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COLLOQUY text theory critique issue 16, december 2008 Critique of Violence guest edited by Carlo Salzani and Michael Fitzgerald plus General Articles Editorial Committee: Editorial Board: Geoff Berry Bill Ashcroft David Blencowe Andrew Benjamin Rachel Funari Andriana Cavarero David Lane Joy Damousi Adam Lodders Alex Düttmann Blair MacDonald Jürgen Fohrmann Barbara Mattar Sneja Gunew Diane Molloy Kevin Hart Eleonora Morelli Susan K. Martin Elyse Rider Steven Muecke Tanya Serisier Paul Patton Robert Stilwell Georg Stanitzek Rachel Torbett Terry Threadgold Julia Vassilieva Advisory Board: Axel Fliethmann Rose Lucas Alison Ross COLLOQUY text theory critique 16 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue16.pdf ISSN: 13259490 Issue 16, December 2008 Editorial 3 CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE ARTICLES Introduction: Violence and Critique Carlo Salzani and Michael FitzGerald 6 Violence as Pure Praxis: Benjamin and Sorel on Strike, Myth and Ethics Carlo Salzani 18 Prior to Law and Subsequent to Understanding: Benjamin as a Student of the Law Stephanie Polsky 49 The Creature Before the Law: Notes on Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence Mathew Abbott 80 Potentiality and Reconciliation: a Consideration of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Adorno’s “Progress” Tim Finney 97 Between Violence and Law, Is There a Place for Justice? Adam Lodders 111 The Ethics of Interpretation; Toward Critique Without Judgment Lara Shalson 131 Interfaith Dialogue: A Deconstructive Site for the Cycles of Mythic Vio- lence? Elyse Rider 146 GENERAL ARTICLES “A Dark and Hidden Thing”: Evelyn Waugh, Cannibalism, and the Prob- lem of African Christianity Timothy M. Christensen 173 Kant on the Beautiful: The Interest in Disinterestedness Paul Daniels 198 COLLOQUY text theory critique 16 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue16/contents.pdf 2 Contents ░ “We Grew Here You Flew Here”: Claims to “Home” in the Cronulla Riots Clemence Due and Damien W. Riggs 210 Magical Allegory in Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Pig Tales (1996): Piggy Debauchery in Postcolonial France Sallie Muirden 229 TRANSLATION Four Japanese Poems for Peace Sue Stanford 246 BOOK REVIEWS Christopher Clark. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia 1600- 1947. London: Penguin Books, 2006. David Blencowe 263 Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas eds. Transcendental Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Rachel Funari 266 Paul Gillen and Devleena Ghosh. Colonialism and Modernity. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007. Ann McCarthy 270 Chris Healy. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. Diane Molloy 274 Mark Tredinnick. The Little Green Grammar Book. Sydney: UNSW, 2008. Geoff Berry 279 Editorial The second issue of Colloquy: text theory critique for 2008 includes a themed section dedicated to reflections upon Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” and comes accompanied by its own substantial introduction, which deals with the ideas and authors included in it. Alongside this excellent array of postgraduate articles, of which all involved may feel justifiable pride, this issue includes four general articles, a translation and some book reviews. The general articles include investigations into Evelyn Waugh’s sense of Christianity in the context of African cannibalism, analysis of Kantian aesthetics with a discussion of dis- interestedness and beauty, insight into the composition of Australian na- tionalism in light of the Cronulla riots, and an exploration of French post- colonial debauchery. As usual, then, an exciting mix with a broad variety of interests all concerned with the general Colloquy CFP request: for submis- sion of articles related to literary or cultural theory (pure or applied), au- thored by those involved in research in English, communications, lan- guages, performing or recorded arts, and inspired by a wide range of politi- cal and/or aesthetic positions. Alongside the articles included in this issue there is a translation of Japanese poems specially chosen to sit alongside the Violence and Law section. Dealing with war and peace, atomic bombs and the fragility of emotional as well as physical survival, these new trans- lations also come highly recommended. As always the editors want to thank the many referees who made this issue possible. COLLOQUY text theory critique 16 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue16/editorial16.pdf 4 ░ Issue 17, to appear in June 2009, will feature general articles as well as papers devoted to two themes. These are: Alternative visions: philoso- phies of freedom in South Asian Diasporic Writing, and International and In- tercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. The first, with a dis- tinct leaning towards contemporary postcolonial theory, will be guest edited by Elin-Maria Evangelista, Isabella Ofner and Pooja Mittal. The second themed section will feature select postgraduate papers from the Communi- cations and Media Studies conference, held at Monash University in Au- gust 2008, on International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. These papers consider current understandings of globaliza- tion and the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, including relations between the empirical and the theoreti- cal in media cultures in action, what ideas we use to make sense of them, and whether or not disciplinarity is even still a workable idea. The deadline for authors wishing to submit to these sections is December 21st, 2008. Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for this and future is- sues. Issue 18, due out in December 2009, will concentrate on articles aris- ing from the conference Demanding the Impossible: The Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, held at Monash Uni- versity in December 2007. The conference featured keynote speakers Terry Eagleton, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent and Lucy Sussex. The submission deadline for Issue 18 is June 15, 2009. Academic arti- cles, review articles, book reviews, translations, opinion essays and crea- tive writing will be considered. THE EDITORS C R I T I Q U E o f V I O L E N C E A R T I C L E S Introduction: Violence and Critique Carlo Salzani and Michael FitzGerald 1. The questions of violence, justice and judgment define one of the most resonant and constant concerns of contemporary thought. In part, this is only a reflection of what are often called the ‘realities on the ground’ (the in- tonation is, of course, that to pursue these questions as questions is al- ready to be ‘in the air’ or ‘in the clouds’). In the few years of this century the logic of violence, and even its aestheticisation – whether as terror or as ‘shock and awe,’ or in the citizen’s daily vocation to be ‘alert but not alarmed’ – have become the familiar data of current experience. They are a kind of weather, felt through the colour-coded threat scale of the Homeland Security Advisory System, or in the casual references to the ‘current cli- mate.’ In view of these realities, and of an acclimatisation to them that in- forms general popular support for extensions of executive power and legis- lative activity, the urgency of the turn or return to questions of force and law is to be expected. In the fabric of recent debate, they are seams at which COLLOQUY text theory critique 16 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue16/salzani-fitzgerald.pdf ░ Critique of Violence Introduction 7 confrontations are staged and positions defined; but also, where the thought that remains closest to the ‘realities on the ground’ is forced into juxtaposition with the mythological and theological schemes that violence, justice and judgment inevitably conjure. Thus, contributors to this issue of Colloquy were invited to consider whether it was possible to account for a difference between violence, terror and revolution, without simplification or banalisation of the relationship between law and force. On the one hand, the editors envisaged that this question would be a provocation to re- examine contemporary representations of sovereignty, jurisdiction and the ‘state of exception,’ in a global context dominated by issues of security and the justification of extra-legal and extra-judicial force – occupation, deten- tion, torture. On the other hand, the reference to the mythological and the theological was inevitable, inasmuch as contributors were invited to organ- ise their reflections around two of the most significant interventions in twen- tieth-century jurisprudence and political theory, Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law.” For as is well-known, Benjamin and Derrida pursue their distinctive lines of questioning in the di- rection of a ‘divine violence’ or of a ‘mystical foundation of authority.’ The reception of the two texts suggests that these concepts remain, for many, difficult to the point of being indigestible; at least in the ‘current climate.’ 2. The history of the composition and publication of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” is well known, but it is worth reprising it here, in order to con- textualise the many issues raised in this dense and troubling essay. This history must begin with a short sketch of the historical and cultural context from which the piece arose. In 1920, when Benjamin was working on the piece, Europe and Germany in particular were living through extreme and violent historical events: Germany had lost the war in 1918, a war that, with its 10 million casualties and the massive involvement, for the first time, of the civil population, had been the bloodiest and most destructive in history and thus marked the beginning of a “short century” of violence. The defeat had determined the end of the Second Reich in Germany and the procla- mation of the Republic in Weimar: though between 1923 and 1929 this Re- public experienced a period of relative calm, its first years were extremely troubled and violent. Physical confrontation became the ‘other means’ by which politics was continued, culminating in the bloodbath of the Spartacist 8 Salzani & FitzGerald ░ uprising of 1919.
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