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48 chaptEr 2 conceptual network of revolutionary ideological violence, which falls under the critic both of the uncertainty of consequences of violence in the long run and of the mythical face of ideology that is like the uncritical egocentric structure of the wishful thinking. Between these two poles, there seems to be a rift: politics is as much a critical opening in contrast to the violence of the constituted domination and the one of the constituent revolutionary sovereignty . This perspective is reinforced by Arendt by experiences of modern totalitarianism where the ideology used to justify violence becomes at the same time a type of mythical representation of a world that strays from reality, in hiding the abyss between these claimed ends and actual outcomes. conclusion Upon first consideration, we have identified a rift between Arendt’s and Benjamin ’s conceptions: Arendt, as we have just noted, grasps a true antinomy between politics and violence, while remitting violence to the camp of domination , and sovereignty and power as human capacities for common action, to the political domain; from this perspective, Arendt represents violence in the order of an instrument, and thus, as an inverse indicator of political power; on its own, violence neither appears nor fortifies itself unless power is reduced, and inversely, authentic power is only fortified when it is uninvolved with violence; hereby, political power has nothing to do with the order of teleological instrumentality, but is rather a form of human existence as much as it is expression of an action, and not merely the fabrication (a like consideration opposing political power and violence was already central to Spinoza’s reflections in his theological and political treatise on the subject of democracy).35 Benjamin perceived that next to both the violence that sought to maintain the law and the violence that was founder of law, there was a violence that was disruptive of the law, which displayed itself beyond instrumentality so as to meet an end, and which is considered as “pure means” and, from this perspective, as “immediate” or “divine.” This disruptive violence is none other than an excess of justice; and in contrast to the law, this violence is divine only by the miracle it brings into the world, brought in by its power or ability to breach the bonds of a temporality so bewitched by sovereignty and by mechanical domination, to the advantage of the human temporality of the action and of its meaning. Benjamin thus allows this articulation of violence and of politics, while Arendt elaborates in antithetical terms. After closer analysis, however, we can imagine Benjamin’s “divine” violence as the analog of Arendt’s idea of political power: it requires a similar favoring of the interruption that gives place to the opening of meaning and Global JusticE and politics 49 action; after all, did Arendt not herself affirm that human action, as our capacity to give a beginning to a course of things in the world, is a miracle?36 With Judith Butler37 and Françoise Proust,38 we can think of Benjamin’s concept of disruptive violence as a kind of nonviolent violence—an oxymoron that simultaneously allows for a violent rupture in the mechanical time of sovereign domination by the fact of human action, while also providing for a total lack of focus for violence of domination in the structure of sovereignty . indeed, in the writings of Arendt and Benjamin, it is possible to perceive the elements of a reflection on a form of justice—on a disruptive violence, that, as it is essentially linked to common human action beyond the mechanics of the violence that dominates sovereignty, could permit us the opportunity to provide a conceptual framework for a politic of global justice that could withstand collapse in a philosophy of law, which is often an issue in debates that occur within the framework of the Rawls categories of the Theory of Justice, that are certainly enlightening and indispensable for all that is in the order of distributive justice, but that are insufficient in all counts in the context of politics on a global and cosmopolitan scale, as given by the conditions of globalization. it is in effect the opening up of the common on the cosmopolitical scale, which is here the only guarantor for a political claim regarding the destiny of our life on Earth, and in this sense, all matter of distributive justice is fundamentally indebted to the political overture. notEs 1. Étienne Tassin, Le trésor...

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