being trans-
formed into mythical violence. Is Benjamin not merely falling into a new kind
of theodicy, one not based on God’s goodness, as in the case of G. W. Leibniz,
but on the promise of a coming age? Humanity needs to be expiated because
of the depths to which everything has been smashed in history and of “the
problematic nature of law itself.” A theodicy justifies the evils of the world by
means of a greater good. It offers a whole that grants each part, however
unjust, suffering and tortured that part may be, a role in the meaning of the
whole. For Leibniz, every event within creation is a part of the best of all
possible worlds, and without it, God’s goodness would be put into question.
Leibniz’s theodicy justifies the evils of the world, the interminable pain and
suffering of humankind, by means of the whole reached thereby. Benjamin’s
angel of history, on the other hand, cannot make whole what has been
smashed. There is no longer any idea—transcendent or immanent—that can
ground the totality or wholeness. To assert that God’s goodness justifies the
suffering in the world is to remain caught within the instrumental thinking of
means/ends, yet at an infinitely greater scale. It is no longer particular laws or
institutions that attempt to justify their violent acts by positing their own
ends, but the whole of History is justified as a means to the greatest of all ends
(the actualization of God’s goodness). Divine violence, however, cannot func-
tion with the means/end structure without being unmasked as mythical
60  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

violence. It is for this reason that it is not possible to decide when it has been
realized, and that its expiatory power is invisible to us.12 If Benjamin is offering
us a theodicy of sorts, it is very different from traditional conceptions of it.
Justice is actualized on Earth in its possibility, whereas in Leibniz this actual
world is the best of all possible worlds, and this fact should not be invisible to
us. A theodicy with an expiatory power invisible to humankind might not
deserve the name of theodicy.
Divine violence expiates our guilt without putting an end to it because if it
did, we would cease seeking justice by attempting to change our world-
historical conditions. These attempts produce guilt and expiation. Benjamin
talks of a “retribution [Sühne] that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and doubt-
less also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law” (297). Expiation
exists despite there being, or precisely because there is, nothing else but guilt.
If expiation were visible to men, it would bring with it the justification of
violence and, thus, would transform divine violence into, or rather unmask it
as, mythical violence. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel says: “the final purpose of the
world is just as much accomplished as it is eternally accomplishing itself”
(1991, § 234, Addition). It is accomplished only insofar as it is permanently
accomplishing itself. Not only is the purpose immanent to the world, and not
transcendent, it is also mobile, constantly transforming itself, subject to the
contingencies and becoming of history. In the same way, divine violence is
exercised in the midst of mythical violence as its shadow, so to speak, in the
revolutionary impetus by which violence is met with violence. It is invisible to
us since we always believe, wrongly, that we can justify our violence, thus
further feeding the cycle of guilt and retribution. In our attempts to right
previous wrongs, we create more wrongs, pile up more wreckage, and yet the
revolutionary impetus by which we attempt to bring justice on Earth, while
producing more injustice, actually does bring justice, though it is a justice that
cannot be justified. Our salvation lies in our attempts at salvation. Since we
can neither be saved by any transcendent being nor actualize justice on Earth
due to the problematic nature of law, we are saved by the possibility of justice,
actualized (as possible) in our striving for it.
The remaining task is to ask about the purpose of offering a concept
of divine violence impossible to recognize with certainty in history, whose
 Luis Guzmán  61

expiatory power is equally invisible to humankind. Without a notion of divine

violence, justice would be impossible, beyond the reach of humankind. There
would be nothing but guilt in history, emanating from the never-ending cycle
of mythical violence. Thus, divine violence is necessary. At the same time, its
unrecognizability, the invisibility of its expiatory power, is also necessary due
to the problematic nature of legal violence and the insolubility of legal prob-
lems: the realization of justice is impossible since it requires power and power
cannot legitimize itself. Justice is impossible. The only remaining path for
justice given its necessity and its impossible nature is to be actualized as
possible, to be reached in the attempts at reaching it. Divine violence is neces-
sary insofar as justice is (im)possible, making it thereby im(possible).
The paradox of violence, as Benjamin describes it, may be completely
side-stepped if one does not accept one of its constitutive theses: that violence
is never justifiable. One may want to preserve a distinction between violence
and power (the Arendt-Habermas path), allowing for legitimate exercises of
violence that therefore would not fall into what Benjamin calls the cycle of
mythical violence. However, if one finds within the concept of law itself an
aporetic nature insofar as it may only justify itself by appealing to itself
(“history will absolve our actions”), then Benjamin’s text is courageous insofar
as it confronts us with the unavoidable paradox of violence and the law. And
yet, does his concept of divine violence help us work through this paradox, or
does it end up merely offering us a map of the world the size of the world, that
just replicates it, without any normative guidelines for action? Are we any the
wiser with his notion of divine violence than we were when we acted believing
in certain normative guidelines that justified our actions, thereby enabling us
to believe in the founding of a new era, in the arrival of das Neue?

NOTES

1. In the text, mythical violence is first mentioned on page 294, in the form of a law-making
punishment of the Gods against Niobe, distinguished from law-preserving violence. Some
pages later, however, Benjamin conflates law-making and law-preserving violence under
the term mythical violence insofar as both necessarily imply and feed each other. For the
62  Benjamin’s Divine Violence

purposes of this article, by “mythical violence” I shall understand this broader use of the
term.
2. I shall quote the text in full: “But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure
immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the
highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and by what means. Less
possible, and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence
has been realized in particular cases. For only mythical violence, not divine, will be recog-
nizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory
power of violence is not visible to men” (Benjamin 2007, 300).
3. One could read the third chapter of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence as a rebuttal of this claim,
although Benjamin is not once mentioned in her text.
4. The first break, that of the rule of myth, uses the verb brechen, whereas the second break,
that of the mythical cycle, uses the term Durchbrechung (“breaking through”). The latter has
not occurred in history; it is reserved for the “coming age.”
5. Hegel states: “What ought to be is, and at the same time is not. If it were, we could not say
that it ought merely to be. The ought has, therefore, essentially a limitation. This limitation
is not alien to it” (Hegel 1995, 132–33).
6. The structure of mythical violence replicates the structure of Hegel’s bad infinite. The
structure of divine violence replicates that of the true infinite. Alexander Garcia Düttmann
has already established this connection: “Benjamin’s formulation of the law of oscillation to
which positing is subjected translates bad infinity into the language of a critique of vio-
lence” (Garcia Düttmann 1996, 171).
7. See also James Martel: “Divine violence is anti-fetishistic. It does not instantiate truth in the
world. For Benjamin such truth can never be known by human beings. Instead, it removes
the untruths that we ascribe to God (it removes myths)” (Martel 2012, 51).
8. For a different reading of what Benjamin means by “moral issues” see Honneth: “Accord-
ingly, in his study, he restricts himself to analyzing forms of violence that possess sufficient
moral legitimacy to be able to compel ethical transformations in a society” (2009, 96).
9. Thus, what Beatrice Hanssen criticizes Benjamin for when she says: “his essay fell short of
providing an incisive differentiation between just and unjust uses of violence, and, there-
fore, in the final analysis, of offering a credible critique of violence” (2000, 23) is precisely the
point Benjamin makes in his text: this is an impossible differentiation, and as such it must
not be an urgent task. On the other hand, Honneth seems to suppose that Benjamin
inhabits this external standpoint, which allows him to produce a critique of violence that
judges the values and legitimacy upon which present acts of violence are exercised: (2009,
96–98). However, the reason why it is impossible to decide which acts of violence are divine
as opposed to mythical is precisely the impossible nature of occupying such a standpoint.
10. This seems to be the point Simon Critchley makes: “For Benjamin divine violence purifies
the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law” (2012, 243). We need to rid ourselves of law in
order to change the world-historical conditions that need to be dealt with, though this will
necessarily lead to expressions of violence that cannot be justified and that, therefore, will
produce more guilt, fanning the cycle of mythical violence.
 Luis Guzmán  63

11. The German term translated into English as the “coming age” is “das Neue.”
12. See Leibniz (1985, 201 ff). See also “Dialogue on Human Freedom and the Origin of Evil” and
“On the Ultimate Origination of Things” in Leibniz (1989).

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