Benjamin and Brazil, a Final Interpretation: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ at Its Centenary, Part VI

Abstract

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part VI of the Forum, Bethânia Assy, Rafael Felgueiras Rolo, and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin close the series with reflections on Benjamin and Brazil. In their essay, Assy and Rolo discuss Benjamin’s work to assert which conception of history could render justice to actual needs in the struggle against contemporary forms of fascism, especially considering the reality of the urban movements such as MUST and MTST. For Rolo and Assy, the concept of divine violence needs to be reconsidered and dislocated from traditional understandings in contemporary literature on Benjamin, and the authors do so by developing an immanent notion of divine violence. They develop an analysis of Benjamin’s eighth thesis to make sense of the so-called ‘state of exception’ regarding a real state of exception, which is the duty of critical thinking to instate. Assy and Rolo shed light on the social phenomenon of these urban occupations, so that a better positioning in the struggle against contemporary fascism is (if at all) possible in the light of Benjamin’s texts. In the final reflection, Gagnebin draws on her vast expertise in contemporary philosophy to weave together conceptual and philological insights on Benjamin’s Marxism in relation to his political and theological thought, on law and justice, and on myth and the mythical.

Keywords

• housing struggles
• law
• Walter Benjamin
• critique of violence
• perspectivist difference
• state of exception
• divine justice
• Marxism