Monash University
Browse
abbott.pdf (363.83 kB)

The Creature Before the Law: Notes on Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence

Download (363.83 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-22, 03:05 authored by Mathew Abbott
Transforming as it does from an exemplar of meticulous philosophical analysis into an allusive political/messianic tract, Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" is representative of all that is most difficult about his work. Against those critics who find the eschatological dimensions of Benjamin's texts unpalatable and/or philosophically bankrupt, however, the wager of this paper is that it is possible to extract a philosophically sophisticated and politically interesting concept of the messianic from Benjamin. For it remains the case that the mortification of law carried out in "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" does not simply boil down to a naive antinomianism; that Benjamin's argument is far more subtle than any simple call for "a radical destruction of the legal order." Indeed, if we read the text in conjunction with certain others in the Benjaminian oeuvre it becomes clear that it engages lucidly with a set of crucial, difficult questions about the status of law in modernity.

History

Publication date

2008

Issue

16

Pages

80-96

Document type

Article

Usage metrics

    Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC