POWER AS VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AS POWER

sovereignty, state of exception and coloniality

Abstract

A little over a hundred years after its original publication, Benjamin's essay “For the Critique of Violence” has been read and reread with renewed interest by the academy. Appointed as one of the most complex and unavoidable texts for the discussion of the links and refractions between power and violence in advanced capitalist societies, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler deserved thought-provoking reflections updated by contemporary dilemmas. Inflamed by the recent rise of proto-fascist trends around the world, such studies lead us to repose the question some of the concerns that motivated his writing in the context of the then incipient Weimar Republic: what is violence? Is it possible to exercise established and maintained power without recuring to violence? From an ethical and political point of view, is violence inevitable or acceptable? How to combat state or systemic violence without perpetuating it? Can non-violence be effective as a political power? This article aims to indicate some developments of the major issues addressed by Walter Benjamin in three main moments of his work: Origin of German Baroque Drama (1916-1925), “Towards the Critique of Violence” (1921) and the theses “On the Concept of history” (1940). In the light of a global and decolonial reading of the imbrication pointed out by Benjamin between culture and barbarism at the very heart of the victors’ triumphal march, the notion of a true State of exception will be used to delimit something like a “revolutionary violence” in charge of dynamiting the continuum of the progress in the name of the emergence of a new historical era.