Our second module is organized around Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Toward the Critique of Violence.” This text was written and published very shortly after the bloody defeat of the 1918 German revolution, in which Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg (our school’s namesake) and many others were killed by a proto-fascist mercenary force known as the Freikorps, under orders from their own presumed comrades in the SPD, Germany’s social-democratic party.
Although Benjamin’s essay contains only very scant direct references to these events, and instead seems to be engaged in a set of rarefied scholarly debates about “positive and natural law,” “mediacy and immediacy,” and “mythic and divine violence,” our wager will be that to understand these arguments, what was all-too-present for Benjamin first has to become so for us.
The “orienting” lecture will focus primarily on events in Germany and Benjamin’s immediate circumstances from 1914 (when the SPD voted to authorize the war credits, that allowed the German state to enter the first World War) until 1921, when Benjamin, having recently returned to Berlin, wrote and published “Toward the Critique of Violence.”
The seminar discussion will focus exclusively on Benjamin’s essay.