Podcast: The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Ep. 237: Walter Benjamin Analyzes Violence (Part One)
Pub date: 2020-03-02

Notes from The Intellectual:

What if the explicit goal of a strike was not to attain benefits, some particular transfer of power, but to unseat the state altogether? This kind of strike, which would likely involve both implicit and explicit violence, Benjamin imagines could be seen as comparable to divine violence. It would redeem workers. .

On "Critique of Violence" (1921). What is violence? Benjamin gives us a taxonomy: law-creating, law-preserving, mythological, and divine. Then he deconstructs his own distinctions to demonstrate that all state power is rotten through its being founded on and continually re-established by violence or the threat of it.

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