The Meanings of Violence

From Critical Theory to Biopolitics

Gavin Rae, Emma Ingala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351336512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of 'violence' itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 'Critique of Violence' essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology.

Part I

Political Myth and Social Transformation

1 Walter Benjamin and the General Strike

Non-Violence and the Archeon

James Martel

It is fairly often acknowledged that Walter Benjamin’s notion of the general strike is anarchist (as I will show, he says so himself), but it is not as often noted what exactly that entails; how, that is to say, the general strike is anarchist and how that anarchism allows human beings to engage in a practice of non-violence. In his ‘Critique of Violence,’ Benjamin famously contrasts the general strike to what he calls the ‘political strike.’¹ This distinction, originally made by Georges Sorel but taken up by Benjamin in this essay, offers that the political strike is merely a case of workers trying to beat the State at its own game, effectively blackmailing the State or corporate entity that the workers are contending with into making concessions. In this way, the workers are wrangling for a better deal, but are not in any way challenging capitalism as a system.

The general strike, on the other hand, is a radical rejection of capitalism in all of its forms. Benjamin writes of this that:

Whereas the first form of interruption of work [i.e. the political strike] is violent, since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions, the second [the general strike], as a pure means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the [S]tate… . For this reason, the first of these undertakings is lawmaking but the second anarchistic.²

In this chapter, I will try to explore what Benjamin means here by ‘anarchistic.’³ I will examine this concept by locating Benjamin’s discussion of the general strike, both in the context of the ‘Critique of Violence’ and also in his larger body of work. Benjamin does not mention anarchism all that often and sometimes when he does so he does not sound favorably disposed to it (including in the ‘Critique of Violence’ itself, wherein he speaks of a ‘childish anarchism’).⁴ Despite this textual ambivalence, I will be arguing that, particularly in terms of his discussion of the general strike itself, Benjamin offers not only an understanding of what anarchism entails, but also a mode of acting through that anarchism in a way that is both maximally destructive to capitalism as well as to the violence that capitalism and other archist forms always bring.

In doing so, I will be setting up a contrast between ‘anarchism’ and ‘archism,’ the latter referring to a notion of politics as a form of rule (coming from the Greek verb ‘arkein’ which means both to rule and to commence). Archism is not a word that Benjamin uses himself (although I will argue that it is more or less akin to his term ‘mythic violence’⁵ which he employs in the ‘Critique of Violence’), nor is it a term that one encounters with a lot of frequency more generally. I nonetheless maintain that it is important to give archism its own label because one of its key conceits is that it is just ‘how politics happens’; it is normativized and rendered almost invisible, which makes it appear as ubiquitous and inevitable. By giving it a name and contrasting it to anarchism, we can begin to see how archism is highly vulnerable to exposure, to putting a focus on what is usually background and invisible and which, by that stealth, continues to shape and dominate most of the world.

In order to think more about archism and how and why the general strike is a specific and highly subversive challenge to it, I will argue that archism is based on the ‘archeon’; that is, the place from which its exceptional position and power is generated (where its rule ‘commences from,’ to give attention to both of arkein’s meanings).

My argument will be that archism is highly adaptive and resilient, but it cannot live without the archeon—and this is precisely what the general strike threatens or eliminates. I will connect this discussion of the archeon to Benjamin’s understanding of the term ‘pure means’⁶ (which he refers to in the quote cited earlier) as well as to his notion of mythic violence. I will also mention a few areas both in and beyond the ‘Critique of Violence’ where Benjamin gives evidence of how archism and the archeon can be defeated (from the outset, I should reiterate that these are not Benjamin’s terms or concepts, but using those terms, I believe, helps to clarify what Benjamin is doing in the ‘Critique of Violence’).

Collectively, these engagements serve to reinforce the basic message of the general strike as a way of saying ‘no’ to capitalism and its myriad forms of violence. But this ‘no’ is not merely a refusal or a turning away. It is also a way of depriving capitalism of what it most needs: not just recognition (although it needs that, too) but also a sense of its own self-transcendence, of its conceit to have a position from which it can judge, know, and order the world. By taking away these two aspects, the general strike and related actions deprive archism—with capitalism as a kind of ultimate expression of this system—of its life blood and get at its deepest vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, this form of anarchism is not purely negative and destructive, for it also has a positive aspect which I will try to work out in more detail based on what are admittedly highly cryptic and precious few comments on Benjamin’s part. As I will try to show, the positive aspect of such anarchistic acts shows a way to be in the world that is based precisely on the absence of an archeon. Without that self-transcending site, all manner of life and politics becomes possible in ways that seem utterly inconceivable (indeed utopian) when considered from within the framework of myth and archism.

Perhaps most importantly, for Benjamin, the general strike is a critical vehicle for the possibility of human non-violence; although as I will show, this term is complicated and is not what the reader would think it means based on ordinary English usages of that term. In the ‘Critique of Violence,’ Benjamin asks whether—in a world marked by false authority, a killing State, police and military actions, and the like—non-violence is possible at all. His answer is a strong affirmative ‘without doubt.’⁷ I therefore want to look at how the possibility of the general strike and of anarchism more generally helps to make that answer possible.

The Archeon

To begin this inquiry, I would first like to turn (very briefly) to Jacques Derrida to think about a term he calls to our attention, the Greek word arkheion, which I, taking my lead from other scholars, have anglicized to archeon.⁸ Derrida’s discussion of this term takes place in the opening pages of his book Archive Fever. It might seem strange that ‘archive’ and ‘archism’ have the same derivation but Derrida explains why this is the case, writing:

The meaning of ‘archive,’ its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their house, in that place which is their house (private house, family house, or employee’s house), that official documents are filed. The archons … do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archive.⁹

Here we see that the ‘arkheion’ (or archeon) is above all a ‘place.’¹⁰ The archive is both a repository of law and authority and also, quite literally, a source for those things. Here we can see how the two meanings of the Greek verb ‘arkein’ can merge because the rule of archism commences here in this house and this place. This is furthermore, as Derrida goes on to write, a place of ‘hermeneutic right and competence,’¹¹ the site and origin of interpretative power itself, that is to say, of judgment.

In this way, the archeon is something unique: it is a place or vantage point that is beyond reproach, a source which—exactly because of its physical location, its presence in the city, and its recognition by the public—cannot itself have a further source (at least not a further human source). It is the origin of law, of rule, of authority, and of power. For this reason, Derrida acknowledges that the archive is not an innocent space. The archeon is what gives archist entities—the State, the law, and so on—the ‘right’ to pronounce judgment. It is a perch which is exempt, as it were, from its own judgment (it cannot be judge to itself, lest there be a reductio ad absurdum). The very idea of being a commencement and a rule at the same time means that the law, the authority, has to start from somewhere and this somewhere is the basis for everything that follows.

As I will argue, however, the archeon does not literally have to be a particular building or site, but it has to have a spatiality, a sense of existing in time and space in order to be able to pronounce judgment on the community it rules over, even as it itself is exempt from the ordering of that very same time and space which it controls; this condition, I would argue, is the very heart of archism.

Accordingly, the archeon must have a kind of ghostly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Meanings of Violence
• Part I Political Myth and Social Transformation
• Part II Sociality and Meaning
• Part III From Subjectivity to Biopolitics
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index