Bosteels Critique of Originary Violence.pdf

Colloquy: text theory critique issue 16, 2008

3

MOSAIC-WINNIPEG-, 2007

Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani (eds.), Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, London: Bloomsbury Academic, (2015): 1-15.

This introduction sketches the history of the reception of Benjamin’s essay "Critique of Violence", focusing specifically of its presence in Agamben’s oeuvre, and provides then an overview of the contributions to the volume 'Toward the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben'.

Colloquy: text theory critique issue 16, 2008

Violence provides us with insight as to how we can interpret the relationship between law and violence through the ideas of positive and natural law. He also illustrates the dual function of violence: lawmaking and law preserving. Discipline and Punish, by Foucault, gives us a framework in which we can view violence in the modern form, through discipline. Using surveillance as the means of control, he shows us how discipline rose as a new form of domination, resulting from increased human knowledge about our body and soul. Lastly, Robert Cover"s Violence and the Word takes the common practice of judicial interpretation and shows us the inherent violence that is present in the everyday functioning of our judicial system.

Contexto Internacional, 2023

published his influential essay 'Critique of Violence'/'Zur Kritik der Gewalt' in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin's essay for contemporary critical theory. In this opening to the Forum, the guest editors Gabriela Azevedo and Ludmila Franca-Lipke introduce the Forum as a whole. Then in the following piece, James Martel argues that Benjamin helps us to better understand our current moment than almost any other thinker. Benjamin explains the nature of authoritarianism, the link between liberalism (and neoliberalism) and fascism and how such forces can be resisted. In his essay, Martel updates the concept of mythic violence to take into account the resilience of the liberal/fascist connection (even as it ap pears to be a node of struggle and mutual incompatibility). He shows that 'Critique of Violence' doesn't just diagnose our time but it also shows a way out of the abyss that we are in. Martel lists seven key points from Benjamin's essay and adds one other point from José Carlos Mariátegui to think concretely about how to apply their lessons from 100 years ago to our own time.

boundary 2, 2017

This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...