Law, justice and violence in the early work of Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between law, justice and violence in the early work of Walter Benjamin. To achieve this goal we will focus our reflection on the essay Benjamin Towards Critique of Violence (1921). The work discussed in the first instance the relationship between violence and conservative founder violence presented by Benjamin in his essay on violence. Once this is done, we will discuss the reading Jacques Derrida makes of Benjamin's essay in its work Force of law. The mystical foundation of authority (1994). Through critical reading Derrida gives us we are going to present the concepts of mythical violence and divine violence. And a possible critical reading about the way Benjamin articulates the relationship between these concepts. Then, we will refer to Benjamin's essay On Language as such and on the Language of Man (1916) in order to analyze how the text on violence is influenced by Benjamin's theory of language. From which we will try to find an alternative to Derrida's reading of Benjamin's divine violence. To accomplish this we will use the reading that makes Werner Hamacher of Benjamin's essay on his work, Afformative, strike (1994)