Violence and instrumentalism. On the margins of Tyson Lewis’s Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education

ABSTRACT

My response to Tyson Lewis’s book concentrates on two themes, seemingly peripheral to the book’s explicit content: the pertinent question of (educational) violence and the related problem of instrumentalism. I try to tackle both of them by outlining the dispute between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The choice of Schmitt as the background for these peripheral commentaries is not accidental. The premise of Lewis’s book is that there is a link between fascism and 21st century populism and authoritarianism (in the US, France, and Germany, but – as I would argue – much more prevalent in Hungary and Poland). The European version is, if not intellectually connected, then at least somehow coincident with the renaissance of the thought of the German jurist of the Weimar and Nazi era. Benjamin’s antifascist potential depends also on his power of de-potentializing Schmitt’s political theology, concepts of sovereignty and state of exception.

KEYWORDS:

• Tyson Lewis
• Walter Benjamin
• Carl Schmitt
• violence
• instrumentalism
• sovereignty
• state of exception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For example, the Polish right-wing government refers openly to the Schmittian understanding of sovereignty.

2. That is, the ruler. The paradigmatic description of the status and the role of early modern princehood we find in Nicollò Machiavelli’s classical work The Prince (Machiavelli 2008). Another figure corresponding to Benjamin’s description is Hamlet, due to his indecisiveness.