Giorgio Agamben (2005) _State of Exception_, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Walter Benjamin (1996 [1921]) 'Critique of Violence', in Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings, eds. _Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926_, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 236-252.

Susan Buck-Morss (2003) _Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left_, London: Verso.  

Leon Trotsky (1987 [1911]) 'Terrorism', in 'What do we mean...?', _Education for Socialists No. 6_, March, Socialist Worker's Party. 

Slavoj Zizek (2008) _Violence_, London: Profile Books.


The task of the critique of violence is a moral question in as much as it is defined by law and justice. But for Benjamin, the issue is not whether violence is a means to a just or unjust end (a critique of 'just ends') but whether violence can be a moral means in itself. As he puts it, 'a more exact criterion is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve' (1996: 236). This is important as otherwise violence operates as if by natural law, in a Darwinian fashion as 'the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature' (1996: 237). (This is also how ideology operates effectively through appearing natural and involved in the production of natural ends through natural means). In contrast to natural law that takes violence to be a product of nature, positive law takes violence as a product of history. The problem is that 'positive law is blind to the absoluteness of ends, natural law is equally so to the contingency of means' (1996: 237). Whereas natural law seeks to justify means, positive law tries to guarantee ends. Rather than simply reconciling just ends by a justification of the means, or vice versa, the 'Critique of Violence' essay focusses on the realm of means, or more precisely: 'the question of the justification of certain means that constitute violence' (1996: 237). 

As far as the State is concerned, violence exercised by individuals, or its legal subjects, is a threat to the legal system that serves to justify its own use of violence. Legal ends appear to be only achievable by legal power. As Benjamin, says: 'Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence.' (1996: 248) This indicates the law's 'monopoly on violence' as Benjamin puts it, in not simply preserving legal ends but more importantly in preserving the law itself. It also affirms the threat of actions that are outside of the law, to the law itself. 

An exception to this is the right to strike that remains conceded by the State. But then To strike is an active refusal to work, the withdrawal of actions, a non-action, is not necessarily violent. Where violence is more easily discernible is that to strike is to escape from the violence imposed on the worker by the employer. The right to strike translates as the right to use violence to attain certain ends, and the State reserves the right to counter this with violence. This is in keeping with the position of Trotsky, in his essay 'Terrorism' of 1911, who considers the argument against the use of violence to be a hypocrisy in that the entire state apparatus and its laws, police, and army nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror in itself:
'Our class enemies are in the habit of complaining about our terrorism. What they mean by this is rather unclear. They would like to label all the activities of the proletariat directed against the class enemy's interests as terrorism. The strike, in their eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of a strike, the organisation of strike pickets, an economic boycott of a slave driving boss, a moral boycott of a traitor from our ranks - all this and much more they call terrorism. If terrorism is understood in this way as any action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the enemy - then of course the entire class struggle is nothing but terrorism.' (1987)

What is important in Trotsky's formulation is not individual terrorist acts, but collective acts against the system: 'In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it _belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness_, reconciles them to their powerlessness...' (1987). Capitalist society recognises this and allows strikes on the basis that it requires an 'active, mobile, intelligent proletariat'. It is the recognition of this, that is revolutionary in Trotsky's view to consolidate self-organisation, the 'alignment of class forces, the proletariat's social weight'. Against the argument of the 'absolute value of human life', Trotsky points to the paradoxical value system that allows for millions of people to be sacrificed in the hell of war. In the contemporary setting, much the same applies as the 'war on terror' and the 'state of emergency' become the justification for the erosion of citizen's rights and freedoms. The duplicity is contingent and skewed according to state/power interests. 
(Note: Susan Buck-Morss points to the flagrant opportunism of the US in this respect, and the West in general in how it approaches 'democracy' with double standards, quoting Samuel Huntington: 'Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalism to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel... human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia' (2003: 32). 
Similarly, on the one hand violence is seen to be inadmissible, and yet on the other, in exceptional circumstances is seen to be necessary - in a 'shift from the moral high ground to raw self-interest' (Buck-Morss 2003: 33). 

(--> example from the film 'Battle of Algiers' and the speech where the captured guerrilla leader is asked by journalists, referring to the practice of leaving bombs in cafes, how he can justify the death of innocent victims. His reply is that he would gladly swap their baskets for French aeroplanes...) 

Benjamin too points to how military violence uses this exception clause to the ends of the State despite active contradiction with its own legal and natural laws. This capacity for State power to withdraw its guarantee of protection and legal entitlement is precisely what Giorgio Agamben's _State of Exception_ discusses in depth (2005). In such cases, the law uses violence for legal ends that itself has decided. As an agent of State authority, police violence is similarly legitimated as both law-making and law-preserving - and all violence as a means is law-making and law-preserving, according to Benjamin. When the ends cannot be guaranteed by the legal system alone, the police and military further intervene 'for security reasons' (1996: 243). Security marks the exception in other words. For instance, the US national security state is a war machine that requires 'a localizable enemy for its powers to appear legitimate; its biggest threat is that the enemy disappears' (Buck-Morss 2003: 30). Power continues to produce its own vulnerability, dialectically. 

On the relation between violence and revolution, Benjamin also refers to Georges Sorel's essay 'Reflections on Violence' (1915) (196: 245-6). Sorel points to the failure of parliamentary democracy to deliver its promises and to the principle of counter-violence, not only through strikes but through proletarian revolution based on a distinction between violence and force (Note: the German word 'Gewalt' means both violence and force). The point is that under certain conditions violence becomes force, as pure means.  

There remains the potential for 'pure immediate violence' - human action that neither makes nor preserves law, that is outside of the law. 
Agamben draws upon Benjamin's essay to add detail to the idea of 'pure violence' ('reine gewalt') quoting a letter to Ernst Schoen of 1919:
'It is a mistake to postulate anywhere a purity that exists in itself and needs only to be preserved.... The purity of a being is _never_ unconditional or absolute; it is always subject to a condition. This condition varies according to the being whose purity is at issue; but this condition _never_ inheres in the being itself.' (in Agamben 2005: 61) 

Following this, the sense of 'purity' (Reinheit) does not apply to any violent action in itself, but in its relation to external conditions. The paradox of Benjamin's position is in drawing together proletarian violence informed by Marxism with the theology of divine violence represented by Judaic Messianism - where redemption is provided by 'pure divine violence'. So rather than promote terrorist violence, or as necessary means justified by ends, he calls for: 'collective political action that is lethal not to human beings, but to the humanly created mythic powers that reign over them' (Buck-Morss 2003: 33). The concept of pure, divine violence is a violence that appears to come from nowhere - from beyond the law - in which 'killing is neither a crime nor a sacrifice' because law applies only to the living according to Zizek. He continues:
'Divine violence is an expression of pure drive, of the undeadness, the excess of life, which strikes the "bare life" regulated by law.' (2008: 168). For Benjamin, revolution requires this sense of excess. To Zizek, divine violence is a sign without meaning, it serves no means (2008: 169, 171). 
It is a means without end. 

(--> violence of language/code)
In addition to the 'systemic violence' described above, there is a symbolic violence embodied in language itself - not simply in a called incitement to a violent action or in the ways that language reflects social domination more generally but - in the way that it produces meaning more fundamentally. Instead of direct violence, language is used in peaceful debate and at the same time how it is also used to argue tat violence is inadmissable. Although it is often argued that this is what distinguishes humans from other animals, Zizek asks: 'what if humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they _speak_? (2008: 52) He is making reference to Hegel's observation that there is something inherently violent in the capacity of language to represent a thing, which is equivalent to its symbolic death: 'it dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous.           it inserts the thing into a field of meaning that is external to it' (2008: 52). This happens with source code too but goes further. It says something and does something at the same time - it symbolises and enacts a violence on the thing. This is similar to what Zizek refers to when he claims: 
'A fundamental violence exists in this "essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced innocence, one partial colour gives the tome of the whole.' (2008: 58) 
(Note: Zizek refers to Laclau and Heidegger respectively in understanding language as demonstrating hegemonic operations and ontological violence.)  

(--> contracts and licenses associated with software)
The moral ambiguities and duplicities of the law are clear, and at the heart of all contractual agreements. To break a contract is to legitimate the use of violence against the guilty party and the law rests on this potential threat. 


 



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