Critique of Violence

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'.

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...

New Centennial Review, 2014

Foucault Studies, 2018

Violence is an often used but much less theoretically discussed word, even among Foucauldian scholars, with Johanna Oksala being a notable exception. However, she limits her definition of violence to physical forms. In this article, I seek to overcome the quandaries she poses for wide-ranging definitions of violence by incorporating Arendt's critique of violence into a Foucauldian paradigm. While some work, though not a great deal, has been done on comparing Arendt and Foucault, I highlight some points of commonality that makes Arendtian violence accessible to Foucauldian scholars that mostly rest on the concept of freedom. If power is productive to the extent that it provides the potential to act otherwise, Arendt, in many ways, situates violence as the prevention of this, similar to Foucault's account of domination. Violence and power are therefore cast in a symbiotic relationship, not limited to physicality, whereby power produces meaning as well as the ability to act and violence is projected as preventive; in such a scenario, the push for freedom can be positioned as a second-order normative claim.

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture

Violence works at the same time as what we find in the world according to our best description of reality, and as what we fight and reject, hoping for a more peaceful world. It may also be what we recommend, as the only way to change things, or even what we celebrate, as the key resource of true art. Sometimes we even think that adequate theory arises from violence against given paradigms. How can it be so? Do we really understand what we refer to when we speak about violence?

Kaygı Uludağ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Felsefe Dergisi, 2016

In this paper, the relation of law and violence is being addressed within the frame of the thoughts of Foucault. Thus, first it was examined what law and violence means, and then it was tried to reveal how Foucault approaches the subject. Foucault deals with the problem of law in the context of power relations. At this point, it is being observed that there is a connection among state, law and violence. In addition, it is also being observed that body is the object of violence and law functions as an interference to the living space of the individual. In this study, all these problems will be tried to be discussed.