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ON THE LIMITS OF VIOLENCE

GIORGIO AGAMBEN
Editors introduction In February 1970, a twenty-eight-year-old Giorgio Agamben sends a letter to Hannah Arendt. After introducing himself as a friend of Dominique Fourcade, with whom Agamben attended Martin Heideggers 1966 and 1968 seminars in Provence, Agamben proceeds to express his gratitude to Arendt: her books, he writes, provided him with a decisive experience. He then indicates his intention to join with others in the gap between past and future, and to work within the horizon that Arendt herself had opened up. He signs the letter, Cordially Yours, Giorgio Agamben. But these are not his final words to her. In a postscript Agamben adds: You will excuse if I take the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence which I should have been unable to wright [sic] without the guide of your books.1 A 1985 interview, Unidea di Giorgio Agamben, in the Roman newspaper Reporter sheds some light on the essay that Agamben sent to Arendt in 1970.2 Responding to a question about his involvement with 1968 social movementsposed by Adriano Sofri, one of the cofounders of the extra-parliamentary leftist movement Lotta ContinuaAgamben answers that he never really felt at ease with 1968. He was reading Arendt at the time, an author whom his friends in the movement considered a reactionary, someone absolutely not to be discussed. In fact, the essay on the limits of violence in which Agamben was coming to terms with Arendts thought was rejected by a political review and was ultimately published in a literary journal. While an oeuvre sometimes functions as a historical detonator [detonatore storico] accelerating revolutionary moments, that was not the case with Arendt. Agamben concludes that such a missed appointment with history is one of the most humiliating experiences that time itself affords us. Here then for the first time in English is the essay in which Agamben first attempted to come to terms with Arendts philosophy of history, the essay that he sent to Arendt and that she referred to in the German edition of On Violence.3 The original essay, Sui limiti della violenza, appeared in Nuovi argomenti in the winter of 1970.4 Lorenzo Fabbri

Agambens letter and Arendts response are held at the Library of Congress and may be viewed online. The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Correspondence File, 19381976. Agambens letter appears at the end of this essay. 2 Adriano Sofri, Unidea di Giorgio Agamben. Reporter 910 Nov. 1985: 3233. 3 Macht und Gewalt (1970) mentions Sui limiti della violenza in a footnote: 35n44a. 4 Nuovi argomenti 17 (1970): 15973.
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Fifty years after the publication of Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence, and more than sixty years after Georges Sorels Reflections on Violence, a reconsideration of the limits and the meaning of violence stands little risk of appearing untimely.1 Today, humanity lives under the constant threat of its own instantaneous destruction by a form of violence that neither Benjamin nor Sorel could have imagined, a violence that has ceased to exist on a human scale. However, the exigency of rethinking violence is not a question of scale; it is a question of violences increasingly ambiguous relation to politics. Thus, this critique diverges from Benjamins exposition of violences relation to law and justice, seeking instead to determine its relation to politics, and in so doing, to uncover the question of violence in and for itself. In other words, we aim to determine the limitsif such limits existthat separate violence from the sphere of human culture in its broadest sense. These limits will allow us to address the question of the only violence that might still exist on a human scale: revolutionary violence. At first glance, the relation between violence and politics appears a contradiction in terms: European history itself is predicated on the notion that violence and politics are mutually exclusive. The Greeks, who invented most of the concepts we use to articulate our experience of politics today, used the term polis to describe a way of life founded on the word, and not on violence. To be political (to live in the polis) was to accept the principle that everything should be decided by the word and by persuasion, rather than by force or by violence.2 The essential characteristic of political life was thus peitharkhia, the power of persuasion; it was a power so revered that even those citizens condemned to death were persuaded to die by their own hand. The Greeks association of politics with languageand their understanding of language as essentially nonviolentwas so pervasive that anything outside the polis, including encounters with slaves or barbarians, was defined aneu logou: a phrase that did not refer to actual physical deprivation of the word, but exclusion from the only way of life in which language alone had meaning. The idea that language precludes any possible violence, as Benjamin rightly notes, is borne out by the fact that lying was not punishable under any ancient legal code. Political life as peitharkhia depended upon a particular understanding of languages relation to truth: namely, the belief that truth, in and of itself, could exert persuasive power on the human mind. The Greeks did not view persuasion as a specific technique such as sophistry, but rather as an essential characteristic of truth. From its origins, Greek philosophy was in conflict with the political sphere, where truths seemed to be losing the power to persuadeone need only think of Platos bitterness as he helplessly watched his master Socrates condemned to death. Feeling increasingly exposed to the threat of violence, philosophers began seeking truths outside the politico-temporal sphere, truths radically removed from any possibility of violence. Seen in this light, our experience of politics is unlike that of the Greeks: we know firsthand that Greek philosophers were right to suspect that truth in politics cannot persuade against violence. Furthermore, today we are witnessing the proliferation of a form of violence totally unknown to the ancients, as more and more lies are introduced into the political sphere. We can thus say that the association of language with nonviolence no longer holds up to scrutiny. Indeed, the dissolution of this relation forms a dividing line between our experience of politics and that of the ancients; any political theory founded on Greek suppositions is inevitably unreliable today. The modern age can claim the dubious honor of moving beyond a simple recognition of languages suggestive power, enacting a calculated plot to introduce violence into
Modified from the original to correct a reference to the publication date of Benjamins Kritik der Gewalt (1921).Trans. 2 See Arendts description of the Greek concept of politics in The Human Condition, chapter 1.
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language itself. Today, organized linguistic violence aimed at manipulating consciousness is such a common experience that any theory of violence must address its expression in language. Moreover, linguistic violence is no longer limited to the political sphere: it has entered the daily realm of human divertissements. The explosive diffusion of pornography at the end of the eighteenth century was nothing other than the discovery that the experience of certain linguistic constructions can, in certain contexts, provoke reactions entirely removed from the will of the individual. Language can influence the bodys instincts, overpowering the will and reducing humans to nature. Language can do what violence does: language can arouse. In short, the appeal of pornography is its ability to introduce violence into the realm of nonviolence: language. To this end, the Marquis de Sade, a serious and coherent scholar of pornography, devised a deliberate project (a perfect counterpart to the Kantian project seeking a maxim for action that could be elevated to universal law) to find a form of violence that would go on having perpetual effect, in such a way that so long as I lived, at every hour of the day and as I lay sleeping at night, I would be constantly the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder might broaden to the point where it brought about a corruption so universal or a disturbance so formal that even after my life was over I would survive in the everlasting continuation of my wickedness. [Sade 525] Sade found his universal catalyst in linguistic violence. And yet, careful analysis reveals that pornography shares some essential qualities with another form of linguistic expression, one that usually occupies the highest position in any hierarchy of cultural values: poetry. It is no accident that Sades search for a universal catalyst within linguistic violence coincides with Hlderlins description (the first of many to use figurative violence to articulate the experience of poetry) of the tragic words violence, where the word seizes the body so that it is the latter which kills [114]. In many ways, the idea that violence inheres in poetic language can be traced back to Plato. Curiously, few have grasped the motive behind his much-debated ostracism of the poets. In some respects it is a perfectly explicit manifestation of the belief that persuasion should never be violent, one of the cornerstones of maieutika, the Socratic theory that regards free linguistic relations among human beings as a midwifes art. Maieutics is incompatible with violence: as violence is an irruption of the outside that immediately denies the liberty of its victim, it cannot reveal inner creative spontaneity, only bare corporeality. Poetry introduces a form of persuasion that does not rely on truth, but rather on the peculiar emotional effects of rhythm and music, acting both violently and bodily Plato was thus bound to cast the poets out of the city. Perhaps the greatest divide between our experience of politics and that of the Greeks lies in our awareness that persuasion itself becomes violence in certain forms and circumstances, specifically when persuasion goes beyond the free linguistic relation of two human beings, and is taken up by modern techniques of reproducing spoken and written language. This is the essence of the only widespread form of violence that our society can claim to have invented, at least in its modern form: propaganda. Here it is necessary to confront another of our societys inventions, namely, the theory of violence that has emerged in our era, completely upending traditional ideas. In this theory, violence is not at all incompatible with the midwifes art, as Plato believed. Rather, it is, as Marx writes in Capital, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one [824]. This phrase is noteworthy, not only because one could argue that all modern discussions of violence are simply attempts at exegesis, but because Marxs characterization of politics and society reveals his understanding of the relation of violence to politics. Of course, the above observation was not meant to be applied to all kinds of On the Limits of Violence / Giorgio Agamben 105

violence; the violence that demolishes an old social order by exercising maieutic action upon a new one is distinct from the violence that preserves existing law, opposing change of any kind. The problem lies in identifying a just violence, a violence oriented towards something radically new, a violence that can legitimately call itself revolutionary. The most common criterion employed to identify this violence is drawn from a kind of historical Darwinism. This theoryoften mistakenly associated with orthodox Marxism, but actually derived from bourgeois sociological constructions of history influenced by Darwin and developed in the late nineteenth centuryconfigures History as a linear progression of necessary laws, similar to the laws governing the natural world. Accordingly, the Marxian conception of man and nature, and the radical transformation contained therein (their Aufhebung, in dialectical terms), is clumsily construed as reducing History to prevailing ideas of nature in nineteenth-century science.3 In this theoretical framework, the Hegelian reconciliation of liberty and necessitywhich Marx consistently criticizedbecomes the precondition for establishing a reign of mechanistic necessity that contains no space for free and conscious human action. Within this framework, identifying just violence is no problem at all: if violence is the midwife of history, it need only hasten and facilitate the (inevitable) discovery of Historys necessary laws. Violence that serves this end is just; violence that resists this end is unjust. To appreciate just how clumsy this interpretation is, we need only consider that it paints the revolutionary as a naturalist who discovers a plant species destined for extinction and then uses everything in his power to hasten its demise so that he may realize the laws of evolution. This was precisely the model adopted by totalitarian movements in the twentieth century, whose self-proclaimed exclusive right to revolutionary violence fostered involutional processes within authentic revolutionary movements. This was exactly what happened in Nazi Germany with the deportation of the Jews, and what happened in Russia with the great purges of 1935, when whole Soviet populations were deportedthe only difference being that Hitler sought to hasten the realization of a natural law (the superiority of the Aryan race), while Stalin believed he was hastening the institution of an equally necessary historical law. Even if we could ignore the disastrous political consequences that this theory of violence has wrought, we would still be able to identify its true defect: namely, that it situates the justification for violence outside of violence itself. In other words, it simply places violence within a broader theory of means that justify a superior end; the end is the sole criterion to determine the justice of the means. Benjamin correctly noted that, while such a framework can justify the application of violence, it fails to justify the principle of violence itself. Ultimately, any theory that defines the legitimacy of revolutionary means through the justice of their end is as contradictory as legalistic theories that guarantee a just end by legitimizing repressive means. Violence in nature may only be called just by those who believe in cosmic plans and divine providence; human violence may only be called just by those who believe that history is a steady advancement along the predetermined route of linear time (the vision of vulgar progressivism). In European culture, the need for theodicythe philosophical justification of Godarose only when the capacity to reconcile historys cruelty with divine goodness had been lost, extinguishing immediate faith in divine justice. Likewise, the need to justify violence arose only when all consciousness of violences original significance had been lost. A theory of revolutionary violence is meaningless within historical theodicy, which paradoxically renders the revolutionary into a kind of Pangloss, convinced that everything is happening for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.
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It is well known that contemporary science, having abandoned this idea, no longer derives natural laws from a mechanistic model of the world.

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In light of all this, we do not seek to identify a justification of violence (the means to a just end). Rather, we are searching for a violence that needs no justification, that carries the right to exist within itself. As Sorel and Benjamin reflected on possible theories of revolutionary violence, they both recognized the necessity of breaking the vicious cycle of means and ends in order to discover a form of violence that would, by its very nature, be irreducible to any other. Sorel distinguishes between force, which aims at authority and powerin other words, the creation of a new stateand proletarian violence, which aims at abolishing the state. For Sorel, proletarian violence had been misunderstood primarily because Marx, while offering a detailed and thorough description of the capitalist orders violent evolution, had been quite sparing in his account of the proletariats organization: The consequence of this inadequacy of Marxs work was that Marxism deviated from its real nature. The people who pride themselves on being orthodox Marxists have not wished to add anything essential to what their master has written and they have always imagined that, in order to argue about the proletariat, they must make use of what they have learned from the history of the bourgeoisie. They have never suspected, therefore, that a distinction should be drawn between the force that aims at authority, endeavouring to bring about an automatic obedience, and the violence that would smash that authority. According to them, the proletariat must acquire force just as the bourgeoisie acquired it, use it as the latter used it, and end finally by establishing a socialist State which will replace the bourgeois State. [Sorel 16970] Benjamin expands upon the Sorelian theory of a general proletarian strike, finding his model of revolutionary violence in the distinction between mythic violence, which imposes law and may thus be called dominant, and pure and immediate violence, which seeks to impose no law, not even in the form of ius condendum. Instead, pure and immediate violence ousts both law and the force that upholds it, the State, thereby inaugurating a new historical age. However, in both cases the objective of finding a violence that contains its own principle and justification remains only half fulfilled. Ultimately, the criterion remains teleological: the end of ousting the State and instituting a new historical order is the determining factor. Despite this, both Sorel and Benjamin push themselves to an outlying threshold from which we can begin to perceive the outlines of a theory of revolutionary violence. After all, what is violence that imposes no law? Isnt violence divorced from the assertion of power a contradiction in terms? What gives revolutionary violence the miraculous ability to blast open the historical continuum, beginning a new era? These questions will guide our approach as we consider a possible theory of revolutionary violence. A violence that deliberately refrains from enforcing law, and instead breaks apart the continuity of time to found a new era is not as inconceivable as it initially seems. We know of at least one example of such violence, though it is situated outside our civilized experience: sacred violence. Most primitive peoples celebrated violent rituals designed to rupture the homogeneous flux of profane time. These rituals resurrected primordial chaos, making humans contemporaries of the gods and granting them access to the original dimension of creation. Whenever the life of the community was threatened, whenever the cosmos seemed empty and vacant, primitive peoples would turn to this regeneration of time; only then could a new era (a new revolution of time) begin. Curiously, these rites of regeneration were often celebrated among peoples commonly considered to be the creators of history: Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Iranians, Romans. It is almost as though these peoples, no longer bound to a way of life determined by purely cyclical and biological temporality, felt more keenly the need to periodically regenerate time, ritually reaffirming the violence at the origin of their history. On the Limits of Violence / Giorgio Agamben 107

The desire to reintroduce the time of original creation through sacred violence did not arise from a pessimistic refusal of life or reality. On the contrary, it was precisely and only through the sudden irruption of the sacred and the interruption of profane time that primitive humans could fully engage with the cosmos, asserting power through the extreme act of spilling their own blood. In this way, they regained the authority to participate in the creation of culture and a historical world. The conception of the polis lent a special urgency to Greek examinations of sacred violence, which articulated its unsettling power in the figure of Dionysus, a god who dies and is reborn. Sacred violence reveals itself where humans intuit the essential proximity of life and death, violence and creation; it emerges when humans discover that the experience of this proximity is rebirth and the generation of new time. Seen in this light, the closing words of Euripidess Bacchae become significant. The tragedy, which tells of the conflict between the gods sacred violence and the tyrants profane violence, concludes with an expression of mans eternal faith in a new, unexpected possibility: the possibility of restarting time. Many things the gods accomplish unexpectedly. What we waited for does not come to pass, while for what remained undreamed the god finds ways. [8687] In The German Ideology, Marx draws an explicit connection between the proletarian experience of revolution and the ability to restart history and found society along new lines. He writes that the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew [60]. The ability to open a new historical age belongs solely to a revolutionary class that experiences its own negation in the negation of the ruling class. Applying Marxs characterization of the revolutionary experience to the question of violence will reveal the criterion necessary to our inquiry. Revolutionary violence is not a violence of means, aimed at the just end of negating the existing system. Rather, it is a violence that negates the self as it negates the other; it awakens a consciousness of the death of the self, even as it visits death on the other. Only the revolutionary class can know that enacting violence against the other inevitably kills the self; only the revolutionary class can have the right (or perhaps, the terrible imperative) to violence. Like sacred violence before it, revolutionary violence can be described as passion, in its etymological sense: self-negation and self-sacrifice. When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that repressive violence (which enforces law) and delinquent violence (which defies law) are no different from the violence aimed at establishing new laws and new power: in each case, negation of the other fails to become negation of the self. Executive violence is fundamentally impure, regardless of its objectiveas conventional wisdom recognizes, vilifying both the hangman and the copbecause it always excludes the only hope of redemption, it refuses to negate the self as it negates the other. Revolutionary violence alone can resolve the contradiction that Hegel described as a basic dissonance in the concept of violence: force or violence destroys itself forthwith in its very conception. It is a manifestation of will that cancels and supersedes a manifestation or visible expression of will [Philosophy of Right 33]. Thus, there is but one criterion by which violence may call itself revolutionary. Experience tells us that our society is hardly ever conscious of the fundamental contradiction of the violence it enacts. Most violent revolts against the dominant class do not bring about revolution, just as most doses of medicine do not bring about miraculous cures. Only those who consciously confront their own negation through violence may shake off

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all the muck of ages and begin the world anew. Only they may aspire, as revolutionaries always have, to call a messianic halt capable of opening a new chronology (a novus ordo saeclorum) and a new experience of temporalitya new History. Revolutionary violence must be understood in light of its relation to death, a fact that allows us to extend our inquiry to revolutionary violences relation to culture. Every culture aspires to overcome death. Everything that humankind has thought, known, written, or created as culture has been created, written, known, and thought with the aim of making peace with death. This is the basis of our perpetual inclination to separate violence and language: language is, first and foremost, the power we wield against death, the only possible space for reconciliation. To the eternal question why is there something, rather than nothing, culture responds by exploring the mystery that Benjamin once called that object, to which in the last instance the veil is essential [351]; culture transports us to a region where nothing and something, life and death, creation and negation reveal themselves as inextricably bound, bringing us to the very limits of languages possibilities. Once it has led us to the threshold of what cannot be known through language, culture exhausts its function. Because it aims at reconciling us to death, culture can go no further without negating itself. Revolutionary violence alone may cross this threshold. It occurs in the stunning realization of the indissoluble unity of life and death, creation and negation. This realization can only occur in a sphere beyond language, which radically disturbs and dispossesses humankind. Violence, when it becomes self-negation, belongs neither to its agent nor its victim; it becomes elation and dispossession of the selfas the Greeks understood in their figure of the mad god. The living cannot recognize their own essential proximity to death without negating themselves, and this contradiction acts as the seal guarding the most sacred and profound mystery of human existence. As an experience of self-negation, revolutionary violence is the arrheton par excellence, the unsayable that perpetually overwhelms the possibility of language and eludes all justification. It is precisely by going beyond language, by negating the self and powers of speech, that humanity gains access to the original sphere where the knowledge of mystery and culture breaks apart, allowing words and deeds to generate a new beginning. At the dawn of every history aimed at ensuring security and making peace with death, it shall be written: In the beginning, there was the word. At the dawn of every new temporal order, however, it shall be written: In the beginning, there was violence. This is both the limit and the insuppressible truth of revolutionary violence. By crossing the threshold of culture and occupying a zone inaccessible to language, revolutionary violence casts itself into the Absolute, validating Hegels observation that the most profound representation of truth is contained in the violent image of the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk [Phenomenology 27]. Translated by Elisabeth Fay

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WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Goethes Elective Affinities. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19131926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 297360. Print. Euripides. The Bacchae of Euripides. Trans. C. K. Williams. New York: Farrar, 1990. Print. Hegel, G. H. W. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. . Philosophy of Right. Trans. S. W. Dyde. New York: Cosimo, 2008. Print. Hlderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters on Theory. Trans. Thomas Pfau. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988. Print. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: Modern Lib., 1906. Print. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus, 1998. Print. Sade, Marquis de. Juliette. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove, 1968. Print. Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Trans. Thomas Ernest Hulme with Jeremy Jennings. Ed. Jeremy Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Trans. of Rflexions sur la violence. Paris: Pages libres, 1908.

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Letter from Giorgio Agamben to Hannah Arendt, 21 Feb. 1970. The Hannah Arendt Collection at the Library of Congress (Correspondence, General, 19381976, Ab-Am miscellaneous 19651975. Document no. 004722). Published with the permission of the author.

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