Critique of biopolitical violence

ABSTRACT

Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set political-legal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore force against anything threatening, and, the violence said to optimise life that eliminates anything debilitating. Second, critique moves beyond such justifications. It does so in reference to Benjamin’s concept of the divine that appreciates violence through criteria irreducible to official foundations. An understanding of violence is not mediated by government, but continually extended in how individuals live such violence in novel ways. A critique of biopolitical violence accordingly moves from a deadly productivity coincident with political-legal authority (the violence of bio-power), to how such violence generates new ways of thinking and acting (a bio-politics of violence).

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• Walter Benjamin
• violence
• necropolitics
• Michel Foucault

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Pasquale (1993, 86), who worked with Foucault during the lectures, claims that Foucault would not have wished them to be published, as he regarded his courses as working hypotheses. For more, also see Oksala (2012, 38).

2. For more on Benjamin’s (1998, 37) own genealogy of representation in the human realm, see the Origin of German Tragic Drama.

3. Benjamin’s ‘Critique’ breaks with this vicious circle of violence by radically rethinking a philosophical-political tradition that reduces natural violence to political ends. For Hanssen (2000, 18–9), such a tradition runs from Aristotle’s syllogistic definition of the means-ends relation to Kant’s qualification of Gewalt (power/violence) as a disposition over external objects or means. Understood more practically, so too is it a logic repeated in the instrumentality of Carl von Clausewitz (2007, 28) in On War – ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’ – in Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Duhring (1987, 154) – the ‘triumph of force depends upon the production of armaments’ – and, also in Hannah Arendt’s (1970, 64) On Violence – violence as the ‘only way to set the scales of justice right again’.

4. This distinction allows Foucault to forward a ‘historico-political discourse’ based on conflict, in contrast to a ‘juridico-political theory of sovereignty’ as exemplified by Thomas Hobbes. For more, see Foucault (2003, 166–70).

5. As Esposito (2012, 56) makes clear, there is an implicit bio-necropolitical assumption at work here: ‘if the natural purity of the race has been corrupted through blood, it can only be restored through the shedding of blood’.

6. Further lines of research inspired by Benjamin might engage this temporal component of direct violence. Benjamin’s notion of jetztzeit (now-time) is useful in breaking with any false continuum of present violence resulting in later security. Instead, time has a revolutionary force, not only in its disruptive sense (cf. Hanssen 2000, 18), but also in a constitutive sense (cf. the concept of kairòs in Negri 2003, 147–169).

7. Waltende is infamous in English-speaking circles. In the last line of the English translation of Benjamin’s ‘Critique’ waltende is written as sovereign government. However, as argued by James Martel (2012, 61), waltende does not exactly mean ‘sovereign’. If Benjamin meant to say sovereign he most likely would have used the Latinate cognate souveranität. Although waltende has connotations of rule and order, it also suggests a form of rule that is not identical to institutional conceptions of politics.

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Notes on contributors

R. Guy Emerson

R. Guy Emerson is a Professor at the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Universidad de las Americas Puebla. His research focuses on themes of violence and the politics of life and death. He is author of Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico, (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), and has recently published in Theory & Event, Latin American Research Review, International Political Sociology, Journal of International Relations and Development, New Political Economy, Contemporary Politics, and International Studies Perspectives.