Justice and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Time of Anticipation

Abstract: In his “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin seeks to rethink justice as the interruption of the juridical temporality, which is characterized by the relationship between means and ends. Benjamin imagines a form of violence that finds in itself its own criterion of rightness: divine violence emerges as a third kind of violence beyond both the state’s monopoly of violence and the binary opposition between violence and non-violence. I will read Benjamin in the historical-political context of the crisis of the state, democracy and paliamentarism in order to develop the idea of divine violence as a practice that interrupts the means-end relation and defends new forms of togetherness that are anticipated in the moment of a struggle.