In his “Critique of Violence”, Walter Benjamin defends divine violence as a form of emancipatory law-annihilating violence. In his account, divine violence disrupts worldly violence (the violence of law) without appealing to the same logic as worldly violence. In other words, divine violence is not merely the same tool employed in a different manner but a qualitatively different form of violence.
Benjamin argues that the violence of law emerges from its governing force, its ability to bind or impose itself. He aims to describe a form of normativity that does not entail a binding power – further, that prohibits binding power. I will argue that this can be understood best via the investigation of the two prohibitions mentioned in the text: murder and lying. I will extend Benjamin’s analysis to the prohibition of theft. I will try to relate these three prohibitions in a way that demonstrates that they pursue the same objective. They ultimately prohibit the capitalist mode of existence.
The Vicious Cycle of Violence
Benjamin aims to conceptualize a form of violence that disrupts the cycle of law-preserving and law-positing violence. According to him, we live in a constant regime of violence since it is used both to maintain order and to create a new order.
He turns to divine violence to disrupt this cycle. This divine violence is described as ‘law-annihilating’ or ‘deposing,’ challenging the traditional view of law and justice. Divine violence is not distinguished by its strength nor its origin; it is fundamentally different from other forms of power. It does not govern or prescribe. It separates normativity from prescription, neutralizing the possibility of coercion. Divine violence implements a law whose only power is the interruption of any governing force.
Jewish law already embodies the destitution of law that Benjamin envisions. Benjamin refers to several commandments to illustrate his argument, and I argue that they form a mode of normativity that is non-binding. Jewish law, as presented by the Benjaminian reading offered here, was never intended to prescribe strict adherence. Commandments are inoperative yet retain their normative force. Jewish law disrupts the logic of enforcement and creates a space for an alternative account of justice.
Bearing False Testimony
The Hebrew commandment that is often referred to as the prohibition on lying actually prohibits bearing false testimony. Benjamin knows this, and he takes it as axiomatic for his arguments. This distinction is important: lying refers to an epistemological condition, i.e., whether a statement corresponds to reality, whereas bearing false testimony entails something else, closer to manipulation. Benjamin writes, “The word ‘lie’ stands both for false information and untruth; only in the latter case does it cover something morally negative; by contrast, in the first case, it is something positive if it does not stand in coincidence [Tateinheit] with the latter.”
The distinction between lying and bearing false witness highlights that the political employment of truth is a governing principle. Using truth as a mechanism of government means that one is always on trial. When Benjamin explores the possibility that lying is not the object of the commandment, his argument is essentially that the ability to determine and impose truth should not legitimate government.
In Benjamin’s account, instead of lying being colonized by false witnessing and therefore being the object of politics, we should understand false witnessing as an instance of lying. Bearing false witness removes the need for the constant enforcement of law. If no one is under judgement, one cannot bear false witness. One might lie, but those would be inconsequential utterances.
The political tension between lying and false witness becomes concrete in the notion of fraud. The market is supposedly a sphere of free, unmediated exchange between individuals. Private individuals enter into agreements without coercion. However, lying in commerce (fraud) is not only a private matter but a crime and hence political. Fraud is not an instance of false witness in the strict sense of the word. It becomes false witness because it signals the need of law to impose itself and govern life. Benjamin writes, “Only at a late stage and by a peculiar process of decay has legal violence penetrated this sphere by penalizing fraud.”
Murder
A similar assessment can be extended to the issue of killing. Benjamin is clear that the prohibition on killing is absolute and any attempt to justify it, even for revolutionary purposes, would entail the legitimation of violence that is the object of his critique. Benjamin again makes a subtle but important distinction: the commandment does not prohibit killing in general but rather murder. One may kill if necessary, and in fact the example Benjamin employs to demonstrate divine violence is a case of killing: the biblical punishment of Korach.
According to Benjamin’s close friend Bertold Brecht, “There are many ways of killing. You can stick a knife in someone’s stomach, take someone’s bread away, not cure someone’s illness, put someone in poor accommodation, work someone to death, drive someone to suicide, take someone to war and so on.” Brecht is arguing that there are several ways to murder a person beyond those currently recognized by the law. The distinction between murder and killing allows for a legal regime where violence can legitimately take place.
The commandment against murder demands the annihilation of the possibility of murder: that all forms of killing become impossible. Against the idea that without law, violence would have a free reign, Benjamin suggests it is law that allows for violence to occur and therefore the annihilation of law is the annihilation of the possibility of violence.
Theft
The prohibition on theft is really a prohibition on property. If property is only established via law, with the annihilation of law there would be no property and hence no stealing. As in the cases of murder and bearing false witness, the annihilation of law does not entail the disappearance or elimination of the commandment but rather its inoperative presence. Werner Hamacher’s analysis of the creation of debt allows for this connection: “The mechanics of debt—of ‘advanced’ or ‘credited’ money—compose the process by which value transforms itself into surplus value—which is what defines value as value to begin with… And more precisely, it is a theogeny out of credit, a credit that is itself drawn from unpaid labor, exploitation, colonization, theft, and murder, legalized under the laws of the privileged.”
The definition of value as a form of theft resembles Brecht’s definition of murder (Brecht also used theft) in the way that it expands the sphere of what is usually considered under the law. In this way, one could paraphrase Brecht to say that appropriation happens several manners but only a limited scope is considered stealing, i.e., rendered illegal or even the object of legislation. Thus, too, with property itself: it is theft and warrants prohibition.
The commandment against stealing hinders any form of appropriation, guaranteeing that property is annihilated. In this context, one can see perhaps the clearest application of the logic of a law that is normative without being prescriptive. The law prohibits property, but it does not prescribe its alternative: it does not command a logic of use or consummation. It is a destructive logic without any constructive side.
This is not a powerless argument that merely provides empty proscriptions (‘ought nots’) without stipulating any obligations (‘musts’). The ban on stealing must be implemented, but implementing it is an absolute impossibility: there are no specific actions that can be taken to implement it. Without prescriptive power, the ban on stealing opens rather than closes the future. It does not decide or bind, it merely annihilates, which is to say prohibits, violence.
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Benjamin’s vision involves a radical rethinking of law, violence, and property. His approach challenges the necessity of an executable law. Jewish law provides a model for this deactivation of law, where commandments are observed not through strict adherence but as part of a normative life that inherently resists governance.
