“A MORE EXACT CRITERION”: LAW’S VIOLENCE AND

THE POSSIBILITY OF NONVIOLENCE IN THE WORK

OF WALTER BENJAMIN

James Martel*

For Walter Benjamin, the law’s violence is a given. By

“violence,” Benjamin does not merely mean killing, hurting, and so
forth—the ordinary meaning of that term in English. In German,
Benjamin uses the term Gewalt, which has connotations not only of
that sort of violence but also, and perhaps more importantly, of
force, authority, and power. *1 While ordinarily law is seen as the
antidote to violence, for Benjamin, on the contrary, it is the source of
violence. The law is violent, in his view, because it is based on false
sources of authority; it projects its origins and bases onto screens of
truth, justice, and God, whereas it is, in fact, an entirely and merely
human contrivance.2 For Benjamin, although truth, justice, and
God are all real and transcendental, we as human beings have no
access to them whatsoever (in his view, the Fall of Adam is the
critical moment in human history; ever since, we have been
alienated from God and the real world) . 3 In the Critique of Violence,
Benjamin tells us that all law is part of what he calls “mythic
violence,” which is the false projection of authority and the
promotion of an arbitrary and self-promoting set of principles as
transcendent and right.4 In this Essay, I look at Benjamin’s ideas
about legal violence in order to think about the possibility of
nonviolence. Benjamin argues that a nonviolent alternative to

* Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University.

1. Walter Benjamin , Zur Kritik der Gewalt, in Walter Benjamin :
Gesammelte Schriften Band II. 1, at 179, 200 (Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann
Schweppenhauser eds., 1980); see also Gewalt Definition, Collins German-
English Dictionary, http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-
english/gewalt (last visited July 6, 2014).
2. Walter Benjamin , Critique of Violence, in Walter B enjamin :
Selected Writings Volume 1:1913-1926, at 236, 247-48 (Michael W. Jennings
et al. eds., 1996); see also Peter Suber, Amendment, in 1 The P hilosophy OF
Law: An Encyclopedia 31, 31-32 (Christopher B. Gray ed., 1999).
3. Walter B enjamin, On Language as Such and the Language of Man, in
Walter Benjamin : Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926, supra note 2, at
62, 70-71; see also Art Lindsley, Creation, Fall, Redemption, Knowing & D oing,
Winter 2009, at 6.
4. Benjamin , supra note 2, at 236, 248-50.

757
758 WAKE FO REST LA W REVIEW [Vol. 49

mythic violence is possible. But, it is not always clear for Benjamin

th a t this means th a t hum an beings should never themselves act in
ways th a t we might ordinarily consider to be violent.5 R ather than
resort to any absolute judgments about w hat we m ust do and what
we m ust not do, Benjamin provides us with a set of guidelines and
tools by which we can begin to think about ways to act both legally
and politically th at do not rely on the kind of fetishistic state
violence to which he is so deeply opposed.6 As I will argue further,
for Benjamin, it is not so much th at there are times when we are
“allowed” to commit violence and other times when we are not. He
will not give us these kinds of answers. Instead, for Benjamin, in
each moment we m ust always decide—locally, specifically, and
without any certain transcendental principles—what we m ust do
both as a community and as individuals. Although nonviolence is
possible for Benjamin, it is no more a blanket set of values than
violence is a means th a t he would always oppose. For Benjamin, we
m ust think differently about our actions and also about our own
personal and collective responsibilities. Each time we act, we are
accountable only to ourselves, and we can never justify our deeds
through recourse to words like justice and righteousness. Thus the
burden of the law falls fully and only on us and, with it, our
responsibility for acts of violence and nonviolence alike.

I. B enjamin ’s Cosmology
To begin this inquiry, let me first lay out some of Benjamin’s
basic cosmology to demonstrate where violence comes from for
Benjamin and how we might address it. In his strongly theologically
inflected theory, as already noted, the hum an condition is
characterized and shaped above all by the Fall of humanity. In his
essay, On Language as Such and the Language of Man, Benjamin
tells us th at Adam’s job in paradise was to give a spoken name to
the objects he encountered in the garden.7 This name corresponded
to the mute, true name th a t God had already given these things. In
this way, Adam engaged in a direct and unmediated encounter with
reality. His act of naming was not a m atter of representation but
rather, one could say, presentation; in speaking the names of things,
Adam simply acknowledged their presence before him.
With the Fall, all of this changed. Benjamin writes of this: “The
knowledge to which the snake seduces, th a t of good and evil, is
nameless. It is vain in the deepest sense . . . . Knowledge of good

5. Id. at 244-45.
6. Id. at 250-51.
7. Benjamin, supra note 3, at 62, 68—69.
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION” 759

and evil abandons name; it is a knowledge from outside, the

uncreated imitation of the creative word.”8
It is this “uncreated imitation of the creative word” that
constitutes the current human realm for Benjamin.9 Blocked from
any direct relationship to the world as it really is, our only option is
to represent the false projection of ideas and truths onto a world
that we have effectively abandoned. Choosing knowledge over
truth, human beings inherently become idolaters. Our relationship
to the material world changes from one in which we acknowledge its
existence, to one in which we seek to use the world instrumentally
for our own advantages. The world in turn displays a “deep
sadness” at our abandonment, and we become alienated from our
very reality . 10 What results is a false miasma of misrepresentation,
which Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria.” *11 One of the key facets
of such phantasm is mythic violence. 12
Benjamin discusses mythic violence in the Critique of Violence.
In that essay, he runs through much of the legal doctrine of his time,
and ours, recognizing natural and positive law and the various ways
in which we ground legal decisions in some kind of external basis. 13
In all cases, he argues, we are working with an ends versus means
distinction that is intended to guide and produce law, albeit with
very different sorts of ends depending on whether we are talking
about positive or natural law. 14 Benjamin writes: “With regard to
the first of these [laws], it is clear that the most elementary
relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means, and,
furthermore, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of
means, not in the realm of ends.” 15
Benjamin goes on to argue that the problem with this way of
thinking is that the ends on which we rely to determine what is good
law and what is bad law are not in fact available to us . 16 He writes:

8. Id. at 71.
9. Id.
10. Id. at 72.
11. Phantasmagoria Definition, M erriam-Webster Dictionary,
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phantasmagoria (last visited June
4, 2014).
12. Benjamin , supra note 3, at 72-73.
13. Benjamin , supra note 2, at 248-52.
14. Id. at 236, 248-49.
15. Id. at 236. For a good reading of the Critique of Violence, see P eter
F enves, T he Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of T ime
(2011). See also Beatrice H anssen, Critique of Violence: Between
P oststructuralism and Critical Theory (2000); Andrew Benjamin , Working
with Walter Benjamin : Recovering a P olitical P hilosophy (2013).
16. Benjamin , supra note 2, at 236.
760 WAKE FOREST LAW REVIEW [Vol. 49

These observations provide a critique of violence with premises

that are more numerous and more varied than they may
perhaps appear. For if violence is a means, a criterion for
criticizing it might seem immediately available. It imposes
itself in the question whether violence, in a given case, is a
means to a just or an unjust end. A critique of it would then
he implied in a system of just ends. This, however, is not so.
For what such a system, assuming it to be secure against all
doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a
principle, but, rather the criterion for cases of its use. The
question would remain open whether violence, as a principle,
could be a moral means even to just ends. To resolve this
question, a more exact criterion is needed, which would
discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without
regard for the ends they serve.17
Here, Benjamin is saying th a t if we really could access just
ends, as God does, then we would be able to employ means without
concern about their justice—the justice would be implicit in its
connection to those ends. Since we cannot know these ends,
however, we lose the ability to distinguish between our acts. We
need, Benjamin tells us, “a more exact criterion” to determine the
nature and benefit of our acts.18 To do so, we m ust “discriminate
within the sphere of means themselves” without regard for the ends
they serve.19
This is where Benjamin’s notion of mythic violence becomes
relevant. The concept of mythic violence serves Benjamin as part of
a criterion of how to discern and discriminate among possible acts.
As already noted, for Benjamin, mythic violence is a set of means
th a t are oriented towards the false ends to which we are all meant
to pay homage.20 It is “mythic” because it is based on these
projections.21 It is “violent” because these projections are enforced
on the entire political and legal community.22 Thus, Benjamin
writes: “Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic
manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally
identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the
latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function,
the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory.”23
Here we see how law is itself not only a form of violence but also
the source of it for Benjamin. Law is the basis for the mechanics of

17. Id.
18. Id.
19. Id.
20. Id. at 248-49.
21. Id. at 248.
22. Id.
23. Id. at 249.
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION” 761

phantasm , a mechanism by which such phantasm s become taken as

valid, authoritative, necessary, and even irresistible.
The law is violent in two senses for Benjamin. First, as
previously noted, the law is violent because of its self-imposition and
false projection .24 Second, in the absence of any genuine basis for
authority, the law disguises and allows an inherently and
irremediably arbitrary power to be given to the agents of the state .25
We can see this quite clearly, for example, in his discussion of the
role of the police. He writes:

The assertion that the ends of police violence are always

identical or even connected to those of general law is entirely
untrue. Rather, the “law” of the police really marks the point
at which the [S]tate, whether from impotence or because of the
immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer
guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it
desires at any price to attain. Therefore, the police intervene
“for security reasons” in countless cases where no clear legal
situation exists . . . . Unlike law, which acknowledges in the
“decision” determined by place and time a metaphysical
category that gives it a claim to critical evaluation, a
consideration of the police institution encounters nothing
essential at all. Its power is formless, like its nowhere-
tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized
states .26
As subjects of the law, then, we are all subsumed to this
arbitrary and false power. Violence is embedded in every facet of
our lives; it is the fabric of our legal, social, and political order under
conditions of capitalism and phantasm —two phenomena which for
Benjamin are intimately related.

II. T he P ossibility of N onviolence

This discussion sets up a dilemma concerning the subject of the
law as we see th a t avoiding violence is not merely a m atter of
refusing to hu rt or kill anyone. Violence goes much deeper than
th a t for Benjamin. We m ust also avoid or contend with the violence
of our own sense of reality—our own judgments about whatever
fundamentally shapes and controls our world. Yet, for Benjamin,
nonviolence is not only possible (he tells us th a t it is possible
“without doubt”27) but in fact, we have been practicing it all along.
The turn to nonviolence is possible for Benjamin because God
answers our acts of mythic violence with a respondent form of divine

24. Id . at 248.
25. Id . at 239-43.
26- Id . at 243.
27. Id . at 244.
762 WAKE FOREST LA W REVIEW [Vol. 49

violence—gottliche28 Gewalt29—which might be better translated as

God’s violence. Benjamin writes of divine violence th a t

[t]his very task of destruction poses again, ultimately, the

question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to
call a halt to mythic violence. Just as in all spheres God
opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine . . . .
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
threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter
is lethal without spilling blood.30
This pure, immediate violence does nothing except erase the
falsities th a t we have promoted in God’s name. The example th at
Benjamin offers of divine violence is the story of Korah, an
idolatrous Levite priest who challenged Moses’s right and ability to
speak for God.31 God made the ground open up and swallow up
Korah and his followers, leaving no trace or sign of their existence.32
As a result, no new truths were introduced in this act of divine
violence. If new truths were actually produced—or said to be
produced—they would only be fodder for more idolatry insofar as the
hum an realm is completely permeated by fetishism. Divine
violence—which for Benjamin has a corresponding form of
resistance in the way th a t the objects of the world themselves also
resist and rebel against our treatm ent of them as fetishes—serves to
allow hum an beings a space to remain undetermined, a zone th a t is
free, however temporarily, of the certainty of phantasm . It is
because of this opening th a t nonviolence, as much as violence, is a
central aspect of hum an life.
For Benjamin, the practices of nonviolence are generally
relegated to small and local decisions—decisions th a t fly under the
radar of larger social, legal, and political forces.33 Of such forms of
practice, Benjamin writes:

28. Also spelled gottlich. Gottlich Definition, COLLINS G e r m a n -E n g l is h

DICTIONARY, http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english
/gottlich (last visited Aug. 27, 2014); see also Signe Larson, Notes on the
Thought of Walter Benjamin: Critique of Violence, CRITICAL L e g a l THINKING
(Oct. 11, 2013), http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/10/ll/notes-thought-
walter-benjamin-critique-violence/.
29. Gewalt Definition, supra note 1.
30. B e n ja m in , supra note 2, at 236, 249-50.
31. Id. at 250; see also Numbers 16:1-2.
32. B e n ja m in , supra note 2, at 250; see also Numbers 16:32.
33. B e n ja m in , supra note 2, at 245.
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION” 763

To induce men to reconcile their interests peacefully without

involving the legal system, there is, in the end, apart from all
virtues, one effective motive that often enough puts into the
most reluctant hands pure instead of violent means: it is the
fear of mutual disadvantage that threaten [s] to arise from
violent confrontation, whatever the outcome might he. Such
motives are clearly visible in countless cases of conflict of
interests between private persons.34
Here, Benjamin is alluding to the way th a t private persons
work out conflicts on their own all the time without recourse to the
law (and hence to mythic violence). Note th a t he speaks of “pure
instead of violent means .” 35 This is because the people in question
do not tu rn to larger principles of justice to work out their
differences. Their means are “pure” because they are not in service
to idolatrous ends and one could also say th a t they function as
means without ends. Note too th a t such actors respond to their
violent context as they fear “m utual disadvantage” due to violent
conflicts. Yet this fear is not itself determ inant of their
arrangem ents—while the nonviolent actors exist in a violent context
(that is, the context in which we all operate within), their means are
capable of being pure. This is even true, at times, for those who are
the most bought into phantasm —even into “the most reluctant
hands.”
Benjamin also mentions diplomacy as a kind of nonviolent
forum in which deals are made locally and specifically, without true
recourse to overriding principles .36 He writes:

Fundamentally [diplomats] must, entirely on the analogy of

the agreement between private persons, resolve conflicts case
by case, in the name of their states, peacefully and without
contracts. A delicate task that is more robustly performed by
referees, but a method of solution that in principle is above
that of the referee because it is beyond all legal systems and
therefore beyond violence. Accordingly, like the intercourse of
private persons, that of diplomats has engendered its own
forms and virtues, which were not always mere formalities,
even though they have become so. 37
It is critical to note that, for Benjamin, diplomats make their
decisions “without contracts.” Contracts suggest the presence of
mythic law. Benjamin tells us th a t a legal contract “is, in turn, of
violent origin even if violence is not introduced into the contract

34. Id.
35. Id.
36. Id. at 247.
37. Id.
764 WAKE FOREST LA W REVIEW [Vol. 49

itself.”38 Insofar as violence is endemic to the practices of law, any

legal action th a t perpetuates this frame, regardless of its content,
dooms us to further fetishism. As I will argue further, this does not
mean for Benjamin th a t we can or should abandon law altogether,
but rather only its mythic manifestations.

III. A P ractice of N onviolence

We see then th a t mythic violence is ubiquitous but there are
ways to subvert and resist it. Therefore, the question then becomes,
If we practice nonviolence all the time in the context of mythic
violence, is it possible to make nonviolence itself a kind of standard
practice? W hat would such a practice look like, and would it be
truly free of violence once and for all? Benjamin writes:

Legal and illegal means of every kind that are all the same
violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones as unalloyed
[i.e. “pure”] means. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness [sic],
trust, and whatever else might here be mentioned are their
subjective preconditions. Their objective manifestation,
however, is determined by the law (whose enormous scope
cannot be discussed here) that says that unalloyed means are
never those of direct solutions but always those of indirect
solutions. They therefore never apply directly to the resolution
of conflict between man and man, but apply only to matters
concerning objects. The sphere of nonviolent means opens up
in the realm of human conflicts relating to goods. For this
reason, technique in the broadest sense of the word is their
most particular area.39
There is quite a bit to unpack in this passage. To begin, we see
th a t besides the hum an laws th a t are mythic, there are other laws,
which, as he says, are too enormous in scope to be discussed at this
point in the essay. These laws are not hum an laws at all but divine
ones. Although we cannot know such laws because to know them
would be to subsume them to hum an phantasm , we can experience
their effects—in the same way th a t divine violence makes h u man
nonviolence possible in the first place. One effect of these other
forms of law is th a t nonviolence does not occur directly between
people so much as it occurs via interm ediaries—by “indirect
solutions.” Here, it helps to remember th a t for Benjamin, once
again, the objects of the world resist the fetishism th a t we place
upon them. By aligning ourselves with their rebellion, we are
perm itted a bit of a rebellion, or conspiracy, of our own. Benjamin

38. Id . at 244.
39. Id .
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION” 765

tells us th a t technique—th a t is, engaging in mediated relations via

objects—is the main way hum an beings can access nonviolence.40
He goes on to tell us th a t a key form of technique is the
conference.41 He writes:

[The] profoundest example [of technique] is perhaps the

conference, considered as a technique of civil agreement. For
in it not only is nonviolent agreement possible, but also the
exclusion of violence in principle is quite explicitly
demonstrable by one significant factor: there is no sanction for
lying. Probably no legislation on earth originally stipulated
such a sanction. This makes clear that there is a sphere of
human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is
wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of
“understanding,” language.42
Here, language itself becomes the means, or technique, by
which we escape from violence. This may seem peculiar since
language and representation are the mechanism by which we
become enslaved in phantasm in the first place for Benjamin. Yet,
in pointing out th a t the conference has no sanction for lying,
Benjamin alludes to a way in which language need not be used as
the set of instrum ents we normally take it to be. When we punish
lying, it is because we are holding language up to a standard of
tru th telling. We insist th a t words mean something real. But it is
equally possible, Benjamin suggests, for language to be a technique
of pure means th a t is not aligned with great transcendent truths.
By taking such a view of language, one would understand it as
engaging in locally derived and temporary sets of meanings. The
conference then, for Benjamin, is a forum in which these sorts of
hum an encounters are possible in ways th a t go beyond the kinds of
private agreements th at are, in principle, always possible and
always available to us.
It might be speculated here th a t as an example of a conference,
Benjamin is thinking of the kinds of workers’ councils th a t sprouted
up during the brief and abortive 1919 Spartacist Revolution43 th a t
so deeply inspired him.
Benjamin does warn us th a t in his own time the conference had
begun to take on a more law-like (human law, th a t is) aspect in
term s of its move to sanction fraud.44 He tells us th a t “in
prohibiting fraud, law restricts the use of wholly nonviolent means

40. Id.
41. Id. at 244-45.
42. Id.
43. The Spartacists, HISTORY LEARNING SITE (2012),
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/spartacists.htm.
44. B enjamin , supra note 2, at 245.
766 WAKE FOREST LA W REVIEW [Vol. 49

because they could produce reactive violence.”45 In other words,

once we legalize (or mythologize) our meetings, we create conditions
of retribution, required response, and reaction.46 We have
reintroduced ends and thus reentered the realm of mythic violence.
Benjamin’s key example of acting through pure means, and
hence nonviolently, comes in his discussion of the general strike. As
opposed to the political strike, which is merely, in his eyes, a form of
blackmail whereby workers try to get a better deal for themselves by
threatening capitalism—and hence engaging in a form of violence of
their own47—the general strike is nonviolent. He writes:

Whereas the first form of interruption of work [the political

strike] is violent, since it causes only an external modification
of labor conditions, the second [the proletariat general strike],
as a pure means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in
readiness to resume work following external concessions and
this or that modification to working conditions, but in the
determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no
longer enforced by the [S]tate, an upheaval that this kind of
strike not so much causes as consummates.48
In other words, the general strike, akin in a sense to the larger
workings of a conference, simply says “no” to capitalism. Here,
there is no deal to be made, no negotiations to reach, and no contract
to fulfill or alter. Instead, the general strike is a way of saying “no”
to phantasm , to capitalism, and to commodity fetishism.
Benjamin tells us th a t this form of action is “anarchistic.”49 As
such, anarchism serves as the name th at Benjamin would give to a
politics of pure means.50 The strike’s rejection of all things involving
capitalism allows a break with all false ends. As such, the strike,
like the conference too, deals only with the world of m aterial objects
(i.e., pure means/ technique).
When we think about these kinds of possibilities, we see th at
nonviolence can indeed constitute, and at times already entails, a
wider set of practices than those limited to private decisions among
citizens. In this way, Benjamin offers us an entirely different
approach to action and decision. He tells us th a t “a more exact
criterion” for judgment and decision is in fact available to us, which
provides an alternative beyond those tautologies and fetish is ms
provided by existing concepts of law.51

45. Id.
46. Id.
47. Id. at 239-40.
48. Id. at 246.
49. Id.
50. Id.
51. Id. at 236.
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION” 767

IV. Is N onviolence A lways P ossible ?

If a broader practice of nonviolence is possible, based on
techniques like the conference and the general strike, does th at
mean th a t we can safely say th at for Benjamin we must always
choose nonviolence? Is nonviolence a kind of ethical command th at
structures everything else th a t we do? Here, an answer depends a
bit on what we mean by nonviolence. As already noted at the
beginning of this Essay, because the German word Gewalt covers
both violence and force, it is not always clear where the more
ordinary sense of violence comes into the picture for Benjamin. Do
the striking masses always avoid any act of violence, even if they are
being directly threatened by police or other forms of state reaction?
The evidence is a bit mixed. On the one hand, in an earlier,
companion essay to the Critique of Violence entitled The Right to
Use Force, Benjamin offers an instance of total passivity in the face
of overwhelming violence. He writes:

When communities of Galician Jews let themselves be cut

down in their synagogues without any attempt to defend
themselves, this has nothing to do with “ethical anarchism” as
a political program; instead the mere resolve “not to resist evil”
emerges into the sacred light of day as a form of moral
action. 52
In speaking of “ethical anarchism,” Benjamin is evoking the
idea th a t we are not perm itted to engage in violence either at the
individual or state level. Here, he tells us th a t such a stance is not a
“political program” (hence different than conferences and general
strikes) but th a t it remains a viable and even sacred response to the
ubiquitous presence of violence in the law and in politics .53
There are other examples, however, where Benjamin seems to
take a different stance. At one point he discusses the degree to
which we are to be bound even by divine commandments . 54
Discussing specifically the sixth commandment against killing,
Benjamin writes:

52. Walter B enjam in , The Right to Use Force, in Walter B enjam in :

S elected W ritings V olume 1:1913-1926, supra note 2, at 231, 233.
53. Id.
54. B enjam in , supra note 2, at 249-50.
768 WAKE FOREST LAW REVIEW [Vol. 49

[N] either the divine judgment nor the grounds for this
judgment can be known in advance. Those who base a
condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on
the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a
criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of
persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude
and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the
responsibility of ignoring it.55
Here, we see th a t even the sanction against the ultim ate form of
violence (taking the word in its ordinary, English sense) is not as
cut-and-dried as it might seem for Benjamin. In fact, even the sixth
commandment cannot always be taken literally. Thus, he tells us
th a t Jews “expressly re je c t. . . the condemnation of killing in self-
defense.”56 Although he may have given us a “more exact
criterion”57 to discern violent from nonviolent acts, Benjamin does
not go on to say th a t in all cases we m ust avoid all forms of violence.
Although the Galician Jews went to their death without engaging in
any violence, for Benjamin a “political program”58 might suggest
th a t there are times when a community or an individual would turn
to violence in order to counteract the violence of the State or of
reactionary agents who espouse their false ends.
A politics of pure means is therefore nonviolent in the sense
th a t it eschews the violence of ends but not necessarily the violence
of means themselves. To promote an absolute judgment on the level
of “Thou shalt not kill”59 is to return us to the transcendent-based
mythology of violence th a t Benjamin is seeking to escape in the first
place. But rath er than doing this, he turns to our own decisions, our
own measures taken, and if and when we can achieve a space th a t is
cleared of the certainty of phantasm. Thus, through indirect means
and through objects and technique, hum an beings may eschew
mythic violence but may not always eschew every form of violence
altogether.
But there is a crucial difference between Benjamin’s “advocacy”
of violence, if th a t is what we should call it, and the general
promotion of violence th a t occurs under circumstances of the
phantasmagoria. Whereas the “phantasm ist” may think th a t she
kills because she is justified by some higher concept (whether God’s
truth, the power of the State, ideas of racial and national purity, or
what have you), rationalizing her action and denying her own

55. Id. at 250.

56- Id. at 250. I discuss these ideas in more depth in JAMES Maktel , T he
One and Only Law: Walter B enjamin and the S econd Commandment
(forthcoming 2014).
57. B enjamin , supra note 2, at 236.
58. B enjamin , supra note 52, at 233.
59. Exodus 20:13.
2014] “A MORE EXACT CRITERION’’ 769

personal responsibility in the process—the actor of pure means

bears the full and sole responsibility for what she has done. It is she
herself who has to take on the burden of the law.
This may seem like a small or philosophical point, but I think it
amounts to saying that in a world run according to Benjaminian
principles we would have a lot less violence of both the mythic and
ordinary variety. The violence of our own society reflects, as already
noted, on the violence of the State, its false projection, and its
usurpation and elimination of rival forms of authority. In such a
context, all of us are similarly rendered violent, victim, and
perpetrator at the same time, and so even our private actions reflect
that violence. There are, however, ways to resist that violence, as
we have seen. If we were truly responsible for our deeds, if we
treated commandments not as absolute truths that we must either
slavishly obey or perversely go against, we could escape from the
sphere of myth. If we enter into a political mode that is
characterized by the possibility of extensive nonviolence, we treat
these transcendent truths as we have seen—as being at the most
“guideline [s] for the actions of persons or communities who have to
wrestle with it in solitude.” 60 In this case, there is no “Big Other” to
sanction our deeds.61 Would we kill as often, with as much aplomb,
if we did not have some other foil onto which we project our own
responsibility, our own guilt? Would we act as violently if we did
not operate in a context, as already noted, that was so saturated
with violence?
For this reason, I would argue that Benjamin is not offering us
a nonviolent utopia so much as a set of criteria by which we can
rethink our position to violence, in which we are not wholly
determined by it. I think that it is untrue to say that Benjamin is
anti-instrumentalist and anti-violent. His avocation of pure means
suggests that he is very much an instrumentalist but that he
encourages a very different relationship to the instruments in
question. His claim that we must wrestle in solitude with the
question of violence (among other matters) suggests that we will not
always come up with the same answers and the same decisions
when faced with a particular question. When we cease to think of a
set of transcendent rules that we merely need apply (or reject,
depending on our relationship to law), we enter into the realm of
pure means, of a politics that is not determined by violence even as
it might, on occasion, partake in violence. If this answer disappoints
those who would like to see a pure and perfect form of nonviolence, I
think Benjamin’s only answer would be to point out how often

60. Benjamin , supra note 2, at 250.

61. For more on this idea of the “Big Other” as it relates to violence, see
Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways R eflections (2008). See also Alenka
ZupanCi C, Ethics of the R eal: Kant, Lacan (2000).
770 WAKE FOREST LA W REVIEW [Vol. 49

images of perfection are foundered by their own practice. By

focusing on the practice of pure means as opposed to fetishistic ends,
Benjamin offers us a way to engage in politics without recourse to
predetermination, fated violence, or endless cycles of repetition.
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