Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ with Carl Schmitt’s Notion of ‘Political Theology’: A Study of Sovereign Violence through Justice, and the Genesis of the Social Order
Rajarshi Roy
- Pages
- pp. 72-86
- Published
- July 1, 2019
Rajarshi Roy (2019). Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ with Carl Schmitt’s Notion of ‘Political Theology’: A Study of Sovereign Violence through Justice, and the Genesis of the Social Order. Labyrinth, 10(3), 72-86.
Abstract
Linking of free speech, with the birth of the first communities, which then went on to form polities, in terms of its experiencing of the ‘political’ is necessary in order to make sense as to how justice played an important role in circumscrib ing natural rights within the realm of what is justiciable and what is not. The first community was based on the fact how key importance was given to the notion of free speech; the only truest functionality of the initial communities, that came anywhere cl ose to the idea of Equality in the broadest sense of the term. Taking a historiographic methodology of analysing state - craft, from the formation of the primitive community , it would appear since then, how political experience since then has been but a function of a series of violent legitimi sations since then. The very formulation of the legal system from the sophist ’s idea of justice, has been but a product of historic legitimi sations, that has formed a gradient of institutionali sed rejection of human expe riences and a subsequent formulation of the normative, which rejects the errant forms and exiles it outside its control. The methodology , that this essay , seeks to follow is perhaps a distinctly radical one, for it speculates, the impossibility of defining Equality , in the world fascistically enframed in terms of legal systems that has now become a somewhat of a distinct character to each modern nation. This essay , seeks to consider free speech as a political metaphor for equality and try to argue with the aide of the historical gradient, as to how, the birth of the social order, has been Rajarshi Roy Page 73 but a product of few violent instances; namely the birth of the legal order from the sophistic idea of justice and the gradually rising importance of the sovereign, in repe ated drawing and re -drawing of its limits of power. The essay , would in fact, stress more on the violence perpetuated in terms of the invocation of ‘willed’ abrogation of rights and expression towards the formation of the ‘social order ’ from the primordial collective or the community , through a study of few politically significant instances. As a literary critical essay , this could write-up should be understood as a possible negotiation of Walter Benjamin ’s works on ‘political emergency’ to Carl Schmitt ’s theorisations on the possibility of a ‘Political Theology ’. The author of these essay believes that, since both these authors were personalities adorning the contrasting ideological spectra, and existed around the same time; their writings should offer us a much needed understanding their understandings of an ‘extreme society’
Keywords:Free-SpeechPolitynatural rightsjusticethe historicthe historicalcommunitysovereignlimits-of-powerstate of emergencysocial order. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: ON METHODOLOGY AND PURPOSE


