DIVINE VIOLENCE

Walter Benjamin's essay ‘Critique of Violence’ is a foundational text for Giorgio Agamben's study of sovereign power because it lays bare the link between violence and law that is so important for Agamben's critical project. As Agamben observes, Benjamin understands this link as a dialectical oscillation between the violence that posits the law and the violence that preserves it. The aim of Benjamin's essay is to propose a third figure that would break the circularity of this dialectic. Agamben finds Benjamin's essay problematic, however, in that it leaves this figure largely undefined, suggesting even that it can't be recognised in the concrete case. Benjamin concentrates instead on the bearer of the link between violence and the law, bare life. All the more surprising, then, that Agamben's own work also largely leaves it unclear as to what form the divine violence that constitutes an alternative to the problems of modern sovereignty should take. What would be an example of an act of divine violence? How should one understand divine violence to break the circular dialectic between law-founding and law-preserving violence? And what remains of sovereignty and law after this break has been achieved? This essay seeks to address some of these questions through a comparative reading of the politico-poetic concept of divine violence in Agamben.

‘What is certain [about divine violence]’, Agamben writes in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, ‘is only that it neither posits or preserves law, but rather ‘de-poses’ (entsetzt) it.’ The break between law-positing and law-preserving violence that divine violence achieves creates a zone of indistinction between the two and introduces a politics liberated from the law.