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Nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that of necessity and without exception, everything-language and fact-falls for him within the sphere of justice . . . For him, too, justice and language remain founded in each other.
-Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus"
Prolegomena
Before beginning, a few prefatory remarks appear necessary to maintain at least the hope for that which Benjamin would have condemned: communication. Call it an act of violence, an act of communicative violence, if you will. But is not all language, that is, "impure" language, all language after the Fall, as Benjamin would say, violent? And does he himself not battle and ultimately fail in the face of language: fail either by instrumentalizing it as a tool for communication, or fail in failing to communicate, fail as a communicator, so to speak?
Given this aporetic situation that guarantees failure no matter what, we shall-violently-assure ourselves of some fundamental assumptions recurring in what is to come. In his 1921 essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" Benjamin is concerned with law, law's denial of its inherent violence (Gewalt ). He is concerned, more concretely, with the nature of juridical force (Gewalt ) and what he calls its law-positing and preserving character. All law is characteristic in that it violently establishes boundaries, divides, discriminates between 'legal' and 'illegal' so as to then coercively-if not violently-maintain these divisive moments of lawmaking. That is to say, law assumes its authority very much as a result of an ever-present latent threat, the threat of physical violence, directed against the people, the citizens. Why is this so remarkable? Because law is supposed to attain justice. Yet given law's violent nature, justice and law appear to be irreconcilable-exactly contrary to the way in which democracy, democratic jurisprudence, usually understands itself.
At first it seems as if there will probably never be an alternative to the particular nature of legal violence. But then, in the last third of his essay, Benjamin actually offers an alternative, an-other, form of violence: divine violence. While he links positive law with mythic violence, which posits and preserves itself, posits and insists on this initial moment of instituting, institutionalization, divine violence is different in that it also...