Walking Away

“All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving…. Law-preserving violence is a threat directed at the transgressor; lawmaking violence is a threat that establishes law.”

These curious, perhaps confusing lines are taken from Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay “Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt.)

In this essay, Benjamin examines violence as an inherent component of law and suggests that it is monopolized by any ruling regime of any kind.

Before I go deeper into this, a word about Walter Benjamin. Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish thinker, whose body of work was vast and eclectic; he wrote philosophy, political theory, literary criticism and cultural analysis. He was a left-leaning thinker who is associated with the Frankfurt School and Neo Marxism as well as a self-described theologian and a scholar of Jewish mysticism, a field that he shared with his close friend Gershom Scholem. Benjamin took his own life fleeing Germany by taking poison on the border between France and Spain. His writings and especially the essay which we are discussing today cannot be disconnected from the time and place in which he lived.

In his essay, Benjamin suggested that violence is, and always has been, a part of the state, or any ruling system for that matter. Every regime, according to Benjamin, regardless of form, is founded by violence and once founded, uses violence to maintain itself. In his terms, as quoted above: “lawmaking violence”  is the violence which is used to found a regime, for example, revolutionary violence or war. “Law preserving violence” is the violence that the regime or the state uses to maintain itself, like the army and the police. In order to use this “preserving violence,” the state monopolizes it, meaning, it punishes anyone else who attempts to use it. In this way, anything considered law or justice is always what the rulers maintain through violence. At least, until such a form of it is replaced by another violent means, which in turn maintains their rule by more violence and so on.

Is there a way out of this cycle?

To answer this question, let’s look at our Torah portion this week - Bo. Bo tells the story of the last three plagues which descended upon Egypt: Locust, Darkness and the Slaying of the First-Born. After these plagues, the Pharaoh finally lets the Israelites go and the commandments and rules for celebrating Passover are given.

There is something which stands out about the departure of the Israelites from Egypt. The Israelites do not resist or rebel, nor do they join the Pharaoh’s enemies to wage war. The Israelites simply walked away. They walked away under the umbrella of Divine Violence.

Here is how Benjamin defines Divine Violence: 

“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 violence only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.” 

In a fascinating move, Benjamin offers a way out of the cycle of Lawmaking - Law-Preserving violence. 

Every attempt to resist a current rule of law would justify the preserving violence of that particular law. Even a non-violent protest threatens the preservation of that law and so it is almost always met with violence, even if it is only implied. That form of organization almost always justifies the inherent preserving violence in the system. Of course, any organized revolution to replace the law will only become lawmaking violence, which will result in a new violent law-preserving system. The only way out, according to Benjamin, is to disengage. To withdraw. In other words, to walk away.

Benjamin gives the example of the General Labor Strike as such divine violence. 

“The political general strike seeks to bring about only an external modification of labor conditions, while the proletarian general strike sets itself the sole task of destroying state power…..it is not concerned with the establishment of new legal relations, but with the annihilation of all legal relations.”

For Benjamin, a political strike, meaning one which is made by workers only in order to cut a better deal with their employers, is nothing but a pressure valve which is meant to preserve the health of the system, in this case the capitalist system. However, a general strike, meaning a total disengagement in all fields of labor, one which does not seek a deal, will topple and destroy the system itself.

Benjamin, brings another example of Divine Violence, this time using the actual Torah and bringing the story of Korah.

“The divine violence exemplified in the punishment of Korah and his company strikes without warning, without threat, and without bloodshed… This violence does not find law, but destroys it; it annihilates guilt rather than establishing it…no judgment is pronounced; the violence is not expiatory in the mythic sense, but purely destructive of the legal order…”

Benjamin references Korah here because in the story of Korah there is no trial, no proportional punishment, no new legal norm established afterward, and no human authority involved. The earth swallowing Korah is final, silent, and non-judicial. This could remind some of the Divine Violence of the plagues. 

What I find interesting about Benjamin’s theory and the Exodus, is the fact that the Israelites indeed destroyed the Pharaoh’s power by doing the worst act that could be done to a regime - they walked away. There was no uprising, no counter-violence, no seizure of power, no replacement regime, and no new political order installed in Egypt. 

In this way, the Israelites did not justify the law-preserving violence of Pharaoh and, at the same time, did not create a lawmaking violence of their own.

Personally, I’d like to take a moment and dwell on this radical act of freedom, moments before a new law had descended upon the Israelites from Mount Sinai. 

Nowadays, contemporary thinkers identify Benjamin’s Divine Violence with unexplained bursts of violence in different parts of the globe, violence which has no goal, no plan, and no program to speak of.

I see the genius of Benjamin's words in their encouragement to disengage. In our day and age, the ruling class profits from our passionate engagement in clashing with each other over manufactured identities. Violence is being justified, preserved, and founded in the name of those identities. The radical act of freedom is withdrawal, destroying the system by simply exiting the game. Freedom might be as simple as… walking away.

Watch this in Hebrew below: