As we wrap up our series on the book "State of Exception," by Georgio Agamben,
we'll have a look especially in this video at how Agamben deals with the figure of Walter Benjamin,
the Jewish writer from the 20th century. I would suggest that in chapters four and six especially,
Agamben uses Benjamin as a kind of solution to the problem of the state of exception.
That doesn't mean that he agrees with all of Benjamin's ideas, but I do think that he takes
Benjamin's idea of divine violence, and sees it in some ways as a kind of template that provides
a utopian solution. So we'll try to trace this in the video, and try to help you make some sense of
Agamben's ideas towards the end of the book. Now Benjamin writes very famously in his essay
"Critique of Violence" [that] "All violence as a means is either law making or law preserving."
What he's talking about there especially is that within a state, within a nation you might say,
the state likes to have a monopoly over violence. We might sketch this out a little bit here...
We have the state, and the state would like to make sure that it has control
over any kind of violence that is both law-making okay and law-preserving.
There we go. And both of these, we might say, are means to an end. These things are the means to an
end, and this idea of thinking about means and ends is really central to Benjamin's "Critique
of Violence." So by looking at this, then, basically the state wants to control violence.
We can see this even in the way the police operates, according to Benjamin.
If we think, for instance, of the police using emergency measures, sometimes ... there's abuse,
there's a lot of interpretation of how the law should be applied. And what we see then in the
way the the police operates is that sometimes it's simply law preserving -- just keeping the
order and the peace -- but sometimes it's also interpreting the law and law-making in a sense.
It's doing both of those things, and the police, then, are a good example of how the state tries to
keep a monopoly over violence. Another way we can think about this is that one thing that the state
really hates is when the laborers go on strike. So how does the state relate to strikes?
Well, if people go on a strike, then there's a lot of debate about whether that strike is
violent or not. Even a non-violent strike -- you know the the labors are just in the streets and
they're marching, but they're not destroying any property or anything like that. For Benjamin,
the state still sees this as violent because there's an element of extortion involved.
There's an element of extortion because the the strike leaders are always making demands.
They're saying, we're striking because we want this: we want more pay or longer vacations,
or who knows what. So if that's the case then what these strikers are really doing is they're still
using a kind of violence (extortion) as a means to an end. For Benjamin, then, those kinds of strikes
don't really solve the problem, because you're still using the same logic as what the state uses.
You're using violence as a means to an end. If you're still stuck within that same kind of logic,
then you're not really going to resolve the problem. The only way to resolve the problem
is to see that there might be a kind of violence outside of the law, and this is what
Walter Benjamin refers to as divine violence. He gives the example of divine violence from the
Old Testament, for instance, where the sons of Korah are swallowed swallowed up by the earth.
Other terms for this are "pure violence" and also "sovereign violence." Now, this kind of violence,
you could say, is a kind of pure means -- a pure means without an end. To really understand this,
think about, for instance, the notion of anger. Let's say
that you suddenly get upset with somebody, and this happens to all of us,
and you just have a burst of anger. ...
Well, that anger is not really planned so much, and it's not really [directed] towards an end. You're not
trying to achieve anything by it. You're just really angry. You need to kind of burst out!
So we can say it's a manifestation, and it's spontaneous. Well, that seems to escape the
logic, then, of having a means to an end. Now we have a pure means. It's simply a means with no
end that's associated with it. There's no goal associated with it. If we were to extrapolate
from this a little bit further, we might think that of other things that could fit
this same description, and these things could be, for instance, a proletarian general strike,
which basically means all the workers are out in the streets but they're
not really demanding specific things. They're just really angry -- kind of like a burst of anger --
which might lead them to want to abolish the state altogether ... to do away with it all together,
although you could argue that in that case they still have an end in sight. This is one of the
problems that Benjamin faces, I think, is that it's very difficult to get out of the means to an end
logic. So there almost always seem to be ends anyways, but that's a different
discussion. Another thing we could mention here is revolutionary violence ...
which seems to fit the same logic. If you are starting a revolution, but you don't
really have a clear sense of what you want the next government to be, but you're simply angry,
you want to destroy things, well perhaps that could be a kind of divine violence. What we see then is
two very different ways to think about violence. On the one hand, the state likes to control everything,
and on the other hand we have potentially this divine violence outside of the law. Now the reason
why Carl Schmidt needs to react to this, in a sense, is because these concepts of law-making and law-
preserving violence are actually surprisingly close to a couple of concepts that Carl Schmidt
himself uses. So law-making, if you recall, is very similar to constituent power.
And law-preserving is very similar to constituted power.
That is why Carl Schmitt in his 1922 book "Political Theology," according to
Agamben, tries to react to this by focusing less, perhaps, on constituent and constituted
power, and more on this notion of the decision. If we think, then, about what
he does is he tries to basically put the exception the state of exception within the law
and tie it to the sovereign's decision -- the sovereign's decision.
He's taking this notion of divine violence and trying to pull it back into the law,
by saying [to paraphrase], "You know what? When there is this kind of sovereign decision, which seems random
and outside the law, we can bring it back in, because the sovereign, after all, is both inside
and outside the law, and the sovereign, through the decision can control this state of exception."
That might have seemed like a pretty good response, but Walter Benjamin uhalso responded
to Carl Schmitt again. For him, if you take these two ideas ... so you have the law
on one hand ... and then you have what's outside of the law,
which we might call anomie, as we've seen before, and you make them synonymous (because that's what
happens when the sovereign pulls the state of exception into the law) for Walter
Benjamin, then, basically the state of exception becomes the rule. The state of exception
... is the rule now. The tendency here, in other words, is that the law
is this kind of corrupting force. As soon as it tries to capture what is outside of it,
it becomes contaminated by it and eventually we cannot distinguish between the two, whereas if we
think about what Carl Schmitt is trying to do he's basically saying, well, we have
the law ... and then we have the sovereign, who's both inside and outside of it.
And then this tandem, you might say, these two together, they try to capture the pure
violence of the state of exception. They try to capture what's outside of it. They
try to capture divine violence and if they can capture that they will include it within this
state of exception, which is inside of the law. Alright, so a little bit repetitive here on
my part, but I'm trying to kind of sketch out this dialogue and to show you what's happening.
We might argue, then, that eventually these two positions can seem quite close to each other.
Maybe one way to think about it is that on the one hand, if we think of Carl Schmitt's model,
we have two circles here again -- we have the law and we have anomie, or life.
Basically the law tries to conquer life and
anomie through this concept of "force-of-law," which we talked about before. "Force-of- law" --
which was crossed out, if you recall. And the state of exception allows the law to
conquer in this direction. So this is an image of conquest, we might say,
or annexation. Now if we think, then, about the other model, it's actually somewhat similar in
a way. Alright, but now we can think of this as revolutionary violence ...
through which the life that is here, the anomie, kind of destroys, you might say,
the state. So we have more destruction ...
There we go, and what we have here instead is a kind of pure means.
There we go: so we have pure means on this side and we have some kind of state of exception on this
end, but they actually seem remarkably similar sometimes! And so
as Agamben suggests, sometimes it feels like you're moving the same pawn across the chessboard.
That's the image that he uses there. Well, how do we solve this problem? How do we solve
this problem? It seems that for both Agamben and for Walter Benjamin the only solution is in
a sense to get out! Now you're living in the state of exception, which has been been conflated
with the rule, and you need to get out somehow. Well, how do you do this? How do you escape this whole
complex entanglement altogether? That's kind of the question at the end
of the book you might say. The solution, in a sense, is very similar to what Benjamin
argues, for which is that we need a kind of pure means. We need a pure means
without an end. We're not trying to achieve a specific end. And if we do that we will get to
life -- kind of a restored life, although there's no beginning before the law, as Agamben
argues. We will also get to justice, or at least the beginning of justice, which is a
different concept than law here. But the only way to do that is not not to have the law anymore.
In a sense we're basically discarding the law, or a good example that Agamben uses towards the end of
his work is he gives this example of studying an old law -- studying an old law
without any attempt to apply it.
You're not trying to make it normative. You're not trying to put it in force. You are simply playing
with the law. It doesn't actually apply. You're just studying it for its own
sake, and it's pure means, but there's no end to it. It seems that Agamben himself sometimes does that,
because he's very interested in old laws, but it might be objected that there's some irony to this
because he himself is studying old laws with the goal, the end, of changing social views and
specific laws! So his own book might actually make this kind of approach somewhat ironic.
But basically he wants to get to a place where the law does not bind.
[The] law does not does not bind, and in that sense he's similar to Walter Benjamin, who also
suggested that we need to get beyond this this problem, where the state wants to use violence
as a means to an end. As you recall here, this box here shows how the state
creates a monopoly over violence. As an aside, I think this also really sheds some light on,
for instance, in the United States, where where there's an attempt to defund the police.
and there too you can see that for some of these protesters the police are inherently
violent -- that violence is associated with the state. It is a means to an end, and there's no way
for a protester like that to see violence as good perhaps.
It has a very negative kind of connotation. As a result, the only way is to
get outside the box, which would mean defunding the police. So the theory here, I think, really
helps to explain some of the social movements, even today. (This is my own application, but
maybe you can see a connection with Agamben here). So we come to the end, then, and I think you would
probably agree that this is a bit of a utopian solution, because how do you get to pure means?
And you might argue that this contrast between means and ends ...
is itself a binary opposition. So if it is a binary opposition,
shouldn't we be blurring the boundaries? Shouldn't we even be applying the state of exception to it
to kind of complicate this relationship? Is it really possible to go to pure means, or is that
more of a dream? I think those are some fascinating questions to consider as we wrap up this series.