Spectres of anarchy: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three

 Irving Wohlfarth

There is an excellent passage in Nadja on the 'enchanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzetti' and Breton adds the assurance that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle [Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfilled the strategic promise of revolt that its name had always held.1

'The Right to the Use of Force'

Benjamin's critique of violence cannot be separated from its religious inspiration. Not merely does it open up a space of thinking unavailable to the profane discourse of his time; it also enables him to conceive of a 'radical politics that is “just” and, precisely for this reason, wants to be nothing but politics'.2 Conversely, and by the same token, this points to a notion of justice modelled on the Jewish God. Radical profanity in the spirit of theology: this seeming paradox is, we saw, the crux of the 'Theologico-Political Fragment'. In acknowledging the autonomy of the profane order – and thus presumably the 'legitimacy of modernity' (Blumenberg) – it rejects any form of political theocracy3 and obviates any attempt to (re)theologize the profane. Aside from the Protestant ethic analysed by Weber, there is perhaps no greater immunity to false idols, including those of the capitalist market, than the one afforded by an old religion. All the more so if, as here, it propels a radically 'profane order of the profane' on its way.

Seen in this light, the modern state would be the 'new idol'4 that Zarathustra calls it – a hybrid between myth and demythologization. A rough draft for a review article from the same period, 'The Right to the Use of Force' (Das Recht zur Gewaltanwendung), suggests as much.5 It is irrelevant, Benjamin there writes, 'whether the state imposes itself [sich einsetzt] as the supreme legal institution [Rechtsinstitut] by its own authority [Machtvollkommenheit] or by an alien one'6 – that is, as a secular or a religious theocracy. In either case, it needs to be dissolved into a politics that is 'nothing but politics'.

Benjamin's draft enumerates four critical options: (A) to deny both the state and the individual the right to use force; (B) to recognize unconditionally the right of both to do so; (C) to grant it to the state alone; (D) to grant it only to the individual. To sum up an already summary argument: Benjamin maintains that (A) – termed 'ethical anarchism' by the author under review – is valid for morality (though not for the reasons usually given), but not for politics; that (B) is intrinsically contradictory and effectively leads to (C), which would be defensible only if the state and its laws coincided with the ethical order; and that, since there is (contrary to C) a contradiction in principle between the state and ethical life and (contrary to A) none in principle between force and the ethical order, (D) remains the only logical possibility. It is its apparent material impossibility that prompts the author under review to reject it out of hand.7 But a 'word against the law', the 'Critique of Violence' claims, is not necessarily spoken into the wind.

~ Source: Radical Philosophy ~