TRANSLATION: NOTIZEN ZU EINER ARBEIT ÜBER DIE KATEGORIE DER GERECHTIGKEIT

Abstract

The Notes Towards a Work on the Category of Justice, here translated directly from the German “Notizen zu einer Arbeit über die Kategorie der Gerechtigkeit”, were in the possession of Gershom Scholem until his death in 1982, which is why they remained unknown until they came out with the publication of his diaries, essays and drafts in 1995. Yet in 1995, Rolf Tiedemman and Hermann Schweppenhäuser — editors of Walter Benjamin's Gesammelten Schriften [GS]—, and surprised by this new finding after having already completed the edition of the GS by the end of the 1980s, published it in the fourth volume of the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, a series of publications directed by Rolf Tiedermann, at the time when he was also director of the Adorno Archiv. In this occasion, it was followed by a commentary by Hermann Schweppenhäuser, entitled “Benjamin, on justice: a find in Scholem’s diaries” [Benjamin über Gerechtigkeit: Ein Fund in Gerschom Scholems Tagebüchern]. These Notes can be considered Benjamin’s first effort to develop a reflection on the category of justice, and their resonances are felt in what is considered one of the author’s most important essays in this regard, Zur Kritik der Gewalt, collaborating greatly to expand this discussion that is also undertaken there: if in the latter, Benjamin casts light on a mythical foundation of power that makes use of violence to guarantee its maintenance; in these Notes, he points to a substantial difference between two fundamental legal figures for bourgeois society: possession and property. In the text, Benjamin states that justice is also a good, but a good that cannot be possessed: justice, thought in this way, does not concern the regulation of the right of possession of a person (an owner/a landlord), but the right-of-good of the good itself.