Territorial Masquerades

Scattered notes and commentary on

politics and geography.

Arendt, Foucault, Benjamin: On Violence, State, Law

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Teo Ballv

This post discusses some scattered points raised about violence

by Hannah Arendts On Violence, Walter Benjamins Critique of
Violence, and Michel Foucaults Society Must be
Defended. Arendt makes a worthwhile distinction between power
and violence, while recognizing that the two rarely operate in
isolation of each other (50, 52). Nothing, as we shall see, is
more common than the combination of violence and power,
nothing less frequent than to find them in their pure and
therefore extreme form (46-47). Taking her definitions of power
and violence into account, we can conclude that violence, for Arendt, is almost always something
wielded in concertthat is, collectively.

Without directly coming to terms with it, the collectivity being hailed by Arendt in her discussions
on how power and violence intersect is the state. She argues that unchecked violence cannibalizes
power, meaning that violences fuel is the withering away of state power. This contention comes
through strongest in her definition of terror, which she describes as rule by absolute (i.e.
powerless) violence and its inherent social atomization (everyones a potential snitch/informant).
Weak statesor weakly supported statesare violent states. This framework rings somewhat
hollow through the lens of fascist Italy that Antonio Gramsci sought to come to terms with; its also
at a loss for addressing Pierre Bourdieus symbolic violence in which power is practically a
precondition.

Arendts attempt to parse violence and power is an important

one, but her view becomes rather clunky when considering the
differential violent treatment of populations internal to the body
politic. Foucaults analysis of war and race war in the
emergence of biopolitics seems a much more adequate way of
tracing the relationship between violence and powerboth on an
individual and collective levelwhether its through making live
and letting die (biopower) or taking life and letting live
(sovereignty). Benjamins Critique of Violence takes on the
state in a much more direct way than Arendt does, though less
so than Foucault. Foucault, who earlier in the book acknowledges
the blood dried on the codes, would have approved of Benjamins point that it may be readily
supposed that where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the
origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence (242). Benjamin is not only pointing
out the constitutive and ongoing splatter of blood on the codesi.e. lawmaking and law-preserving
violencebut also the way in which the law itself is upheld through a distinction between
sanctioned and unsanctioned violence; even though he argues that all violence is ultimately
lawmaking.

The state is in a fundamentally fragile and unstable position in Benjamins critique: Legally
constituted and preserved by violence, while desperately trying to bracket individual violence that
poses an existential threat to the legal order (i.e. the state) itself. The bracketing of non-
sanctioned violence, Benajamin notes, does not stem so much from the nefarious ends that this
kind of violence might pursue, but rather from the threat it poses to the law itself by virtue of
flaunting the law and, thereby, the state (a similar point is also made by Carl Schmitt). The Great
Criminal (the outlaw as folk hero), interestingly, appears in both Benjamin and Foucault
somewhat in Arendt, tooprobably because of how much such figures can tell us about the fragile
ties between law, power, and violence in relation to social justice, all central themes to these texts.
Finally, using Sorels distinction between the political strike and the proletarian general strike,
Benjamin calls the latter pure means and non-violent, precisely because of its waging of no
demands, meaning it skirts a means-end calculus and is beyond the purview of the law and its
violent entrapments.

This entry was posted in Carl Schmitt, Critique, Illegality, Law, Michel Foucault, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Sovereignty, The State, Violence. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Arendt, Foucault, Benjamin: On Violence, State, Law

16 Lakewood Dr, Vancouver, BC says:

March 29, 2012 at 2:43 am

Agamben seems to side with Arendt and Benjamin over Foucault. But Agamben also appears not to have read Foucaults last few seminars, at
least when he was writing Homo Sacer.

16 Lakewood Dr, Vancouver, BC

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