Natasha Hay

This paper charts Walter Benjamin’s philosophical and political revisions to his idea for a free school community in response to the First World War. His initial project appeals to a co-operative form of association that could exercise the value-creating power of study in order to counter nostalgic invocations of a natural idyll of fraternity that dominate the youth movement. When his own mentor calls for a youth army to serve as the vanguard of a cultural state at the outbreak of war, Benjamin confronts the blind spots of their shared vision for the student community. He not only criticizes the apocalyptic theopolitics that justifies the mass sacrifice of youth on the front, but also recognizes that proletarian children were the missing term in the antagonism between youth and adults. This reckoning unearths the hidden topography of the commons that alters his way of conceiving an intergenerational justice at stake in education.

ABSTRACT This article argues against Giorgio Agamben’s use of Paul’s Epistles to align Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence with antinomian theology and anarcholibertarian politics. It focuses specifically on Benjamin’s critical inheritance of Hermann Cohen’s concepts of unintentional sin and atonement to show that he reactivates a prophetic register of education in Jewish religious ethics. The article contends that these normative and narrative elements of Talmud Torah refute a reductive view of Jewish legalism in confronting the cultural afterlives of historical violence. This argument not only uncouples the reception of Benjamin’s theopolitics from contemporary continental philosophy’s revivals of Pauline messianism, but also contributes to a plural field of political theology emerging beyond the scope of secularized concepts of governance derived from a spurious universalism. This article proposes that the nonidentity between human law and divine justice can orient necessary resistance to justifications for and acts of state violence committed in a community’s name.