Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani (eds.), <\/b>Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben<\/i><\/b>. New York: Bloomsbury. 2015; 251+xii pages. ISBN: 978-1-4725-2324-2.<\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by Michael P. A. Murphy, Queen\u2019s University.<\/i><\/p>\n
This collection of essays offers readers of Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin new avenues into their relationship as critics of political violence. \u00a0The volume is at its strongest when tracing new connections both between Agamben and Benjamin and these thinkers and their contexts. In Part One, editors Brendan Moran, Carlo Salzani, and three other contributors place Benjamin\u2019s essay within context of his broader work. The eight essays collected in Part Two analyze Agamben\u2019s reading of Benjamin. The final essay of the collection is Agamben\u2019s own \u201cOn the Limits of Violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of Part One of the collection focuses on the context of Benjamin\u2019s \u201cCritique of Violence\u201d in relation to his essay on Goethe\u2019s Elective Affinities<\/i>, written around the same time as the critique. Alison Ross explains the necessity of reference to works like \u201cGoethe\u2019s Elective Affinities<\/i>\u201d because many of the terms key to understanding Benjamin\u2019s violence-essay \u201care substantially meaningless without the possibility of clarifying references to other pieces from the same period.\u201d (40) The engagement of contemporaneous works is crucial as it avoids \u201cthe form of commentary that brackets out other pieces from Benjamin\u2019s early oeuvre and focuses obsessively on particular phrases from the violence-essay alone.\u201d (40) For Ross, a clear example of this is the notion of \u201cambiguity,\u201d a term which Benjamin uses to refer pejoratively to \u201ccondemn the lack of clarity and absence of truth\u201d in myth (39). By engaging the essay on the Elective Affinities<\/i>, Ross is able to clarify the use of the concept of ambiguity within Benjamin\u2019s polemic before tracing its development through Benjamin\u2019s later work. Ross\u2019s argument offers a method for contextualizing the terms of \u201cCritique of Violence\u201d within Benjamin\u2019s works of similar age, which will be useful for academics approaching Benjamin from collections like Illuminations <\/i>or Reflections<\/i>.<\/p>\n
In the next two essays, Amir Ahmadi and Brendan Moran also use \u201cGoethe\u2019s Elective Affinities<\/i>\u201d to contextualize \u201cCritique of Violence,\u201d bringing out two different themes. Ahmadi reviews the use of the myth of Niobe in this essay, which opens into a reflection on the foundational opposition of mythic violence and divine violence. Ahmadi examines the texts of Empedocles and others to argue that Benjamin employs a great deal of creative license in his use of the myth. In the end, Benjamin\u2019s use of Niobe \u201cdoes not so much reflect the features of the Greek myth as his programmatic and total opposition of \u2018myth\u2019 and \u2018theology\u2019\u201d\u2014meaning that his appropriation \u201ccan hardly be an acceptable interpretation.\u201d (66) Moran analyzes Benjamin\u2019s varying uses of the term \u201cnature\u201d as both mythic (the muteness of nature) and redemptive or destructive. Moran draws on a series of important oppositions, including those between sacredness and mere life (77), and between body-as-K\u00f6rper<\/i> and body-as-Leib<\/i> (80), as he analyzes the sacredness of human and natural life. \u00a0When read with Salzani\u2019s essay on the notion of bare life, Moran\u2019s discussion of two bodies (human and natural) offers an important terminological clarification for those approaching the conceptualizations of \u201clife\u201d offered by Agamben and Benjamin: namely, the natural and the sacred are not synonymous. The sacred life (and Agamben\u2019s homo sacer<\/i> is perhaps the clearest contemporary example) is not merely reducible to the state of mere life.<\/p>\n
The highlight of the collection, Carlo Salzani\u2019s essay at the opening of Part Two, traces the concept of mere life from Benjamin\u2019s blo\u03b2es Leben<\/i> to Agamben\u2019s nuda vita<\/i>. \u00a0Despite Agamben\u2019s presentation of nuda vita<\/i> as direct adoption of Benjamin\u2019s blo\u03b2es Leben<\/i>, Salzani demonstrates how the two concepts \u201cnot only belong to two different historical, cultural and philosophical contexts, but are also literally \u2018construed\u2019 in very different ways, so that, in the end, they cannot be said to coincide.\u201d (109) Salzani addresses a gap in the literature that had previously allowed for \u201ca sort of \u2018Agambenization\u2019 of many\u2026concepts, first and foremost das blo\u03b2e Leben.<\/i>\u201d (109) He traces Benjamin\u2019s development of the concept of blo\u03b2es Leben<\/i> in opposition to vitalism, biologism, and social Darwinism (111), then to a definition approximating \u201cjust and simply \u2018mere life\u2019\u201d (113)\u2014making it synonymous with Agamben\u2019s term zo\u0113<\/i>, not nuda vita<\/i>. (112) For Agamben, zo\u0113<\/i> refers to the natural organic life common to all living things, whereas the more specific bios<\/i> defines the way of living proper to a human being in a community. Agamben, on the other hand, develops nuda vita<\/i> through an opposition of law\/creature in the 1970s, using the Italian equivalent of blo\u03b2es Leben<\/i>, that is, nuda vita<\/i>, only in Homo Sacer.<\/i> By tracing the development of bare life through Agamben\u2019s literary criticism\u2014rather than as a new concept introduced in his political turn\u2014Salzani highlights the problematic assumption that Agambenian and Benjaminian definitions \u201cbare life\u201d are the same.<\/p>\n
The discussion of the coming politics in Thanos Zartaloudis\u2019 \u201cViolence Without Law? On Pure Violence as a Destituent Power\u201d traces the relationship of life to law both in terms of juridification and divine violence. Zartaloudis then moves to a preliminary commentary on destituent potential, framed as a further development of Benjamin\u2019s theory of divine violence. (179) I call this a \u201cpreliminary commentary\u201d because Zartaloudis references Agamben\u2019s public lecture and early article on destituent potential, yet Agamben\u2019s sustained reflection on destituent potential offered in The Use of Bodies<\/i> was unavailable to Zartaloudis (first published in Italian in 2014). The linking of destituent potential to Benjamin\u2019s divine violence provides a genealogy of logic for this new concept: not only does it render \u201cpower (including its own) inoperative as such\u201d (180), but also, as the potentiality of a singularity, it \u201ccan only become sufficient if it becomes the form-of-life adequate to the new historical era\u201d (182). This Benjaminian genealogy offered by Zartaloudis provides a great deal of material for future investigations of destituent potential by situating Agamben\u2019s nebulous notion of destituent potential within the broader Benjaminian critique of violence.<\/p>\n
Separated by half a century at first encounter, Giorgio Agamben\u2019s critique of violence has shifted the way that Walter Benjamin\u2019s \u201cCritique of Violence\u201d is read. \u00a0From the beginning, the collection aims to comment on the links between Benjamin, Agamben, and the critique of violence, and this task it performs admirably. \u00a0The variety of the collection will appeal to those familiar with Agamben and Benjamin seeking terminological precision and genealogies of conceptual developments between the two theorists, and the explanations of context and sources will offer an intriguing point of entry to those just discovering the critique of violence in Agamben and Benjamin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani (eds.), Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. New York: Bloomsbury. 2015; 251+xii pages. ISBN: 978-1-4725-2324-2. Reviewed by Michael P. A. Murphy, Queen\u2019s University. This collection of essays offers readers of Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin new avenues into their relationship as critics of political violence. \u00a0The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[69,41,124],"class_list":["post-5848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-agamben","tag-critical-theory","tag-walter-benjamin","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 15:29:36","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5848"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6928,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5848\/revisions\/6928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}