What do we talk about when we talk about «Critique of Violence» today? On Walter Benjamin and the relationship between Democracy and Terror

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to elucidate Benjamin’s Critique of violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt, 1921) from the perspective of political systems and democracies today, and particularly their own history of violence. Has the recent history of democracy become another history of violence? Or is it that the Cold War has given way to a new paradigm, i.e., to new fighting methods for another set of symbolic forms? These very questions are, in my view, close to the Benjamin/Schmitt debate and they must return to their original spot: the debate around the political body and the notion of law