Walter Benjamin on Justice, Judaism, and the Possibility of Ethics CHARLES H

American Political Science Review Vol. 108, No. 1 February 2014 doi:10.1017/S0003055413000579 c American Political Science Association 2014 Against Politics: Walter Benjamin on Justice, Judaism, and the Possibility of Ethics CHARLES H. T. LESCH Harvard University s politics compatible with the moral life? Recent attempts to revivify democracy have stressed the lived experience of political activity, the democratic character of the spontaneous moment and the I popular movement. This article raises some concerns about such agonistic enthusiasm via an original reading of Walter Benjamin’s political thought. For Benjamin, politics corrodes our everyday lives and moral conduct. His response is to envision a space for ethics wholly apart from the violence (Gewalt) that sustains propertied political order, a purified version of the Kantian kingdom of ends that he calls the “state of justice.” Yet deprived of the coercive instrumentality of politics, there is no action that could lead humanity directly to such a state. To surmount this paradox, Benjamin culls from sources in Jewish political theology, and in particular, Jewish ideas about justice and the community of the righteous. In so doing, he offers a new and radical ethical critique of politics that may hold special relevance in our politics-saturated age. “Human actions form a whole. A space can be saved Such theorizing attends to the impact of ideological with great effort for ethically relevant actions. Saved and instrumental forms of thinking on our everyday from what? From violence, which can be termed moral judgment (Halbertal 2012, 63–78), what Weber ‘myth.’ Almost all realms of human action are sub- calls the “significance of political action within our ject to mythical categories, from which fate alone conduct of life as a whole” ([1919] 2002, 309). The attributes meaning. Justice is the elimination of fate “political” is here taken to be one component of our from action. The righteous act has neither fate nor meaning.” lived experience, offering a reservoir of concepts and categories—power, conflict, authority, strategy, perfor- — Gershom Scholem on Walter Benjamin’s mance, hierarchy—from which we might draw as we “Theses on the Concept of Justice” navigate our interactions with others. But if our ethical relationships also contain elements that are political, it should stir us to interrogate the normative status of he spirit—or demon—of politics,” writes Max politics, to inquire about its impact on the self. In short, Weber, “lives in a state of inner tension with the we might wonder: Is politics compatible not only with Tgod of love.” “This is a tension,” he continues ethical decision-making, but ethical life? ominously, “that may erupt at any moment into irre- A prominent tradition in the history of political solvable conflict” ([1919] 2002, 366, translation mod- thought has responded to this question by sidestepping ified). One important way of theorizing the friction ethical concerns in order to extol the activity of politics. between morality and politics examines the so-called From Aristotle’s “magnanimous man” to Machiavelli’s “problem of dirty hands,” raising vital questions about virtu`, Arendt on action, Gramsci, and perhaps even Ni- when it is appropriate to violate moral norms for the etzsche, such thinkers have promoted the life spent in sake of a greater communal good (Thompson 1987; responsibility, persuasion, decision, and deed. Without Walzer 1973, 1977). Another important but neglected minimizing their differences, what theorists of this kind way to understand this tension, however, inquires not offer is a certain image of human flourishing: A life that into the ethics of high political leadership but the is active and enterprising, inventive and resourceful— politics embedded in our own ethical relationships. and, at the same time, deeply enmeshed in realities of interpersonal power. A person in this mold is a shrewd and artful fashioner of her world, and the wellspring Charles H. T. Lesch is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory in the of her invention is politics. Indeed the political itself is Department of Government at Harvard University. In 2013–14, he here taken to be that mode of life that redeems human- will be a Graduate Fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for ity from its creaturely state, according it meaning and Ethics. ([email protected]) 1737 Cambridge Street Cambridge, purpose. For some of these thinkers, it is a significant MA 02138. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2011 Eu- part of what makes us uniquely human. “Exploiters ropean Philosophy Workshop at Harvard, the Workshop in Jewish or slaveholders” may be unjust, writes Arendt, “but Political Thought at the 2011 Graduate Conference in Political Sci- they are certainly human”; yet “a life without speech ence at Hebrew University, and at the Political Theory Workshop and without action”—one characterized, that is, by a at Harvard University in the spring of 2012. I am grateful to the participants in these events for their insights and discussion, and kind of moral quietism—“is literally dead to the world” would like to extend special thanks to Michael Rosen, Nancy Rosen- (Arendt 1958, 176). blum, Michael Sandel, Peter Gordon, Moshe Halbertal, Dan Avnon, In recent years, a number of theorists seeking to Moshe Hellinger, Tae-Yeoun Keum, and three anonymous review- revivify democracy have looked to recover aspects of ers at APSR for their exceptionally helpful thoughts, criticisms, and this strain of thinking, identifying what is genuinely suggestions. Finally, I owe a significant debt of gratitude to Steven Forde and the other APSR co-editors for their invaluable comments “democratic” with a form of action or activity rather and assistance. than a type of regime. Democracy, on this view, makes 218 American Political Science Review Vol. 108, No. 1 its authentic appearance in spontaneous “moments” At first blush, Benjamin might appear an unusual and popular “movements.”1 Sharing, on the one hand, thinker to which to turn for insights into politics. An a Weberian fear of an apathetic and bureaucratized so- important literary and cultural critic who wrote in con- ciety, and on the other, a concern about the normative tinental Europe prior to the Second World War, he has strictures of political liberalism, some of these thinkers long been influential for theorists in many disciplines, have cautioned against the so-called “displacement of sparking important developments in fields as diverse politics,” the attempt to foreclose humanity’s expres- as history, anthropology, comparative literature, archi- sive horizon by setting in advance the boundaries of tecture, and film studies. Even so, it is only in the past the political. “To accept and embrace the perpetuity of few years that he has been recognized as an innovative contest,” writes Bonnie Honig, “is to reject the dream political thinker. Three facets of his thought have been of displacement, the fantasy that the right laws or con- particularly influential. First, his antihistoricist “On the stitution might free us from the responsibility for (and, Concept of History,” besides spawning a voluminous indeed, the burden of) politics” (1993, 210–11). interpretive literature, has also been an important re- Theorizing of this kind gives rise to important reflec- source for theorists of nationalism (Anderson 1983) tions about the adequacy of our own political institu- and subaltern studies (Scott 2009, 35). His impact has tions. It productively challenges us to rethink many of also been felt in modern legal theory, especially since our assumptions about the meaning of democracy and the appearance of Jacques Derrida’s well-known lec- self-governance. Yet its enthusiasm for political activity ture on law and authority that was framed explicitly also raises an ethical worry. Does a more frankly ad- as a commentary on Benjamin (Derrida [1989] 1992, versarial vision of politics—one that seeks to highlight cf. Hamacher 1991, Menke 2010, Morgan 2007). Most rather than mitigate interpersonal relations of power— recently, the swell of interest in political theology and still permit the development of the moral self? In this the concept of sovereignty has spotlighted the central— article, I argue that this anxiety demands more urgent and controversial—relationship between religion and attention via a new interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s violence in his writings, particularly his notoriously dif- early political thought. Political theorists, I think, have ficult concept of “divine violence” (Agamben [1995] good reason to be troubled by the possible moral con- 1998). In the process, two dominant understandings of sequences of a more expansive role for politics in ev- Benjamin’s thought on religion, politics, and violence eryday life. have emerged, both of which this article sets out to At the same time, Benjamin’s argument also calls reverse. into question one of modern political theory’s most First, the consensus in contemporary political the- important premises. At least since Kant, liberal and ory is that Benjamin does not advance a normative democratic thought has largely assumed that coercive theory of ethics. Jurgen¨ Habermas has expelled Ben- political authority is not only compatible with ethics, jamin from ethics entirely, linking him to Carl Schmitt’s but is its necessary prerequisite. According to this view, theory of sovereignty, the aesthetics of violence, and a the state is justified in using the force of law in order to strand of reactionary antiliberalism. In his eyes Ben- produce an orderly civil sphere, for under its aegis, peo- jamin, with Schmitt, sought nothing less than “the vio- ple will be free to make autonomous moral decisions lent destruction of the normative as such” (Habermas and cultivate individual virtue.2 For Benjamin, how- 1992, cf. [1972] 1991 and Benhabib 1986, 327–9). A ever, political order of any kind necessarily entails—in more recent treatment by Giorgio Agamben has again Weber’s words—“a relation of men dominating men” stressed the link to Schmitt, particularly on the con- (311, translation modified).

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