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  • A Critique of Violence
  • Robin Truth Goodman (bio)

When, in 1968, Hannah Arendt posthumously published her friend Walter Benjamin's essays in Illuminations, she excluded his now-famous, enigmatic work, "A Critique of Violence." "A Critique of Violence" (1921) exhibits Benjamin's philosophical investigations into the role of violence in modern state sovereignty and inherent in its law, and the construction of an alternative understanding of violence—or revolutionary violence—outside of the framework of the modern state. Increasingly relevant today, when violence plays an increasingly central role in spreading markets and controlling populations and when state sovereignty is increasingly undermined by corporate and financial interests, the essay touched on many of the issues that Arendt herself addressed in her opposition to totalitarianism as well as in her theorizing on the politics of the revolutionary tradition and its outbreaks in her time. Arendt never gave any reason for the essay's omission in her collection but spent a considerable part of her career reflecting on the relation of violence to politics in ways that respond to Benjamin's critique, though without any references to it.1

Arendt and Benjamin were both interested in a critique of historical materialism which would divorce thinking from being and open towards an unpredictable contingency not absorbable into a predetermining narrative of progress or causality that denies politics. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, like Benjamin, "Arendt is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity between the past and present that would compel us to view what happened [End Page 219] as what had to happen. She objects to this trap of historicist understanding and maintains that the future is radically undetermined" (2012, 40; emphasis in original). Arendt is not interested in inevitability or reconciliation. She thought, for instance, that saying that historical events preceding the Holocaust assured that the Holocaust had to have happened meant treating temporality as determined in retrospection, and she understood this interpretation of historicity as a washing out of the human potential for freedom and action. As she notes in A Life of the Mind,

A thing may have happened quite at random, but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality, it loses its aspect of contingency and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity. And even if the event is of our own making, or at least we are one of its contributing causes—as in contracting marriage or committing a crime—the simple existential fact that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons) is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness.

(1971, 138)

In some ways, Arendt's view that nothing in history had to have happened as it did is a statement of divine-like, democratic agency and optimism in the face of overwhelming odds, where history—as it is for Benjamin—is shaped by those who live it rather than to mechanical processes, historical inevitability, fate, or state-sanctioned legal enforcement. In this, both Arendt and Benjamin were engaging in a fundamental post-Hegelian unraveling of a tradition of causality—or instrumental-reasoning—which connected means to ends, onto which Arendt cast the term "violence," and both sought alternative possibilities for thinking about action, politics, and power that would not be governed by a pre-existing and determining concept. For Arendt, violence was instrumentalizing and therefore depoliticizing.

Within Arendt's version of some of Benjamin's methods and insights in "A Critique of Violence," she rules out a central character in Benjamin's vision: the legend of Niobe. In this article I argue that Arendt's avoidance of Niobe has philosophical importance for her work: for Arendt, gender cannot be trapped in the means-ends logic of war culture, historical necessity, market calculation, or state sovereignty. Because bodies are political, that is, always coming into the world as no one has before, gender breaks out of historical time and interrupts the meanings imposed by historical necessity, advancing a logic of freedom. In other words, gender for Arendt cannot be thought outside her version of politics; in fact, in some readings it can be said to constitute her version of politics. I show how Arendt's analysis of gender...

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