Jakob Rendl

The focus of the following pages is an attempt to understand one of the central texts of political thought in the 20th century: Walter Benjamin’s The Critique of Violence. This text has lost none of its critical potential in the hundred years since it was written. Not least, the epochal Homo-sacer-Project of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben represents at its core an attempt to interpret the Critique of Violence. The primary aim of the present essay is to present the text’s underlying conception of the sphere of moral relations and the force that operates in this sphere - violence. Thus, it is about the sphere-relative classification of violence. First, the concept of violence underlying the text and the sphere of moral relations in general are determined, and then the positive and negative results of Benjamin’s critical project are presented. After the reconstruction of the central concepts of violence, some aporias in the relationship between these concepts of violence and in the relationship between the spheres corresponding to them are to be addressed. In this context, the ‘autodestructive’ character of the text is to be elaborated. However, it will also be shown that the Benjaminian text - despite its obscurity - provides means to criticize state systems that instrumentalize theology to justify governance. I would like to develop this by means of Benjamin’s frequently used concept of “spheres.”