POWER AND VIOLENCE IN THE THOUGHTS OF HANNAH ARENDT AND WALTER BENJAMIN

Abstract

In this article we seek to elaborate an improbable dialogue between the arendtian conception and benjaminian conception of violence, looking first to understand the conceptual separation between Violence and Power and the assumptions that are placed in this approach founded in the essay On Violence and some other texts from Hannah Arendt. The author understands that every violence is instrumental, while power does not manifest itself in the same way. Arendt seeks to draw a critic of the misunderstanding that in order to be power there must be violence. To substantiate that conceptual position, Arendt visits the Greco-Roman conceptions of civitas and isonomy and conclude that the revolutionaries ones of the XVIII century went wrong about the notion of obedience. Then, seeking to understand the benjaminian´s notion of Gewalt, synonymous with both violence and power, we observe the example and the distinction between two types of strike that adopt different strategies in the face of the coercive power of the state, thus two different Praxis: one it is called political general strike, whose action is understood as means to an end of Right, and that, therefore, in the benjaminian conception, is violent; and other one whose ends are not of Right and that, therefore, is not violent. Benjamin, besides not distinguishing violence and power, conceives the state legal form as a violent form and demand to monopolize other uses of violence disallowing any others forms of its manifestation. The benjaminian arguments heads to a mythical conception of the manifestation of violence. Connected to this we found some of his own conceptions of his works of the 1920´s decade, in which the most general formula we find in the opposition between Myth and History. By way of conclusion, we took some risk by considering some approaches between Arendt and Benjamin.