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Becoming Un-fated: The suspension of myth and the possibility of justice in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Stewart Brown

Dissertation Submitted for the degree of M.Litt. in Continental Philosophy

In Loving Memory of Sandy Thain (1922-2011) whose life, following 1945 is testament to our power, 'upon which the past has a claim'

Contents

Introduction......1 Chapter 1- Mythic Violence and the role of Fate in the Critique of Violence......3 Chapter 2 Myth and Pre-History: Guilt, Fate, and the significance of Tragedy........14 Chapter 3 Happiness, Historical Time, and a Hunchbacked Justice.........28

Introduction

'Mistakenly, through confusing itself with the realm of justice, the order of law, which is only a residue of the demonic stage of human existence when legal statutes determined not only men's relationships but also their relation to the gods, has preserved itself long past the time of the victory over the demons' Walter Benjamin, Fate and Character

Walter Benjamin's philosophical thinking of both history and politics as it developed in the early 1920's can be read primarily as an engagement with the domain of myth and an attempt to enact a philosophical account of its overcoming. The mythic or pagan world is defined by the dominance of a fated, inevitable link holding between the guilt of law and a violent retribution that strikes at the mere life, or biological existence within human being. At the heart of the functioning of a mythic apparatus is the guarantee of power and the effacement of the possibility of contesting what is produced as inevitable. Through passive insertion into myth, human being becomes implicated in a condition of existence where violence that serves to establish or protect a given mythic order presents itself as a natural or fated consequence of guilt. For in myth, what occurs is the continuity of the same; the perpetual reiteration of that which is given as fate, where fate names a temporal operation that works to exclude the possibility of internal transformation. Within this set-up, of mythic law and its violent, ideological apparatus, an immediate or incontestable link is established between 'bloody' retributive violence and 'justice'. Retributive forms of punishment, through appearing as the fated, inevitable, outcome of guilt, is the condition for producing a limited 'justice'. Out of this production, myth reinforces itself; not only is a given state of affairs fated or natural, but it is also justified. For Benjamin, myth persists into the present on the basis of the continued existence of forms of law, that exist in their own interest, and yet appear in the light of 'justice', that is most often manifested as retributive, fated violence. This dissertation will argue that what is occasioned by what Benjamin will call the 'suspension' of mythic forms of law, fate, and guilt is the possibility of a justice, understood not as an event that is completed in the atonement of punishment or retribution, but rather as part of a state of the world that can only be perpetuated, and never completed. But what would it mean to suspend the apparatus of myth? It would mean to introduce contestation or mediacy into that which is given as incontestable or immediate; to suspend the fated link between events and their consequences, through making them subject to a context of human being or activity which is not merely a reiteration already given myth.

5 The site of this struggle is temporal; what is at stake is endings and beginnings, in a present that is traversed by a radical dissymmetry of power. For myth occurs and is lived out within an already given and determinate structure that is imposed upon human being, and from within which events appear as no more than particular instances of fate and guilt. Benjamin will come to designate this temporality as 'inauthentic', and contrast it with what is implicitly an authentic conception of historical time, as a time that is produced by human being, the possibility of which is not always already formed in advance. It is only with the activation of authentic historical time, that ethical activity not implicated within the incontestable obligations of guilt and fated consequences, becomes possible. The two conceptions of historical time the inauthentic guilt context of fate, and the authentic time of possibility are irreconcilable. It is only through the suspension of the mythic order of incontestable law, with the guilt and fate that defines its power, that authentic historical time of ethics and possibility can be active. And it is only on condition of this activation, one which necessitates what will be described as forms of generative interruption, inclusive of modalities of destruction and inauguration, that justice can exceed a limited identification with retribution. The argument will proceed in four stages. It will begin by exploring mythic forms of law, and the 'fate' (schicksal) which ties law to a 'mythic violence' whose symbol is mere life. It will be shown through looking at Benjamin's 1921 essay on theCritique of Violence, that what occurs in fate is the effacement of the presence of power (macht) at the heart of the order of law, an effacement that allows for a limited retributive justice to be imposed and naturalised. Chapter Two will begin by looking in more depth at the ideological function of myth before turning to an exploration of the centrality of guilt (schuld) as it emerges in the earlier essay Fate and Character, and the fated link it produces between law and the limited justice of retribution. This will lead onto an examination of Benjamin's theory of tragedy as a central instance of the suspension of the 'demonic fate' that immediately links the law of the gods to the life of human being. Extrapolating from Benjamin's writings, in tragedy what occurs is the opening of a position within human affairs from which 'wisdom', as that which occurs once the law is no longer understood as inevitably just, can open up a thinking of justice. This will be argued through a reading of the ending of Sophocles' Antigone. At this point three figures of generative interruption and their relationships will have been posited; 'divine violence', 'genius', and 'wisdom'. The final chapter, in which, Benjamin's critique of the time of fate will be aligned with the critique of progressivist and positivist historicism as it is developed in one of Benjamin's final texts, 1940's On the Concept of History. At the heart of Benjamin's rejection of historicism as a similarly naturalised, 'inauthentic' continuity, emerges the figure of happiness (gluck), that persists throughout Benjamin's life. The centrality of the concept of happiness will reveal an ethical core at the heart of Benjamin's philosophy of history, and through its staging of structurally analogous concerns to previous figures of generative interruption, happiness will allow the ethical question of justice that exceeds retribution to be posed. 1
1

The impetus for this project was born out of discussions within and after Andrew Benjamin's seminar on the early theological writings of Hegel in Dundee in early 2011. My understanding of Walter Benjamin's thought is

Chapter 1- Mythic Violence and the role of Fate in the Critique of Violence

At the outset of The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte Marx observes that; Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.2 What is notable here is the conditions of what Marx calls 'the living'. The living are not presented as instances of the autonomous, self-legislating subject of modernity. Rather they are thrown into the midst of a history that is always-already underway, subjected to 'circumstances existing already', which demand response be it subservience or rebellion and make claims upon the possible scope of the activity through which they 'make their own history'. The 'circumstances existing already' constitute a context of activity, that makes claims upon the living, which awaits their entrance onto what, depending on the idiosyncrasies of a life, may-be - or may-become - a stage, a battleground, a depression, or a ruin. The claims made by the always-already precedent context of activity, concern what is and what is not, what could be and what could never be, what is right and what is wrong. And, as Benjamin will show, the sphere in which these claims reveal their crucial dimension, where transgression of these claims can have violent consequences is that of Law. In the Critique of Violence Benjamin can be understood as providing, through a philosophicohistorical perspective upon law, a representation of political history as one of the rising and falling of law, which, by virtue of the power-making purpose it serves, can have no connection to justice. From this perspective, a given age can be delineated through the laws which define it: The law of the fathers, of the land, of its manners, or its texts: Law functions as a superstructural apparatus which defines the given ontology of an age. It defines inclusion and exclusion, and stakes a claim about right and wrong. As such, law constitutes an already given structure that is transmitted upon the 'brains of the living', without their choosing. The activity by which 'men make their own history' is always a response to already existent laws, whose just-ness is never guaranteed. As Marx' formulation implied,
inseparable from these foundations, and for the many suggestions, clarifications, and sources, that Andrew provided in months following. I am also indebted to the time and support Iain Campbell and Ross Mcallister over the last few months. And finally, to my family, for putting up with me. 2 Marx, Karl. (1995) The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Available Online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire, p. 1

7 'circumstances existing already', transmitted from the past, are never neutral but are a burden that weighs 'like a nightmare'.

1.1 The Cycle of Mythic Violence

Benjamin's concept of Law can be staged in contradistinction to its Kantian counterpart. Whereas within the Kantian tradition law originates in a subject peacefully legislating for itself through selfattribution of laws through which to govern experience, for Benjamin, Law originates or persists within a state of struggle.3 Law is what emerges out of the submission of one force to another, and is preserved and established with violence. The word Benjamin uses for violence is g ewalt, a word for which english has no proper analog. It is commonly translated as 'violence', but can equally mean force, coercion, or authority.4 A cause is violent, in the strict sense that Benjamin is using it, by virtue of its relation to law and justice (a hurricane or volcano cannot be violent), and its critique the explicit aim of the text consists in the examination and evaluation of this relation. 5 It is through this critique of violence, through revealing the inseparability of law, violence and power, that Benjamin will come to evoke fate as that which produces an inevitable, naturalised link between law and 'justice'. Benjamin's central concern with violence is its usage as an instrumental means, evaluating its function along with the justness of its application, for he holds that 'every conceivable solution to human problems...remains impossible if violence is totally excluded in principle'. 6 If it is only through gewalt understood as traversing both barbaric violence and an operative power that certain intolerable states of affairs can be brought to the end (to be replaced, it is hoped, by the presence of justice), then it becomes pressing to determine the nature of a violent means that is just. It is in exploring this question with regard to 'legal violence' that Benjamin will evoke fate. What Benjamin will develop philosophically is an observation that history throws up; laws enactment, the violence it sanctions, more often than not have a dubious authority whose origin may not exceed the occupiers of the seat of power.
3

For Benjamin's relation to Kantian Law, see Caygill, Howard. (1998) The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge p.

26
4

Translators retain 'violence' so as not to risk euphemising the issues in question, and the dangerous proximity between revolution and terror. 5 As Balibar notes the term Gewalt thus contains an intrinsic ambiguity: it refers, at the same time, to the negation of law or justice and to their realization or the assumption of responsibility for them by an institution (generally the state). (Balibar, 2009, 101) 6 Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Critique of Violence' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 247 (Hereafter CV)

The most common criteria of evaluating justness is through accounting for violence in terms of an instrumental relation between means and ends. This approach is common to the two main strands of legal theory which Benjamin begins by considering, 'natural law', and 'positive law'. Violence as a means is just, so a certain tradition of natural law has it, if the ends the violence is an instrument of are themselves just. These just ends, in positive law, themselves can only be achieved by justified means. Benjamin rejects the possibility of a critique of violence based on a theory of just ends or just means as they both reveal themselves caught within a 'circle of dogmatic presuppositions', visible when just ends and justified means come into contradiction with each other. Out of this Benjamin observes that it is only with mutually independent criteria for the evaluation of means and ends that this circularity can be broken. The implications of this are that every deed a killing, for example has to be examined without reference to the justness of its ends. This is also to say, 'no judgement of the deed can be derived from the commandment' (in this case 'thou shalt not kill'). 7 Rather than deriving from a universal, time-less standpoint (Kant's categorical imperative, for example), Benjamin's critique of violent means through establishing their relation to justice will emerge from the already noted, 'philosophico-historical view of law'. 8

Within Benjamins' critique there emerge two 'valid' functions for violence as a means, in the sense that they involve a relation to law and justice. These are the 'law-making' violence, used for natural ends, and 'law-preserving' violence which is a means to a legal ends. The distinction between legal and natural ends is unrelated to natural law's just or unjust ends but rather one between violence that serves ends that have in general between historically acknowledged (legal) and ends that lack such acknowledgement (natural). The latter of these is exemplified by military law, in which violence is used for natural ends (often predatory ends) but reveals itself to be law-making in character. This is visible in the modern age, in the state of 'peace' that inevitably follows 'war': 'the adversary is not simply annihilated; indeed, he is accorded rights even when the victor's superiority in power is complete. And these are, in a demonically ambiguous way, 'equal' rights'. 9 'Peace' here denotes the apriori legality of every victory. This is to say, violence as a means to natural ends gains its legitimacy through the future anterior; the violence that founds law will have been morally just once the law that it founds is in place. The 'natural ends' of law-making violence will retroactively become 'legal ends' in the wake of the peace that follows war. On the surface, such a violence, on account of its predatory nature would appear to easily come under critical scrutiny, but this is not so, for in the moment the order of law is violently imposed, there is no law to which the violence of the law-to-come can be made accountable. Rather in law-making violence, law and violence are revealed as both co-present
7

CV, 250 CV, 238 CV, 249

9 and dependent on each other: the practice of critique reveals gewalt at the origin of law.

The moment of this law-making 'executive violence' is represented by law-preserving, 'administrative' violence, which protects and also effaces the moment of undecidability in which legal power is conferred.10 Benjamin exemplifies this violence with general military conscription, wherein the state legalises the right to use force against its citizens in order to protect the given order of law, an order that is assumedly endangered by an external threat. However, the presence of this violence of preservation that turns against any forces hostile to laws' continuity is a compromising violence, for it turns against the very thing which it represents, which is to say, to the principle of law-making violence itself. In order to remain what it is (an order of law) law-making violence must transform into law preserving violence and suppress the possibility of any other outburst of law-making violence. This can be seen in the rapidity with which the State assumes a monopoly of violence after the imposition of the order of law, which is to say, prohibits and represses the private citizens' ability to wield violence of a law-making, 'natural' character. 11

That law-making violence cannot maintain itself without the support of a law-preserving violence reveals the complicity between the two that results in what Benjamin calls a 'dialectical rising and falling in the law-making and law-preserving forms of violence', 12 a fluctuation from one to the other in which law begins to degenerate in the wake of a positing that effaces itself in the violence which preserves.13 Benjamin evokes the example of the parliaments of the Weimar Republic at the time of writing in 1921 to exemplify the transformation, the 'decay', and ultimate oscillation that the 'ambiguity' of legal violence initiates: 'When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our time, parliaments provide an example of this...They lack the sense that they represent a lawmaking violence; no wonder they cannot achieve decrees worthy of this violence'.14 Thus the parliaments, as manifestations of this internally related rising and falling of violence, typify a more general historical condition, within which every order of law is implicated:

The law governing their oscillation rests on the the circumstance that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence it represents, by suppressing hostile
10

11

12
13

In State of Exception, Agamben equates Benjamin's decidability with Carl Schmitts' 'State of exception' . See Agamben, Giorgio. (2005) The State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press p, 53 In this regard Benjamin gives the example of the admiration that the 'great criminal' evoke when, as the saying goes, they take the law into their own hands. This admiration comes from the law-making character of violence, which provokes admiration even where the crime itself is despicable. CV, 249 Werner Hamacher's reading of the Critique of Violence is organised around this phenomena. See Hamacher, Werner: Afformative, Strike: Benjamins Critique of Violence, in Andrew Benjamin; Peter Osborne: Walter Benjamins Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, London; New York, 1994, pp. 110-138. CV, 244

14

10 counter violence...This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay. 15

The 'triumph' of violence over already established (and thus decaying) law is the vicious cycle of law's 'overcoming' through re-establishment. It is the proximity of legal violence law-making and lawpreserving to what Benjamin will come to call the 'immediate manifestations of mythic violence', 16 which provides a productive opening into both the ultimate iniquity of legal violence its distance from a justice exceeding retributionand to the function of fate within the text.

Just as the violence of an angry husband is both pernicious and without mediacy (it is not a means to an end), but is rather an immediate manifestation of anger, so too, Benjamin shows, is the paradigmatic mythic violence of the Gods primarily an immediate manifestation of their existence. Such violence is not mediate in the sense of having a given relation to an end inscribed in human law. While such violence would seem to punish human infringement and thus be law-preserving mythic violence of the gods establishes law with immediacy. Cited by Benjamin is the legend of Niobe, in which Niobe, queen of Thebes, questions the legitimacy of an annual celebration of the goddess Leto and her two twins, on the grounds that she herself is more worthy of worship, with both power and with twice as many children. As a result of her hubris all her children are subjected to a cruel death, while Niobe, who remains as 'a mutes bearer of guilt', is spared death. 17 Through this example, Benjamin identifies legal violence with mythic violence:

If this immediate violence in mythic manifestations proves closely related, indeed identical, to lawmaking violence, it reflects a problematic light on lawmaking violence insofar as the latter was characterised above, in the account of military violence, as merely a mediate violence 18

It is in the wake of this identification that the history of law and legislation becomes irreconcilable with the bringing about of justice. For the term that unites legal violence with mythic violence is macht, power. This is because 'lawmaking is power-making, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence'.19 Power is that which is guaranteed by the establishment of law. The well known phrase, might is right, brings with it not only cultural-historical truth, but also a metaphysical truth. Metaphysical, because the critique reveals that the imposition of an order of Law
15

16

17

CV, 251. A critique of Benjamin's text, beyond the scope or intention of this essay, might centre upon this phenomena. For within Benjamin's text this law of oscillation occupies the position of a meta-law. Such a trans-historical positing could evoke criticism from the perspective of a metaphysical nominalism. CV, 248 CV, 248 CV, 248 CV, 248

18 19

11 is, a-priori, bound up with mythic violence. 20 Thus this critical unmasking of power at the core of both legal and mythic violence reveals an ultimate incommensurability between Law and Justice. Where there is power, Law cannot co-exist with Justice and we find ourselves in the realm of the mythic (a term in Benjamin's work that will demand closer examination). As Werner Hamacher notes in his crucial reading of the text, 'As long as history remains constrained by the circular succession of imposing forces of law, it cannot be the medium of justice'. 21 For where 'Justice', writes Benjamin, 'is the principle of all divine end-making, power the principle of all mythic lawmaking' 22.

It is in the light of the 'pernicious' function of the order of law that Benjamin will raise the question of another figure of violence, one which would not be related to law in either an imposing or preserving capacity. This will be the figure of 'divine violence', a paradoxically non-violent, or 'pure violence', which, unlike the immediate mythic violence of the Gods has no stake in bringing to light a new law, and unlike mediate legal violence, is not inherently compromised by insertion within causeand-effect, means-ends calculations. For the means-ends relationship, as has been shown, is inherently ambiguous; ends which are posited as of a higher sphere than human existence, efface the moment of their own positing in which they are implicated in struggle for power. 23

It is for Benjamin, only a 'pure means', that may not always already be compromised with regard to opening up toward justice. At first glance 'pure means' will itself seem a paradoxical expression, for means are usually defined in relations to an end, to which it finds itself teleologically subordinate. Like the Kantian concept of the beautiful, adapted for a political context, a pure means would constitute a purposiveness without a purpose, a non-instrumental political practice. One of the central examples from Benjamin's work of this time which can be used to illustrate the meaning of 'pure means' is the distinction established by George Sorel between the 'political partial strike' and the 'proletarian general strike'. These are 'antithetical in their relation to violence'. 24 The political strike, since it involves a willingness to return to work if certain demands are met by the state, constitutes an instrumental, mediate violence which justifies itself with reference to an end (it is 'violent' in Benjamin's strict sense because it is extortionate). The proletarian general strike, by contrast, is a manifestation of a pure means, since 'it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification of working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike
20

'It also appears that Sorel touches not merely on a cultural-historical truth but also on a metaphysical truth when he surmises that in the beginning all right was the prerogative of Kings or nobles, in short, of the mighty; and that mutatis mutandis, it will remain so as long as it exists' (CV, 249)
21

22 23

24

See Hamacher, Werner: Afformative, Strike: Benjamins Critique of Violence, in Andrew Benjamin; Peter Osborne: Walter Benjamins Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, London; New York, 1994, p. 115 CV, 248 Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals would be an exemplary instance of revealing the instrumental value of ends which present themselves as external to the power relations that define social existence. CV, 248

12 not so much causes but consummates'. 25 Such a strike is a pure means because it involves no reference to an ends that can be ratified by the given order of law and the violence it represents and monopolises. For this reason the general strike must be understood as non-programmatic and nonutopian for both these impulses have an inherently lawmaking character by virtue of constituting attempts to insert the future within an already determinate, teleological order. 26

While the justness of mediate, legal violence, is made impure by the struggle over power, a pure violent means have no stake in establishing or protecting a certain order of existence, and thus can manifest a qualitatively different justice, one distinct from the order of law. According to Benjamin, the revolutionary violence of the proletarian general strike constitutes 'the highest manifestation of pure violence by man',27 Divine violence is the zero level of mythic violence; it is the moment of violent alteration, where what-has-been is suspended violently (gewalt in its most general meaning of a power or capacity, it must be remembered, cannot be totally excluded in principle from human problems), yet before the becoming of the earth demands for the positive content of effect. This makes the distinction between them dangerous and ambiguous: '[O]nly mythic violence, not divine, will be recognisable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory force of violence is not visible to men'.28 In their instant of en-action, where whatever was law is suspended, it is impossible to tell whether the violence will turn out to be the mythic, fated violence, or divine violence that opens up to a justice that exceeds retribution. However, in effects, they are antithetic in all regards 'If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood...Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure violence over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it'29 Where violence reveals itself as mythic, as we will see, fate rears its head to efface any trace of undecidability through naturalising the continuity of the order of law. One power (macht) replaced by
25

CV, 248 This non-utopian impulse will appear many years later in On the Concept of History, as a prohibition against images of the future. See Benjamin, Walter (1999) Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations. London: Pimlico.
26 27

CV, 252. Divine Violence is perhaps the most controversial of all Benjamin's figures. For more on the relationship between 'pure violence' and 'divine violence', see Khatib, Sami Towards a Politics of 'Pure Means': Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence(2011) Available online at: http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org CV, 252 CV, 252. While this passage has provoked strong interpretations, some implicating Benjamin in the German impulse that was to become Nazism, these readings down-play the centrality of Benjamin's central example of a 'sanctioned manifestation' of the divine; 'the educative power' (which will come into focus later). The central instance of this interpretation would be Derrida's, Force of Law in which 'lethal without spilling blood' comes to be read as a precursor to the concentration camp. Many commentators, however, have cast doubt on the need to make such an alignment. See Hamacher (1994), Agamben (1998), Sinnerbank (2009).
28

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13 another in the re-iteration of law. If the presence of power prevents mythic law from being a vehicle of justice, then the presence of the divine as antithetical to law is the opening to ethics and therefore to the possibility of justice. For divine violence, 'deposes' the law, by suspending it in its immediate and effective link to the limited 'justice' of bloody retribution upon 'mere life'. As Andrew Benjamin expresses it, divine violence constitutes 'a caesura of allowing', or what has been referred to as a generative interruption that suspends the law and the temporal determination and continuity established and maintained by law.30 In this suspension, the possibility of novelty is opened up, 'allowed', but is not yet formed, or determinable in advance. Divine violence thus constitutes the first figure of discontinuity to emerge in this account of Benjamin's thinking of the suspension of myth. As an interruption that allows, divine gewalt comes to function not as bloody violence, but rather as an operative power that, through introducing the possibility of difference into a continuity petrified by its past, by what Marx referred earlier as 'the tradition of all dead generations' that impose a fated image of historical time which 'weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living'. This nightmare is the continuity of incontestable law understood as that which achieves justice through a mythic 'bloodletting' that presents itself as fated. Benjamin proposes a 'pure violence' that suspends the application of law to what he will call 'mere life', a figure of biological existence whose symbol is blood. Capital punishment as retribution is a violence which both preserves and re-establishes law. It is therefore an exemplary instance of bloody lawful violence, wherein 'justice', violence, law, and power are copresent. The name Benjamin gives to this co-presence and its naturalisation by which is gains an automatic legitimacy is fate (schicksal). 31

1.2: 'Only one fate'

At 'the origin of law', Benjamin writes, is 'violence crowned by fate (schicksal)'. The 'power [of the law] resides', he continues, 'in the fact that there is only one fate and that what exists, and in particular what threatens, belongs inviolably to its order'. 32 The relationships in operation within these quotations demand to be worked through with care. The first thing to note is that law, violence, and fate are placed into a conjunction in which they reinforce each other. An order of Law is established through violence, and violence is 'crowned' by fate. 33 The 'crowning' occurs through the incorporation of this violence within the order imposed by fate. The violence which, in preserving also threatens is
30

See Benjamin, Andrew. (2004) 'Benjamin's Modernity' in Ferris, David [ed] The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this essay he traces the path and persistence of the figure of the 'caesura' in Benjamin's work. It arguably constitutes the most general instance of discontinuity in Benjamin's philosophical project. 31 As the central interpretive question within a short text that continues to provoke commentary ninety years after it was written, the force of the distinction between these types of violence will always demand further development. CV, 242. The german here is very close to the translation; gekrnte, which is derived from krnen, meaning to crown. Benjamin most likely chooses the metaphor of the crown because of its affinity with authority
32

33

14 immanent to one fate. This is because in threatening it merely opposes law, and the lawmaking violence represented by it, with its own lawmaking violence. These two violences are qualitatively the same with regards to Justice; because both guarantee power, and in this impurity are thus irreconcilable with Justice.

What necessitates the work of critique is the existence of an operation in which presence of power at the heart of the order of law is effaced. Once signs of this presence are erased, law and 'justice' can be conflated. This allows law to justify both its existence, and that of the violence which establishes and preserves it. Law, especially if aware of its origins, may claim to 'act in the interest of all mankind'.34 While this justifiably may provoke the lowly, miserable thief to question how his punishment may benefit the interests of all mankind, there are of course far more vulgar cases where even 'in the name of mankind' is laughable. The operation by which law and justice, are conflated through the effacement of power Benjamin gives the name fate. Fate is the name given to retro-active justification of a law whose only foundation is the violence that establishes and preserves it and the interests of power which it serves. This order imposed by fate is an oblique, obscure and threatening mixture of power, law, and violence that Derrida has called 'the mystical foundations of authority'. 35 Definitive of such a foundation is what Benjamin will call 'demonic ambiguity'. The foundation is ambiguous, and in being so is all the more threatening: the ambiguity of the foundation of authority always makes it susceptible to presenting itself as a manifestation of the divine, and thus of incontestable Justice. As the embodiment of fate the violence of law is 'uncertain'. In the case of a criminal, they may or may not get caught, nonetheless apprehension threatens. And after the submission of the criminal to the law whether apprehension was in fact fate or merely bad luck will never truly be known. Ambiguity manifests itself most clearly in the above case of Niobe. The law that her hubris brings to pass is singular and burst upon her 'from the uncertain ambiguous sphere of fate'.36 Her fate is most ambiguous precisely because it is not a punishment for the breaking of any law that existed prior to the violence. She is punished for a transgression that only became a transgression after the fact.

What Benjamin calls 'fate imposed violence' decides upon the justification of violent means. In the overthrowing of one violent order of law by another, only fate can justify. It seems that in theCritique of Violence fate, understood as a locus of the mythic, is thus being used in two distinct yet interconnected ways; As naming both the process through which the mythic violence which imposes and preserves the order of law as constituted as inevitable, and as the naturalised continuity of law's historical reiteration. The work of fate functions through a process of naturalisation,
34 35
36

CV, 242 Derrida, Jacques. Force of Law In Cardozo Law Review, 1990 (Vol. 11) CV, 248

15 where nature comes to name a locus of fate that excludes the operative presence of what will come to be named authentic historical time. In an essay from two years after the Critique of Violence on the problem of the historical drama, Benjamin relates fate, nature, and history;

Nature presents the factual reality of historical events as fate. In fate lies concealed the latent resistance to the never-ending flow of historical development. Wherever there is fate, a piece of history has become nature.37

At stake within this set-up are both the significance of events, and their susceptibility to being coopted to resist historical change. Where human history, and the events and activity that constitute it can be understood as open to difference, fate constitutes the attempts to block the creation of history and conserve what has been through insertion that which is, within a pre-given structure. To be bound to fate is to be bound to a temporal operation that subjects the 'never-ending flow' definitive of history to a necessity that constrains the present and future to the repetition of the same. This inevitable continuity of repetition works through inference: since the past appears haunted by sameness, the present and future will also be subject to sameness. Any deviation from this continuity is judged as not in keeping with the 'nature' that observation of 'history' reveals, and thus as under the hold of fate and the inevitable failure of that which challenges its hegemony. In the Critique of Violence w hat becomes natural and given as fate, is the relationship between law and mythic violence where power (macht) has been effaced and punishment or retribution comes to appear as natural and just. Where nature is present its continuity is assumed. It is because the mythic violence inseparable from the order law presents itself as an instance of justice, the possibility of difference of pure means or pure violence is excluded.

The fated continuity of the cycle of mythic, legal violence is the repetition of the same in which power is replaced by power. From the critical perspective of the text all legal violence lawmaking or law-preserving is fundamentally identical, meaning that any particular order of law is merely threatened by another, which, at its heart, is also power-making. Just means have no place in mediate, legal violence, for ends are compromised by their relationship to the 'pernicious' function of the order of Law. In being unmasked as identical to immediate mythic violence, any instance of legal violence can only be a reiteration of 'only one fate'. This fate is always the same in the sense that it works to efface the irreconcilable gap which critique can show between the violence of law and justice. The past of law, therefore, is not so much a history but rather a fate. This is because within law and the violence which establishes and preserves it there is an exclusion of the possibility of selftransformation, for the preservation of already existing law can only brings about its violent re37

Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Calderon and Hebbel' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 365

16 iteration. The fate of the order of law is being caught in the repetition definitive of myth for, as Benjamin noted again some twenty years later in the preparatory notes to one of his final texts, 1940's On the Concept of History, 'the essence of mythic happenings is recurrence'. 38

The ambiguity of a fated continuity in which law subjects life to mythic violence is always demonic because within it is the sign of something undecided, in relation to which human freedom is not yet secure from. This is significant of a more general problem of myth which we will now turn to. Perhaps the central function of myth is to preclude the possibility of an active, critical engagement and contestation with that which it announces; the order of law (and mythic violence) as inherently just because fated. And due to the exclusion of the possibility of self-transformation, this fate demands to be lived out.

38

Benjamin, Walter (2006) On the Concept of History Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 404

17

Chapter 2 Myth and Pre-History: Guilt, Fate, and the significance of Tragedy

The central antithetical opposition of the Critique of Violence, between the mythic and the divine, is developed from one of Benjamin's early influences, Hermann Cohen's The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919). In that text a theoretical framework is developed providing grounds for a critique of pagan, mythic ethics from the standpoint of radical, ethical monotheism that is purified of obligatory mythic ritual. While the Critique of Violence extends this framework into the political sphere, Benjamin's earlier text Fate and Character remains in closer proximity to the ethical sphere which Cohen intended for the opposition. In this text, as we will see, Benjamin criticises fate through attacking the 'dogma of the natural guilt of human life, of original guilt, the irredeemable nature of which constitutes the doctrine, and its occasional redemption the cult, of paganism...'39Fate and Character stages the interruption of the pagan, mythic, 'pre-historical' world of recurrence and fate that occurs in tragedy. What tragedy stages, according to Benjamin's philosophico-historical perspective, is a revolution that is at once political, ethical, and historical. In tragedy, the cessation of mythic world of fate and guilt is staged. Before we turn to look at Benjamin's historico-philosophical view of tragedy, in which victory over the pagan, mythic world occurs 'for the first time', we need to further explore what is at stake in a mythic apparatus in which guilt necessitates the violence of retribution under the guise of fate.

2.1 The Function of Myth

Definitive of the function of myth is an explanatory capacity which, in explaining, mystifies, and therefore denies access to the very thing requiring explanation. What this mystification achieves is the effacement of the possibility of an active engagement with and thus transformation of the very thing obscured by the work of myth. To this extent myth can be defined an an immediacy which excludes the possibility of contestation. As myth, 'fate' functions to explain the appearance of continuity, but, in an explanatory circularity, it is the persistence of the continuity of appearance that functions to explain fate. The power of myth, therefore, can be attributed to the passivity it demands from those under its hold. This passivity is connected to the fact that myth never presents itself as
39

This critique, for both Cohen and Benjamin, is directed as much at Antiquity as at Christianity's dogma of original sin.

Benjamin, Walter (1996). Fate and Character in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 206 (Hereafter, 'FC')

18 such. To those under its hold, myth presents itself, for instance, as 'truth' or as 'nature', or as 'fate'. For one 'obviously' cannot contest that which is given to be true, natural, or fated. As a myth then, fate functions as self-fulfilling prophecy, through precluding the possibility of engaging with its production as myth.

The struggle against myth can be understood to begin as a struggle over Law, where law has a determining effect upon the naturalisation of certain violences, and the blows of fate that they are presented as representing. In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin observes that one of the first victories over the mythic ('pre-historic') world consisted in the writing down of law. 40 Only through the possibility of actively engaging with the letter of the law could it be accurately contested. In the mythic world the vagueness of law served the rulers who wielded it: it could be easily manipulated to suit the purposes of those who were granted the privilege of immediate access (power). If one was not of the privileged classes the law remained unassailable (Protestantism is also founded on a struggle of this form). One could transgress the law unawares (as in the case of Niobe) and become subject to violent retribution. Such a transgression, along with the violent atonement that follows, would present itself, in the understanding of the law, not as accidental but as fate or destiny. What this achieves is both the manifestation of law and the naturalisation of violent atonement, where 'nature' names a locus of fate. The order of law, in its most mythic form of all is the law of the Gods, which, in being given as fate, demands passive obligation. The question of an active contestation of the order of law, is both analogous to, and will shed light upon, the struggle against fate (which is, by definition, a struggle to both rescue and construct history). For as we have seen fate (not the justice excluded by law's pernicious function), and the violence which it explains and naturalises, stands at the origin of law.

2.2 The Time of Guilt and Fate

At stake within Fate and Character is the 'nature of man'. 41 Both 'fate' and 'character' stake a claim upon this nature. Fate, schicksal has cognates in schicklich, meaning 'proper, fitting, seemly' and schicklichkeit, meaning 'propriety, seemliness, appropriateness'. Fate then, makes a claim upon what is proper to man's nature and thus to the possible future of man; it is a temporal operation that subjects human existence to what is already given by myth. These claims are tied to the sphere of Law, which not only sanctions and justifies a violence tied to power, but also makes claims upon what is possible and impossible within human affairs. In contradistinction character (charakter) also makes a claim upon what is proper to man. The two claims are irreconcilable once each gets placed within an appropriate sphere.

40 41

Benjamin, Walter (1999) Franz Kafka, in Illuminations. London: Pimlico. p. 114 FC, 205

19 The investigation of the mythic world in Fate and Character begins with the observation that guilt and misfortune are intrinsic and essential to fate; 'Insofar as something is fate', Benjamin writes, 'it is misfortune and guilt'.42 Guilt orientates the guilty toward a certain course of activity. As an imposition it limits the possibility of autonomous activity. Guilt also has an explanatory function; events conspired in this way because you are guilty. Guilt is thus an ideological category; it produces obligations that are in the service of protecting a certain order of existence. The appearance of a necessary correlation between guilt and retribution is what defines the necessity of fate. In this guilt context, the misfortune caused by guilt comes to appear as fate, which is to say, as inevitable. With the evocation of guilt we are at the heart of the sphere of law, the 'residue' of the 'demonic' in which misfortune imposed by fate and guilt are connected to the mythic violence at the heart of the order of law. The order of law 'condemns not to punishment but to guilt. Fate is the guilt context of the living...the guilt context is temporal in a totally inauthentic way[..]'. 43 Where guilt is present, it must be atoned for, and this 'atonement', where mythic forms of law persists, is a bloody retributive violence that appears as fated. This is a logic of cause and effect determination, whereby guilt strictly entails punishment, which presents itself as the fulfilment of a justice. Benjamin describes the order of law a 'residue of the demonic', for the reason that this cause and effect logic persists at the heart of modern legal systems of guilt and justice through retributive atonement. 44 Guilt therefore, is a motor of the mythic world of fate, power and bloody violence. The fate systems of antiquity described in the Critique of Violence, are defined by guilt and atonement. It is for this reason that Benjamin declares, in an essay contemporaneous to this period, that 'outside the realm of guilt, fate loses all its power' (377). As a locus for the dominance of myth a closer examination of the currency that schuld has in Benjamin's work at this time is demanded, in order to pose the question of what, for Benjamin, constitutes the setting in which the fated link between guilt, life, and the violence of law has been identified. In a note from around the same time as Fate and Character Benjamin characterises guilt as 'a category of world history...Every world-historical moment is indebted and indebting...a state of the world is...always guilty with regard to some other later one'. 45 As a 'world-historical category', guilthistory names the becoming-guilty of existence. The german word for guilt is schuld, commonly translated as 'guilt' but which also, in contrast to english, brings with it connotations of debt and blame. As a 'category of world history' this becoming guilty of existence can ensure the linear direction of history, and the unity and given-ness of the significance and meaning of the past. This is because, in the context of 'world history', 'guilt' can functions as standpoint from which everything that happens can be ascribed a continuous, homogeneous meaning. History understood as an engine of guilt production. What guilt specifically introduces is a particular temporal relation between moments, that
42 43

44
45

FC, 204 FC, 205 Although modern legal institutions grounds its decisions in a thorough investigation of a chain of events. Quoted in Hamacher, Werner: Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion" , in diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2002. p. 82

20 contributes to its status as being 'temporal in an inauthentic way'. From the perspective of guilt, a given moment is merely the indebted offspring of another state of existence, a state that is itself to blame for what it has given rise to. Guilt appears here as a genealogical category of descent. That which came prior has had something taken from it by that which follows, and by extension, whatever came before has withheld from that which follows. In the mythic world of guilt and fate, every state of existence is guilty to the extent that it releases another deficient state and bears the guilt for it. In every moment there is an absence, a lack by virtue of the previous moment being the bearer of its guilt, but this guilt eternally recurs since every moment that follows will be subject to an analogous deficiency. A moment in the guilt nexus is a locus of absence, which is to say, no moment is fully identical with itself, it is always dependent upon another within the temporal context of guilt: For that which is implicated within the never ending continuity of guilt and atonement in fate, there is no moment which can be properly differentiated from any other. There is an inseparability between moments, a reciprocal obligation between two states of the world. From the perspective of guilt, there is co-habitation. This is why Benjamin, following Cohen, will characterise the pagan, mythic world, with its fated systems of guilt and atonement as proto-ethical, and as ultimately pre-historical. 'The perpetual concatenation of guilt and atonement' leaves no room for a relation other than that given by the guilt context of fate. There is no room for the admittance of a modicum of indeterminacy and thus freedom that is required for properly ethical action. Where guilt is dominant moral responsibility is always delegated and diffuse. As Werner Hamacher observes in his incomparable analysis of Capitalism as Religion, Acting in the guilt-nexus means following an obligation to act, dictated in advance by another and is therefore only a form of not acting. Anyone who is bound by guilt and obligation does not do what he does, but instead executes a preordained program and falls fatally, lethally for action itself, into the predestination of an inheritance from whose succession he is not free to abstain.46 In the context of guilt there is nothing that is indeterminate. Every occurrence is inseparable from another to which it is in debt or is at fault. All activity occurs as a determinate particular within a universal guilt. Guilt as history, of course, is fate; the eternal recurrence of guilt and retribution is a repetition of the same, and the inevitable re-iteration of mythic orders. Human history can only occur within a structure in which differentiation, indeterminacy, contingency, and thus the possibility of freedom is admitted. The exclusion of ethics and of the possibility of indeterminacy is because It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable. The
46

Hamacher, Werner: Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion" , in diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4,

Fall-Winter 2002. p. 85

21 judge can perceive fate wherever he pleases; with every judgment he must blindly dictate fate. It is never man but only the life in him that it strikes the part involved in natural guilt and misfortune by virtue of semblance47 The incurrence of fate orientated around 'the guilty person' is deeply ambiguous. Quoting Kafka's K., Benjamin observes elsewhere that one is condemned 'not only in innocence but also in ignorance'. 48 In myth one can become guilty without having suspected a thing. The incurrence of fate, Benjamin notes, 'is never the result of the moral fallibility of the human agent'. 49 It does not stem from a clear and distinct moral transgression that occurs in the midst of events. Because the guilt context is not yet ethical, fate is always already incurred; it awaits and pre-exists its victim. The origin of guilt is invisible to those who are involved; for this reason it corresponds 'to the natural condition of the living' (204). This guilt is a natural guilt, 'not unlike original sin'. 50 Like original sin, natural guilt has always already been incurred. Its origin, if it is even possible to speak of one, occurs in the deepest ambiguity of myth, where apples and snakes are explanations that explain nothing. One finds oneself in the midst of the temporal form of natural guilt and fate, like 'the living' in Marx' formulation find themselves in 'circumstances existing already'. This production, its history the becoming nature of guilt is effaced and what remains appears as an always already given guilt. 'The guilt context', Benjamin writes, 'is temporal in a totally inauthentic way...this time can at every moment be be made simultaneous with another (not present)...It is not an autonomous time []'. 51 That the time of guilt is inauthentic and not autonomous precludes the possibility of a moment of time that has become the locus of possibility for an ethical activity that exceeds the mythic recurrence of fate and guilt. For a time that cannot be differentiated and separated from guilt cannot be one of 'authentic' human historical activity, one which constitutes an opening to justice that is not retributive. It is for this reason that it is not 'man', understood as an ethical agent, but 'mere life' that the mythic violence of fate strikes. The semblance (schein), or, as Sam Weber translates it 'phenomenality', that Benjamin refers to here is a result of the production of human being or 'man' as 'mere life'. 52 When 'man' is reduced to its 'natural' and biological dimension, as a given entity, without history (and the differentiation and indeterminacy this implies), it becomes subject to fate and guilt. Nature, like myth, designates a locus of recurrence. To the extent something is natural, its presence in human affairs is inevitable, yet any explanation of this presence is obscured through the tautology of myth which precludes the possibility of contestation. The fate of 'mere life' in its semblance of guilt is death. That is why bloody violence upon 'the life within man', constitutes 'atonement' for guilt, and give rise to a limited 'justice'. In the Critique of Violence Benjamin notes that 'mere life' is the 'marked bearer
FC, 204 Benjamin, Walter (1999) Franz Kafka, in Illuminations. London: Pimlico. p. 114 49 Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Calderon and Hebbel' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 377 50 Ibid 51 FC, 204 52 Weber, Samuel (2008) Benjamin's Abilities Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 260
47 48

22 of guilt'.53 This life becomes subjected to retributive 'blood letting' in the name of a justice that is inherently compromised by its relation to the order of law and the violence of power (macht) at its core. Fate, that ambiguous and unjustifiable fiat linking guilt inevitably to mere life constitutes a predetermined response (retribution) to an already given temporal context. What is precluded within this structure is the possibility of negotiating and contesting the inevitability that repeats and reiterates the same, that is to say, history as guilt-history or history as 'one fate'. It is only with the suspension of the inevitability that cuts across this setting that a historical time can be located which belongs neither to guilt or to fate. What persists in the suspension of this inevitability is the presence of an ongoing, incomplete process. Where the blood-letting retributive justice of mythic violence has a conclusive finality to it the dropping of the trapdoor beneath the feet of the criminal, the falling guillotine, the push of a red button by contrast, 'pure means' (without ends), 'justice', are ongoing, incomplete, and demand activity. For this reason, it is only through identification of the 'mistaken confusion' between the 'order of law' with 'justice', that the suspension of the mythic, temporal apparatus of guilt, fate, bloody violence, and law, can occur. According to Benjamin's historico-philosophical perspective, the location where this first occurred, where the possibility of overcoming myth was first identified, was in tragedy.

2.3 Tragedy and the Gateway between Times

While Benjamin's theory of tragedy is gestured toward in Fate and Character, it is developed at length in the study of the Origin of German Tragic Drama. The condition for the possibility of tragedy, for Benjamin, is the dominance of the mythic in which man is submitted to the will of the gods. This conception of tragedy and the interruption it stages relates directly to specific situation the Greeks struggled with. The preeminence of the tragic form within the Greek world is telling about the epoch that antiquity comes to be understood to inaugurate, that of the monotheistic kernel transmitted west within the Platonic Dialogues. There are two preliminary things to note about this succession that will be returned to in more depth in the following chapter. First, that Benjamin does not understand this succession as continuous, but rather, as discontinuous. This is to say, the succession is premised upon both modes of destruction and beginning. For this reason, forms of activity (gewalt, for example) will be prioritised. Second, while it constitutes 'a victory', it is emphatically not an unproblematic reconciliation or return to a unity of subject and substance that Hegelian thought might name beauty or freedom. Rather, myth and its apparatus of law and fate, as we have learned in modernity, is not easily disposed of: As early Frankfurt school thinkers have shown, the secularisation that occurs in the Enlightenment brings with it its own specific 'dialectic' in which myth returns to modernity in the form of stratified and naturalised social relations. For this reason, the mode of thinking that is developed in Benjamin's texts of the early 1920's have resonance with our own time, in the sense that
53

CV, 252

23 the laws delineating any epoch have always tended to crystallise into solid mythic institutions that preclude the possibility of radical contestation. It is only where a given mythic apparatus is suspended in its immediacy that the possibility of historical activity beyond reiterating fate originates. (This can be understood as the fundamental meaning behind the well known Maoist phrase 'there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent'). 54 In Benjamin's historico-philosophical theory of tragedy in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the dominance of myth is brought to an end by the defiant figure of the tragic hero. Their death is understood as a sacrifice in the name of a new order within which the incontestability of the mythic worlds' polytheistic powers has been undone. It opens the space for contestation, for the activity of the demos from which the gods have been excluded and human being takes responsibility for its social existence. The rule of myth is described, as in the Critique of Violence, in terms of 'demonic ambiguity'. 'The decisive confrontation with the demonic world order gives tragic poetry its historicalphilosophical signature. The tragic relates to the demonic as paradox does to ambiguity'. 55 The polytheism of the mythic world is demonic because, on the one hand no clear hierarchy is permitted in the economy of the gods, and second because the laws of the gods are not always already given; as in the case of Niobe, laws may yet exist that will only be revealed in fate imposed violence. At stake in Greek tragedy, is what Sam Weber has called in his book on Benjamin's Abilities a 'principle of singular identity', 56 later exemplified in the Socratic form of the Good, that challenges the ambiguity of the mythic world. Benjamin's observes that in the wake of tragedy, 'the old rights of the Olympians are disqualified' to be replaced by a 'new, unknown God'. 57

The death of the hero is a prophecy of a new historical epoch and new political structure. But this prophecy is paradoxical because it occurs in the falling silent of the hero, in their performative refusal to speak the language of the mythical world they reject. The tragedy and the silence of the hero announces the isolation of individuality as Man or as Community - which is also a form of autonomy in which 'Man' will mediate its own affairs without immediate (retributive) intervention by the gods. Benjamin identifies four interconnected elements of this paradoxical process; it is antagonistic, juridicial, theatrical, and linguistic. There is inherent antagonism by virtue of the heros refusal to engage with the gods on the previously performed terms (of the gods) which is destructive of the relational quality previously persistent as fate. It is juridical through taking the form of a trial by myth, in which the hero is involved 'in an as it were contractual process of atonement' and both the 're-establishment but also the undermining of an older legal order in the linguistic consciousness of
54 55

Benjamin, Walter. (2003) The Origin of German Tragic Drama trans. Osborne, John, London: Verso. p. 109 (Hereafter Origin, 107 Origin, 107

'Origin')
56 57

24 a renewed community'.58 This simultaneous re-establishment and undermining reveals that the border between the two worlds, although discontinuous, should not be understood as a clean break. 59 Through entering into a 'contractual process' the hero reveals to himself and to the gods that they are dependent upon man to maintain their own position in a master-slave relation, and thus the hero transforms the relationship the gods had required to sustain incontestable authority over men. But the language of the hero is not legal; for in his performative act of falling silent, of refusing to speak, he opens up the possibility of a judgement upon the law which is not that of the judge or the lawyer. This act of refusal announces both the possibility and the need for a new language and a new social space.

The new language to emerge is Socratic and the new social space is the amphitheater, whose model is the juridicial court but where occupying the role of the judge is no longer the law-making and external demonic gods, but the communal crowd. 'The community attends this appeals trial as controlling instance, even as judge...But a non liquet always resounds in the conclusion of tragedy. The solution to be sure is always resolution or redemption, but it is only ad hoc, problematic, limited'. 60 The redemption is limited (like all redemptions) since it occurs only in the singular case of the hero, whose falling silent announces not a new language itself, but the possibility of a new language. It constitutes what has been referred to in the previous chapter as a 'caesura of allowing', or generative interruption without teleological end or determinate image of the future. In the opening of this caesura, fate is undone, but whether the new language or space will fulfil the possibility inherent within the break is indeterminate. While our present concerns will focus on the generative opening in inherent in tragedy's challenge to mythic law and fate, Benjamin's answer, which takes in the relationship to Socrates's ironic death as much as the German Tragic Drama itself, will be that limitation and separation will persist all the way to the present. Socratic irony will be the 'irrevocable epilogue of tragedy', where 'in place of the sacrificial death of the hero, Socrates provides the example of the pedagogue', who finds not horror in death but who self-consciously chooses to die in order to produce a meaningful, transmittable effect. 61 However, the 'purely dramatic language' of the Platonic dialogues undermine the process of secularisation at work in Greek tragic dramas through a reinstatement of the 'Mysterium' of Man that will come ultimately to be institutionalised in Christianity. 62 Tragedy does not bring mythic nexus of fate and guilt to an end; Christianity's dogmatic doctrine of original sin and atonement returns us to the heart of the mythic in which guilt and fate returns and pervades its belief, action, and its self-conception. Even underlying the apparently secular system of Capitalism, Benjamin
58

Origin, 115

59

Rather there is an interaction between the two worlds in which that which had defined the previous

world undergoes a transformation on the basis of the...

60

61

Origin, 117 Origin, 118 and then problematised once again in the 'fallen' world that gives rise to the German tragic drama (Origin, 118).

62

25 will identify a 'cultic' core of guilt (schuld), debt, exchange, trade. 63 Nevertheless classical tragedy will stage for us an interruption of fate that allows us to delineate a conception of justice not linked to law, guilt, fate or violent retribution.

2.4 The Breach of Fate: Genius, Wisdom, and the 'Educative Power' of Divine Violence

To what Benjamin calls a 'mystical enslavement' to fate, 'character gives the answer of genius'. 64 While the order of law is the context of fate and mythic violence's efficacy, it is 'in tragedy that the head of genius lifted itself for the first time from the mist of guilt, for in tragedy demonic fate is breached'. 65 This formulation sets up an opposition between 'genius' and the 'demonic fate' characteristic of the mythic world. It is not the tragedy itself that constitutes the interruption of fate, but rather it is 'in' tragedy that genius emerges and demonic fate is 'breached'. Inscribed into Benjamin's formulation are the centrality of forms of activity, signalled by the use of two verbs, lifting and breaching. The activity which achieves this is the active repetition of myth as tragedy within the amphitheater, and the active response of the audience to the tragedy. It is in the awakening that tragedy produces that the mythic, pagan world of polytheistic, ambiguous power is suspended. While 'Man' as 'mysterium' signals a return to forms of myth and fate, what interests Benjamin's historico-philosophical perspective is that this is the 'first time' demonic fate suffers defeat, that the possibility of being unfated is awakened to.

What is at stake in tragedy is 'demonic fate' and the order of mythic law, violence, and power which stands behind it. The amphitheater names one expression of the re-distribution of legal power that occurs in tragedy. The other, is the possibility of what is named in Sophocles' Antigone as 'wisdom'.66 The story of Antigone is well known: Creon, the new King of Thebes decrees that the body of the rebel Polyneices will not be sanctified by holy rites and will lie exposed where he fell on the battlefield. Polyneices' sister Antigone, on pain of death, goes against Creon's edict and removes the body. A furious Creon sentences Antigone to be buried alive. Haemon, the son of Creon, tries and fails to persuade him to spare Antigone. However, after a blind prophet warns Creon that because of his choices he will 'lose a son of his own loins' for the crimes of leaving Polyneices unburied and for keeping the living body Antigone under the ground. After initially refusing, a shaken Creon decides to repent but it is too late and fate is 'crushing': Antigone has taken her own life in the cave. Haemon, in response, has stabbed himself to death. His mother, Creon's wife, upon learning this also takes her own life, leaving Creon heart broken at the losses his own action has brought about. The play is
63

64 65 66

See Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'Capitalism as Religion' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. FC, 205 FC, 204 Thanks to Andrew Benjamin for pointing out the productive relationship between Antigone and Benjamin in his as yet un-published Life Beyond Violence: Notes on Walter Benjamin's 'Zur Kritik die Gewalt'.

26 structured around the contradictory laws to which protagonists declare allegiance: Creon deals out retribution because of his allegiance to the laws of the (his) polis, and Antigone acts as she does because of her relation to the law of the family that does not allow her to watch her brother's body decay. It is through maintaining a relationship to these laws that the misfortune of fate befalls all the protagonists. However, the last lines of the play illustrate another conflict at work; Of happiness the chiefest part Is a wise heart: And to defraud the gods in aught With peril's fraught. Swelling words of high-flown might Mightily the gods do smite. Chastisement for errors past Wisdom brings to age at last. 67 As opposed to a conflict between particular instances of law, the positioning of wisdom establishes the determining tension as between law and violent retributive justice on the one hand, and the obtainment of wisdom through experience on the other. Creon, grief stricken, realises that had he listened to wisdom he would not have acted in immediate accordance with the law. But wisdom was only present retrospectively; had wisdom been present before the tragedy, retributive violence (conflated with 'justice') would not have been strictly entailed by the law. Where wisdom is present, a different relationship to the order of law and thus to fate becomes possible.

The presence of wisdom in human being undoes the hold of law in its incontestable link to a pregiven course of action, and thus 'breaches' fate. As its stands however, the characters of the tragedy were blind to this; the realisation of the efficacy of wisdom occurs only after it is too late, after fate has befallen the characters. It is through the blindness of the main representatives of the two opposing laws; Creon to the law of the polis and Antigone to the law of the family, that fate befalls. This is the tragedy; that fate became subject to interruption after it was already too late. Wisdom here is the name of that which occurs from the experience of, in this case, tragedy. Creon learns that undoing fate would have required the suspension of the order of law in its immediacy. Had mythic law been contested, the violent retribution of fate could have been held back. The characters are fated because the possibility of self-transformation, of awakening to the need to suspend the law in its immediacy, is not available to them when they need it most. This is what distinguishes the amphitheaters audience from the characters; the audience have access to wisdom before it is already too late. This is what defines Tragedy, not as an occurrence within a play but as an artistic form with socio-political and
67

Sophocles. (2009) Antigone trans. Storr. F. Available Online at: www.royaltyfreeplays.com, 42

27 historical dimensions. The tragedy is tragic because it repeats mythic violence before the characters can awaken to wisdom. In Tragedy as that which occurs within an amphitheater, repetition takes on an additional character. 'If myth is a trial', Benjamin writes, 'tragedy is its depiction and revision in one'. 68 In repeating within a space where the communal crowd take over the role of the gods as observers, 'wisdom', understood as what exists where incontestable law is suspended in its immediacy, becomes possible before it is too late. The audience already know that wisdom will have been required. What had appeared inevitably subject to the immediate determinations of fate and law, becomes other than it was. For the audience, the tragedy is a repetition in which the possibility of wisdom becomes retroactively inserted into the past. The inevitability of fate could have been undone. By repeating (depicting and revising) the myth in the amphitheater, the wisdom that becomes available after experience, after it is too late, becomes always already available. In tragedy, as the staging of the discontinuity between two times; the inauthentic time of guilt and the 'authentic' historical time of human activity, 'awakening' occurs. The motif of awakening is not without significance in Benjamin's work. Years later, in the Paris Arcades Project Benjamin will write that 'The genuine liberation from an epoch...has the structure of awakening in this respect as well; it is entirely ruled by cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream'.69 The 'cunning' of the awakening in tragedy is the intervention of the audience into the time of myth. Myth, like tragedy is defined by repetition. The difference however is that in tragedy the active construction of this repetition in some sense tricks, fools, myth into revealing, through repetition within an alternative site (the amphitheater), its contingent, artificial production as fate.

This awakening figures in Fate and Character as the the 'head of genius' that 'lifted itself from the mist of guilt'.70 While what Benjamin means exactly by 'genius' is unclear from the text, a distinction gestured toward inGoethe's Elective Affinitiesbetween 'Genius' and 'Genie' forms the beginning of an answer. 'Genie' relates to what in english would be called the individual genius, (the heroic artistcreator), while 'Genius', by contrast, catches a more essential relation 'of a human being to art'. 71 Genius then is never an individual person, but always rather a capacity to create. However, the most crucial comment on 'genius' occurs in a book of writings Benjamin had collected from 1923 named One Way Street. 'Genius' figures in a short section titled Standard Clock

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each
68

Origin, 116 Benjamin, Walter. (1999) The Arcades Project. Trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. G1, 7
69
70

71

FC, 203 Benjamin, Walter (1996) Goethe's Elective Affinities in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press. p. 329

28 caesura and the heavy blows of fate fall like gentle sleep into his workshop labour. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments. 'Genius is application' 72

Crucial to this formulation is the emphasis upon the productive nature of the uncompleted fragment. For genius, the state of non-completion is not a form of disheartening failure, but rather is significant of the presence of possibility and contingency and thus of freedom. This is why Benjamin writes in Fate and Characterthat in genius, 'Complication [of demonic guilt] becomes simplicity, fate freedom'.73 The uncompleted fragment is not what remains after failure, but is rather an originary condition for the further creation of novelty that is not constrained by an already determinate structure. On the other hand, finality and closure signifies determination, the absence of possibility. Once a work is designated as 'finished', the contingency and possibility that characterises a work in its uncompleted, fragmentary state is eradicated. It is in the light of this that the wonderful saying of Paul Valery that 'a poem is never finished, only abandoned' has its greatest currency. What is incomplete and in process retains the productive possibility of not yet being subsumed into what is given as 'fate,' 'nature', or self-evident.

If the dominance of incontestable mythic forms of law and always brings with it an already given and determinate fate, the 'wisdom' that results from the 'lifting' of the 'head of genius' brings with it the ever present possibility of revision, difference, and indeterminacy. Wisdom occurs through a 'caesura of allowing' in which the immediate determinations of fate and law are suspended. For example, a condition of philosophy, understood as a love of wisdom, is laws suspension in its immediacy. This is to say, philosophy in its most general sense, can only occur where that which is already given has become subject to contestation. Only where the laws of the gods is not absolute can philosophy occur. The same, as will be shown, is the case with justice. It is only where the law is suspended in its immediate link to guilt, fate, and 'justice' that an alternative justice becomes thinkable. This suspension, as already alluded, is the motive of 'divine violence'.

Late in the Critique of Violence divine violence receives a crucial formulation that fundamentally separates it from the 'barbarism' of mythic violence: The divine power is attested not only by the religious tradition but is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations. These are defined, therefore, not by miracles directly performed by God, but by the expiating moment in them that strikes without
72

Benjamin, Walter (1996) One Way Street in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. p. 446

73

FC, 205

29 bloodshed and finally, by the absence of all law-making. To this extent it is justifiable to call this violence, too, annihilating; but it is so only relatively, with regard to goods, right, life, and suchlike, never absolutely, with regard to the soul of the living 74 Many things have to be noted from this formulation. What does Benjamin mean here by the 'educative power' as an instance of divine violence? The wager here is that the educative power should be understood as the power of wisdom or of genius. Wisdom or genius can be violent to the extent that they are implicated in a struggle with the order of law and the mystical fate it imposes on life. 'In its perfected form', that is, uncompromised by polemical purposes, the educative power is free of all lawmaking. This means it does not have a stake in any sanctioning forms of existence that are tied up with power (macht) and all its products of goods, right, and life. 75 While it is implicated in this struggle, this is not its purpose; it does not exist as a means to annihilate mythic law. Rather it is what it is and it does what it does. It is purposive without purpose, and as such, in this paradoxical, undecidable vagueness Benjamin associates it with the divine. What the educative power, as instance of divine violence effects, is the possibility of contesting any law that is presented as incontestable. As pure and bloodless, the educative power violently undermines, 'annihilates' the validity of any law that is given as a-priori just. The educative power, proximate to wisdom and genius, is a 'pure means' that, by virtue of its relation to a time of human activity whose structure is not already determined in advance, allows the fated, inevitable link between law and violent, retributive 'justice', to be un-fated, that is, to be contested. It introduces a human mediacy into law, one that both opens up the question of a justice that exceeds law, and to the concept of historical time in which such a justice, emerging on the basis of the suspension of the order of mythic law, can emerge.

Both genius, wisdom, and the 'educative power' occur in and through the suspension of the mythic apparatus of law, fate, guilt, and violence. They constitute processes that have no finality inscribed within them. On the one hand wisdom is not something which comes to an end but which must be perpetually re-constituted on the basis of experience. Genius, on the other hand, understood as that which is open to the continuing productivity of that which is incomplete. They are linked, therefore, by possibility; genius is open to what may become out of the originary fragment, and wisdom is open to an as yet indeterminate learning out what could and does come to pass. Possibility should thus be understood as that which exceeds what is already given as actual, including actually existing images of what constitutes the possible. This possibility occurs in and as time. But the time of genius and of wisdom is not that of guilt or fate. As a concept of time, fate and guilt always already implicate human events in a given framework whereby they were always determined in advance. Guilt and fate as concepts of time constitute universalities' within which particular instances happen, in which the history of occurrences takes place. In fate, things befall humans. The time of wisdom and genius, by
74

75

CV, 250 Of course, since divine violence can only be recognised retrospectively with regards to its effects, the educative power is

susceptible to being made instrumental, corrupt use of, and may be mis-recognised.

30 contrast is the time of human being, of human history, made and struggled for by human, ethical activity in which the future is not-yet. It is for this reason that Benjamin sometimes characterises the pagan, mythic world as 'pre-historical': Human history as activity, can take place only in the wake of the suspension of the mythic apparatus of fate, law, guilt, and the bloody retributive violence that constitutes a limited and compromised 'justice'. 76

As the examples of both Antigone and Tragedy more generally have suggested, the figures of genius, educative power, and wisdom can be understood to constitute an opening to a justice that is not the immediate result of the retribution demanded by the natural guilt of law: Justice as that which can only occur once the work of genius and wisdom are in operation. Of course, justice remains to be ascribed positive form; it may turn out not to be an object of historical knowledge at all, and as yet it has remained defined negatively in terms of its manifestation as retribution that is aligned to the interests of power (macht). Before the question of the significance of justice is faced head on, the question of historical time must be approached in more depth. In the 'pre-historical', mythic world ruled by law, fate, and guilt, justice is limited to the violence of law. An alternative concept of Justice can therefore only occur in the wake of the discontinuity of mythic recurrence. This discontinuity is the motive of divine violence, genius, and wisdom. Because Justice independent of the law cannot simply be posited- 'circumstances existing already' have no a-priori stake in justice - it must be understood as occurring out of and through the suspension of myth. The thinking of justice therefore must occur in relation to a reconstituted concept of historical time, one distinct from the temporal claims of fate and guilt.

76

This shift from 'inauthentic' time of guilt and fate to authentic human historical time, should not be misunderstood as single, linear event shifting from one to the other after which there is no return. On the contrary, their relation is more intertwined. As was noted earlier, the redemption in tragedy is limited; the 'mysterium' of 'Man' for example contains what will ultimately be revealed as a residue of myth. Within the theoretical writings of Holderlin there is an observation that Benjamin may well have been familiar with: 'Most often poets have been formed at the very beginning or at the end of an epoch'. Poetry, if understood as a linguistic practice with a mediate relationship to language, occurs in between times, in those sites where laws are open to contestation. Holderlin quoted in Warminski, Andrzej (1987) Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 48

31

Chapter 3 Happiness, Historical Time, and a Hunchbacked Justice

What links genius, wisdom, and the 'educative power' of divine violence is the affirmation of that which is not yet established, which is to say, of possibilities inherent in the time of human activity, which is to say, in authentic historical time. What can be understood to characterise an authentic conception of historical time is its independence from any over-arching schema which always already constrains historical events to conforming to structure given in advance. An 'inauthentic temporality' works to efface the presence of this possibility.

The guilt nexus of fate is one such structure of 'inauthentic temporality'; fate figures as a stable transcendental condition for the movement and change definitive of historical difference. If everything that occurs is linked by fate then fate guarantees a position of externality. Fate can stand at the origin of history, un-polluted by its pressures, functioning as part of an explanation of history, but its own beginning cannot be explained by history. What this allows for is the supposition and solidity of a position from which the whole can be taken in, for History to be ascribed factual meaning, and for historical change to be accounted for in a continuous and self-identical structure. Another exemplary instance of inauthentic time that shares a great deal in common with fate comes into focus later in Benjamin's life; the 'empty homogeneous time' of historicism, a time filled by the events of history, events which are objective facts awaiting to be discovered in order to account for the fullness of what was once a contentless form of time. Historicism, as exemplary of both a positivist and progressivist concept of history, is the imposition of sequential, causal, factual continuity onto the past. Like the guilt nexus of fate, historicism presupposes an already determinate temporal structure in which events occur. It presupposes a stable, unchanging, 'eternal image' of the past which lies behind appearance and awaits discovery by a historian.77 Historicism, like guilt and fate, is endowed with a fixed continuity of time that is not subject to history because it is a form that is established prior to being filled by historical content. In historicism, fate, and guilt, events occur within an empty, homogenous, continuous time form. However, the seeds of a challenge to fate, guilt, or historicism lie in the fact that they are all imposed retrospectively. Fate, for instance, is validated only after the misfortune associated with its coming to pass has already occurred. Before fate befalls its victims, there remains uncertainty; is there or is there not an operative fate? Will misfortune inevitably befall? If misfortune does befall was it always inevitable? Where these questions are posable, fate as a temporal operation demands to be lived out, but, crucially, has yet to be lived out. It is in the present of this questioning that the challenge to the guilt context of fate occurs.

77

See Benjamin, Walter (2006) On the Concept of History Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 390-392 (hereafter, OCH)

32 In one of the last texts of his life, 1940'sOn the Concept of History Benjamin opposes the time of historicism, of causes, facts, and continuous sequences, to the time of the 'Now', an authentic conception of the present as the basis of genuine historiography. Historicism, and, by extension, the guilt context of fate (as a similarly naturalised continuity) correspond to a 'certain absence of coherence and rigour in the demands it makes on the present'.78 The present as a locus of historical time and human activity, is the site at which demands are made upon the world. These demands must be understood as having an antagonistic relationship to the passive obligations of the mythic world and the guilt context of fate. It is in the suspension of myth that demands, as we will see, can open up to the possibility of justice. In a reconstituted concept of historical time - which is the setting for more rigourous demands upon the present - Benjamin conceives history as 'the subject of a construction whose setting is not homogeneous, empty time, rather a setting filled by the presence of nowtime (jetztzeit)'.79 Crucial here is the emphasis on construction as an activity; a conception of historical time in which human activity - such as the 'lifting' of the head of genius - is prioritised. Human activity always occurs in a setting structured by a dissymmetry of power (Marx' 'circumstances existing already') and thus activity must contest that which is already given. For historiography to be genuine and constructive, according to Benjamin, it must work to re-establish the 'now' of an event, before its retrospective insertion into the homogeneous causal continuum of historicism or the obligation and debt production of the guilt context of fate. 80

In the 'now' of an event, the power of human 'genius' shines forth, along with the incompleteness and possibility which it bears witness to. However what appears after the imposition of historicism or the guilt context of fate is only the actuality and not the possibility; guilty person and the misfortune of fate rather than the 'innocence' of genius. Benjamin had already expressed an early form of this challenge to historicism in Goethe's Elective Affinities where he states that 'only the decision, not the choice, is inscribed in the book of life...' 81 Where fate and guilt persist, the 'choice', the possibility of difference remained unrecognised, only the appearance of obligatory 'decision' was visible. 82 As originary time forms pre-existing that which occurs, historicism, and the guilt-nexus of fate, cast human historical time in the light of factual inevitability, that is of guilt and causation, of obligations and determinations that preclude the independence of the 'Now' that brings with it the possibility of overcoming the continuity of the mythic apparatus, that as we have seen, includes incontestable law, fate, and guilt.

78

Benjamin Walter (1996). 'The Life of Students' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. p. 37 OCH, 395 The emphasis here is on the word 'work'. This reiterates the necessity of forms of activity. 81 Benjamin, Walter (1996) Goethe's Elective Affinities in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 346 82 This is one of the implications of being fated; blindness to the already present possibility of being un-fated.
79 80

33 Activation of the present as 'Now', as that which is liberated from its guilty debt to the past, does not however imply a perpetual present without any relation to the past. A relation persists, but not one of a guilt which transfers fate chronologically and continuously onto the present. Rather, what was referred to earlier as the 'uni-directionality' and given-ness of history is challenged by the presents' sensitivity toward what Benjamin calls the tradition of the oppressed. In contradistinction to any common understanding of tradition in which substantial customs or practices are cumulated or passed on, Benjamin's conception of tradition evokes not substance but absence: the missed possibilities that historicism or the guilt context of fate effaces in its retrospective imposition of factual, chronological and given continuity. The tradition of the oppressed is grounded upon the idea that 'catastrophe' is the constant of history; 'not an ever present possibility but what in each case is given'. 83 Benjamin's famous figure of the Angel of History surveys this constancy: 'His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet'. 84 The catastrophe is not just what did factually happen, but also, and equally, what did not happen, what was missed and what failed. To the continuum of catastrophe, of the factual and the missed, Benjamin ascribes the name 'Unhappiness' (Ungluck). But we must proceed with care here; catastrophe as a constant continuum is not a pregiven originary, determinate formal structure into which events occur. Unhappiness, or the happiness (gluck) which is absent, is not a form, where a form is understood to guarantee a limited content. On the contrary unhappiness is un-formed. This is to say, this continuum of catastrophe is not a given structure in the way that historicism, or the the guilt context of fate are. Rather its active locus is in the present: For instance, the Angel of History views this 'tradition of the oppressed' retrospectively, from the present, only in the wake of awareness of the failure and the non-occurrence of that which could have occurred. The tradition of the oppressed constitutes an injunction upon the present which is a challenge to be taken up or to be missed, and not, as with the guilt context of fate, an obligation to be fulfilled. We are therefore in the sphere of ethics; where there is the challenge of a choice; to either rise to the voices of past generations or to ignore them. The challenge of ethics can only occur outside of the guilt context of fate, where misfortune is not inevitable, but does remain possible. This ethical relation to the past is most famously expressed in Thesis II of On the Concept of History [...]the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a hidden index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Don't the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak
83

Benjamin, Walter (2006) Central Park Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 185 84 OCH, 392

34 messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. 85 By 'redemption' Benjamin is referring to a redeeming not of the past as it factually was (for the factual past 'as it really was' is the concern of historicism). Rather Benjamin is referring here to a redeeming of possibilities which are opened in every age and every life and are likewise missed in every moment, and then effaced by in the imposition of naturalised continuities' such as the guilt context of fate or in positivist historicism. The possibility in question is the possibility of 'happiness' (gluck). The possibilities of happiness that were missed by passed generations, in the continuum of unhappiness, find their locus in the present generation. If possibility is understood as that which exceeds already given actuality then, as such, the possible is time. 'Happiness' therefore would name the liberation of time from its inclusion within fate or guilt. About this Benjamin is unequivocal some twenty years prior to On the Concept of History where he writes that 'Happiness (gluck)' names that which 'releases the fortunate man (den Glucklichen) from the chains of the fates and the nets of his own fate'.86 But what of the 'weak messianic power' that the present generation is 'endowed' with. To begin with what is being evoked here by the 'messianic'? While this could be approached with reference to various aspects of Benjamin's philosophical project, in this case On the Concept of History will be the focus. In thesis XVII the messianic is described in the context of an 'arrest of happening' and 'a revolutionary chance'.87 Underlying these evocations are both an interruption that brings to an end what is already given, and the reference to 'revolutionary chance' suggests the possibility of a beginning that is not a repetition of sameness. The messiah should not therefore be understood as a religious figure, implicated in the fated 'concatenation' between guilt and atonement. The messiah does not appear at the end of historical time as its final atonement but rather in its midst, as a 'chance', where every chance must be understood as having an outcome, an after-life. The messianic should be understood, like happiness, as a generative interruption, that liberates time as the site of the possibility of happiness ('chance' is of course synonymous with possibility).88 And what make this possibility a 'weak' power is that it is the lowly, short-lived time which is ours to be liberated and which is imbued with possibilities of happiness, which, crucially, are open to failure or being missed altogether. A minimal condition of ethics is that it occurs in a temporal context where contingency, possibility, and incompleteness are present. In this context both happiness and unhappiness remain possible. The capability of failure, accompanied by the danger of the situation and the overwhelming dissymmetry of power in which the present struggles to make history, means that the messianic power can only be weak. The weak messianic power endowed upon the present, is an ethical injunction occurring in a 'now' endowed with the possibility of liberation from the mythic guilt context of fate, or from causal,
85 86 87 88

OCH, 390 FC, 204 OCH, 396 Although there are crucial differences between happiness and the messianic, that are explored in the TheologicoPolitical Fragmentthey ultimately reinforce each other. See

35 successive determinations of historicism.

'Happiness' is thus a figure of ethical activity that is radically separate from either the temporal continuum of inevitable fate and guilt and likewise from incontestable, mythic forms of law. Benjamin's use of the word happiness, which appears throughout his challenging and misfortunate life, relates not to our modern understanding of the word that tends to reference the feelings of an individual. 89 On the contrary Benjamin is evoking the Greek word eudaimonia central to ancient moral and ethical theory.90 In Greek, happiness primarily refers to modalities of activity and the time in which they occur. An interrelation between time and activity: to create a happy time, a time of love, or of peace, of excitement, of ending, or beginning. This explains the proximity between the German for 'fortunate man' (den Glucklichen), and 'happiness' (gluck). Happiness as eudaimonia evokes living well and doing well, constituting an active relation to that which occurs and the claims that the world makes upon you.91 Where these claims are of the order of myth and thus demand passivity, happiness as a liberation of time as possibility from its inclusion within the demonic sphere of myth would constitute an active contestation of that which presents itself as incontestable. Happiness thus constitutes an interruption to the mythic, what has been referred to as a 'caesura of allowing' or generative interruption, in which new possibilities are liberated from structures in which possibility has been excluded. The proximity between ethics and happiness, combined with their radical separation from all the elements of myth opens up an implicit link to justice. For justice, as emphasised, is not possible in relation to law, where law, as the Critique of Violenceshowed, does not rule out recourse to violence in its own establishment or perpetuation. The guarantee of power (macht) revealed through critique at the heart of law radically alienates it from justice. If there is a link then between ethics, happiness, and justice, then it occurs in relation to the 'fortunate man' as the subject position capable of negotiating with law and with the time of guilt and fate. A return here to the final lines of Sophocles' Antigone is conducive to developing this. Both Creon and Antigone, through remaining bound to the order of law, although different in content, both suffer the misfortune of fate. Tragedy as
89

For Walter Benjamins personal, that is biographical, connection to the term 'happiness' see Marder, Elissa (2006) Walter Benjamin's Dream of 'Happiness' in Hanssen, Beatrice (ed.) Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project London: Continuum 90 Parry, Richard, "Ancient Ethical Theory", in Zalta, Edward (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), . Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-ancient/ 91 An older english word for happiness observed by Jonathan Lear in a discussion of happiness and psychoanalysis is particularly useful here; happiness as 'happenstance'; 'the experience of chance things working out well rather than badly'. Happiness, according to Lear, is thinkable (and this is different from possessed) when it becomes possible to appropriate 'possibilities for new possibilities' which are 'breaking out all the time'. For Benjamin, such breaking out of possibilities is occurs only with the suspension of myth, where what is given is no longer given as inevitable. 'Happiness...is not the ultimate goal of our teleologically organized strivings but the ultimate ateleological moment: a chance event going well for us. Quite literally: a lucky break. Analysis puts us in a position to take advantage of certain kinds of chance occurrences: those breaks in psychological structure which are caused by too much of too much. This isn't a teleological occurrence, but a taking-advantage of the disruption of previous attempts to construct a teleology. If one thinks about it ... one will see that it is in such fleeting moments that we find real happiness.' Lear, Jonathan (2000) Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 129.

36 a repetition of the mythic, immediate nexus binding law, guilt, and the violence of fate, opens up the possibility of its revision, and a subject position no longer defined by the immediate determinations of the mythic nexus. If, as Romantic thinker August Schlegel suggested, the subject position of the chorus was that of the audience itself, then the audience, in linking happiness with the wisdom that occurs out of the time of experience in the closing lines, is identical to that of the 'fortunate man' 92 Of happiness the chiefest part Is a wise heart If wisdom is 'part' of happiness, and wisdom is another name for the interruptive capacity of the 'educative power' as an instance of divine violence, then happiness and divine violence can be understood as reiterations of importantly analogous positions. In terms of tragedy, the audience are 'fortunate' and occupy the subject position in which happiness liberates and has done so through making an ally of time. This alliance occurs through and as, times' liberation. The good fortune of the 'fortunate man' is that he, quite simply, has time. Both experience (necessary for wisdom, and thus for laws interruption as fated) and Tragedy, understood as an artistic practice, occur in time. More specifically, as activities' they contain or horde time, and as such liberate time from subordination to myth. To liberate time as the locus of human activity and not of the passive reiteration of fate and guilt that flow from the 'nightmare of the past' onto the 'brains of the living'. The time of history as locus of activity as opposed to the time of mythic recurrence. This is why it is in tragedy (and not the tragedy) that the head of genius, as an originary condition for the 'breach' of demonic fate, first 'lifts' itself 'from the mist of guilt'. The fortunate man needs the time to act out the tragedy of fate, in order to revise and thus contest myth through wisdom gained in temporal experience. Where time is no longer mythic time, in which guilt and fate are inexorably and continuously reiterated, then time as possibility is what links wisdom (as educative power and thus divine violence), genius, and the good fortune of happiness as forms of generative interruption in which myth is suspended. A liberated time as the entrance to a state of existence which is no longer subordinated to the a-priori unjust rule of myth. A liberated time in which justice has become possible. But from where does this time-as-possibility come? If it is not a already given time form, such as the 'empty homogeneous time' of historicism, or the guilty time of fate. Where does it originate? Where is it formed, if it does not pre-exist the events of history? For time as yet unformed possibility does not find its 'origin (ursprung)' regulated by the Kantian transcendental Subject or the Hegelian Subject which is located at the origin of, and is realised through, the passage of Historical reconciliation (versohnung). Rather for Benjamin the novelty of historical succession occurs through 'discontinuous finitude'; The origin of time as possibility occurs not outside of time but in the midst of time. 93 For
92

93

Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1973) Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature trans. Black, John, New York: AMS press p. 76-77 Origin, 38

37 example, as the final thesis of On the Concept of Historyobserves, the figure of the Messiah, as an instance of a generative interruption, may emerge through the 'small gateway in time' that is every second.94 For Benjamin, becoming, or, to use a cognate of the German, springing forth is the result of a reciprocity between becoming and destruction. As the often quoted and crucial passage from The Origin of German Tragic Drama explains; In origin what is meant is not the becoming of something that has sprung forth, but rather that which springs forth out of coming-to-be and passing-away...The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming... 95 What is crucial here is that 'origin' always occurs in the midst of things, in that which has alreadybeen becoming or passing away. The origin of time-as-possibility is a discontinuity in the midst of given continuity of guilt, fate, or causation. But nonetheless origin remains within the stream of becoming; the eddy or interruption does not bring becoming to an end but rather, either awaits readoption by dominant, over-powering forces of the stream, or brings with it the possibility of redirecting the stream in an as yet indeterminate direction. Time as possibility, occurs out of and through intervening, ethical human activity. It begins with the interruption divine violence, genius, happiness and in it continued efficacy the persistence of an 'eddy' that holds back and restrains what had been dominant, is the place of justice. Justice can only be located where there is a continued efficacy of the generative interruption. Justice can be found in the continuity of the discontinuity.

3.1 Justice as Part of the Condition of the World

In Walter Benjamin: Time and JusticeAshraf Noof notes that one of the central concerns to figure in both Benjamin and his correspondent Gershom Scholem's work of this period concerned the idea of locating human action beyond the confines of the subject understood as 'the underlying instance to which the will is attributed'.96 The idea of Justice is one such idea. Benjamin and Scholem can be understood as attempting to separate justice from either an ought or from that which is transcendent. In his diaries, Gershom Scholem writes that 'Justice does not appear to relate to the good will of a subject, rather it is part of the condition of the world. Justice designates the ethical category
94 95

OCH, 397 Origin, 45 96 Noof, Ashraf Walter Benjamin: Time and Justice in Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Volume 1 August 2007. Available Online at http://www.deepdyve.com p. 1

38 of existing, virtue the ethical category of the required. Virtue can be required, justice can in the end only exist as a condition of the world, or as a condition of God.' 97 To understand Justice as 'part of the condition of the world' presupposes a relationship to time as a context of ethical activity. Only certain modalities of time can accommodate Justice as part of the worlds condition. The time of myth and its apparatus of incontestable law, guilt, and fate, it has been emphasised, is not one of these modalities because the order of law precludes the possibility of anything beyond a limited concept of justice as retribution. The is the subject of another of Benjamin's enigmatic fragments of the early 1920's, the appropriately titledThe Meaning of Time in the Economy of the Moral World. 98 In this short text it is the Law's 'tendency for retribution' that distances it from 'the moral world'. If 'retribution' (an instance of mythic violence) is one conception of justice then the concern of the 'moral world' is a state of existence in which 'retribution' is not a structuring force upon what constitutes justice. 'Retribution' as noted, describes the work of fate, in which decision and its effect are given in advance and inscribed upon mere life, for its own sake. Retribution is brings with it a given finality; it is an atonement for guilt, in the wake of which, Benjamin notes, the guilty are 'purified' of Law. Retribution is carried out, performed, in the attempt to 'purify', that is, to restitute a prior, lost state of 'innocence'. In the carrying out of the retributive sentence, a fantasy of closure and restitution is attained. And with closure, contestation becomes impossible (the carrying out of capital punishment is exemplary here; the possibility of appeal is only relevant prior to the falling of the guillotine). As such, 'retribution', Benjamin observes, is 'fundamentally indifferent to the passage of time'. 99 The apotheosis of the finality of mythic retribution is 'The Last Judgement' when 'all retribution is allowed free reign' and every postponement is mocked as 'vain procrastination'.100 From within the sphere of Law, if retribution or 'The Last Judgement', is inevitable, fated, then time has no 'meaning' in excess of the repetition of the same. By antithetic contrast, in 'the economy of the moral world', which exists contrary to Law, time does have meaning, and, crucially, power. Time is that which allows for the perpetual deferral of closure, deferral of the work of retribution. In order to struggle against retribution forgiveness finds its powerful ally in time. For time, in which Ate pursues the evildoer is not the lonely calm of fear but the tempestuous storm of forgiveness which precedes the onrush of the Last Judgement and against which she cannot
97

Gershom Scholem Tagebucher 1913-17. Edited by Karlfried Grunder, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Friedrich Niewohner. Frankfurt. Judisher Vrelag. 1995. Pages 401. Unpublished translation by Andrew Benjamin. 98 While in the Selected Works 1 the translation is given asThe Meaning of Time in the Moral UniverseWerner Hamacher's translator Kirk Wetters opt for the more extensive and literal, The Meaning of Time in the Economy of the Moral WorldSee Hamacher 2002 p. 104. For original translation see Benjamin, Walter (1996). 'The Meaning of Time in the Moral World' in Selected Writings. Volume 1. 19131926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 286-288 (Hereafter 'MT') 99 MT, 287 100 MT, 287. The Last Judgement is the paradigm instance of closure and finality, and as such is the antithesis of the figure of the Messiah as Benjamin has conceived it.

39 advance.101 The shift from Law's retributive violence to the 'forgiveness' of the 'economy' of the moral world is the perpetual deferral of closure. 'Ate' is a figure of retribution who works in time. But once time has become a site of contestation, through the cessation of the work of fate and guilt which simultaneously introduces processes of morality and forgiveness, Justice becomes freed from its equation with law and retribution. Justice becomes the meaning of time in the economy of moral world, where 'economy' as Andrew Benjamin has noted in his reading of the text, 'is the underscoring of the ineliminability of process'.102 Justice can only occur in the continuity of the work of forgiveness and the deferral of 'the Last Judgement'. This process is does not restitute a prior state (as with the fantasy of retribution), and is not without internal antagonism; forgiveness, as a condition of justice is a 'tempestuous storm' of uncertainty and contest. Where violent retribution, 'indifferent' to time, 'purifies' mere life of Law, time is the locus of the forgiveness of guilt. 103 Justice thus names the persistence of the eddy which absorbs, re-directs, possesses time, and, in doing so, averts the false, fantasy finality of retributive 'justice'. It is for this reason that the word suspension is most effective for describing what is at work in the struggle against a mythic apparatus. Myth precludes the possibility of contestation; what exists in a given time, is presented, for example, as 'nature' or as fate. The suspension of myth opens what had appeared as incontestable up to contestation. This necessitates activity; this has been highlighted through examinations of figures of 'happiness', 'divine violence', and 'genius'. But acts that suspend cannot be understood as final or as independent; Suspending, ensuring the persistent effectiveness of the suspension, necessitates the continuation of activity, for the danger of the return of forms of incontestable myth haunts world history. Activities can prevent the return of mythic fate through blocking the retributive consequences of what has occurred in the past, and perpetually keeping time open to wisdom. Where these activities define a condition of existence, it is possible to find Justice, but it will always be (to use another figure that permeated Benjamin's life) hunchbacked, weak, makeshift and inconclusive, susceptible to defeat at the hands of bloody violence. It can be argued that this is what is at work in the Commission that followed the breaking apart of Apartheid South Africa. In the establishment of a post-Apartheid order, occurring out of the decay of the previous order, legal guilt was retroactively imposed upon violence(s) which had previously been sanctioned by the law. A gaze over History would suggest that this retro-actively imposed legal guilt would demand retributive punishment. Not only the does the order of law, in its most demonic features, demand blood, but there also persists an urge for retribution that is 'human, all too human'. The desire for retributive punishment is not only justifiable from the perspective of the law, but also understandable from the admittedly vague perspective of 'human, all too human'. Both perspectives demand retributive punishment and there lies great danger in an alliance between them. Neither
101 102

103

MT, 286 Benjamin, Andrew (2011) Morality, Law and the Place of Critique. Walter Benjamin's The Meaning of Time in the Moral World Unpublished p. 5 CV, 252

40 perspective, however, operates in the medium of justice. Michel Foucault, who spent the greater part of the 1970's researching the relationship between power and punishment, is aware of this when he writes 'To punish is the most difficult thing there is': Because punishment is implicated 'circumstances existing already', in preservation and establishment, it is not justice. 104 Again in his diaries, in a note that made a great impression on Benjamin, Scholem wrote that 'justice in its deepest sense means this and nothing else: that, though it is indeed permissible to judge, the execution of a judgment remains as something entirely different'.105 The 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' could be understood in this light. As a judgement that stands in for retribution. As an attempt to defer and eddy the desire for retribution that follows as a consequence of the atrocities that occurred. It is the wisdom that punishing is the most difficult thing there is that opens up the possibility of justice. Because of this, this can only be a weak, hunchbacked justice; a part of the state of the world, and not its total condition.

104

Foucault, M. To Punish Is The Most Difficult Thing There Is in ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, (2000) Power: Essential Works of Foucault vol 3 New York: The New Press p. 464 105 Gershom, Scholem (1995) Tagebucher 1913-17. Ed. Karlfried Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Friedrich Niewohner. Frankfurt. Judisher Vrelag. 1995. p. 401

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