벤야민의 「폭력비판」에 대하여

Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Its Criticism

This paper explores Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and a few critical writings on it by Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek. Benjamin's essay on violence has been a seminal work influential to many scholars and all the more important to critics of postmodern society where state power and capitalism together contain people's potential to act. We can draw the answer to how to act from Benjamin's writing and various criticism on it. Benjamin distinguishes between mythic violence as the founding violence and divine violence as the annihilating violence of destructive law. Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake and divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. Žižek says the Benjaminian "divine violence" should be conceived as divine not in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision with no cover in the big Other. Butler argues that Divine violence is unleashed against the coercive force of the legal framework, against the accountability that binds a subject to a specific legal system and stops that very subject from developing a critical point of view on that legal system. Agamben says that what we can do is to have the door of law closed, like a countryman in Kafka's "Before the Law," and bring a real state of exception as opposed to the state of exception in which we live. In brief, we can know how to act only when divine violence annihilates mythic violence imprinted on our body and mind.