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Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ Judith Butler I would like to take up the question of violence, more specifically, the question of what a critique of violence might be. What meaning does the term critique take on when it becomes a critique of violence? A critique of violence is an inquiry into the conditions for violence, but it is also an interrogation of how violence is circumscribed in advance by the questions we pose of it. What is violence, then, such that we can pose this question of it, and do we not need to know how to handle this question before we ask, as we must, what are the legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence? I understand Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ written in 1921, to provide a critique of legal violence, the kind of violence that the state wields through instating and maintaining the binding status that law exercises on its subjects.1 When Benjamin offers a critique, he is offering at least two different kinds of accounts: in the first instance, he is asking: How does legal violence become possible ? What is law such that it requires violence or, at least, a coercive effect in order to becoming binding on subjects? But also, what is violence such that it can assume this legal form? In asking the latter question , Benjamin opens up a second trajectory for his thought: Is there another form of violence that is noncoercive, indeed, a violence that can be invoked and waged against the coercive force of law? He goes further and asks: Is there a kind of violence that is not only waged against coercion, but is itself noncoercive and, in that sense if not some others, fundamentally nonviolent? He refers to such a noncoercive violence as ‘‘bloodless,’’ and this would seem to imply that it is not waged against human bodies and human lives. As we will see, it is not finally clear whether he can make good on this promise. If he could make good on it, he would espouse a violence that is destructive of coercion, shedding no blood in the process. This would constitute the paradoxical 2 01 J U D IT H B U T L E R possibility of a nonviolent violence, and in what follows I hope to consider that possibility in Benjamin’s essay. Benjamin’s essay is notoriously difficult. We are given many distinctions to handle, and it seems as if we handle them only for a few moments, then let them go. There are two sets of distinctions that one must work with if one is to try to understand what he is doing. The first is the distinction between law-instating (rechtsetzend) and law-preserving (rechtserhaltend) violence. Law-preserving violence is exercised by the courts and, indeed, by the police and represents repeated and institutionalized efforts to make sure law continues to be binding on the population it governs; it represents the daily ways in which law is made again and again to be binding on subjects. Law-instating violence is different. Law is posited as something that is done when a polity comes into being, and law is made, but it can also be a prerogative exercised by the military in innovating coercive actions to handle an unruly population. Interestingly, the military can be an example of law-instating and law-preserving power, depending upon context; we will return to this when we ask whether there is yet another violence, a third possibility for violence that exceeds and opposes both law-instating and law-preserving violence. If we focus, though, on lawinstating violence, Benjamin seems clear that the act of positing law, of making law, is the work of fate. The acts by which law is instituted are not themselves justified by another law or through recourse to a rational justification that precedes the codification of law, nor is law formed in some organic way, through the slow development of cultural mores and norms into positive law. On the contrary, the making of law creates the conditions for justificatory procedures and deliberations to take place. It does this, as it were, by fiat, and this is part of what is meant by the violence of this founding act. In effect, the violence of law-instating violence is summarized in the claim that ‘‘This will be law’’ or, more emphatically, ‘‘This is now the law.’’2 This...

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