VIOLENCE IN THE STATE OF EXCEPTIONapply. Because of this fusion of lawmaking and law-preserving violence, Benjamin sug-
gests, both forms of violence lose their mutual limitations. Lawmaking violence can thus
penetrate all the regions of the legal order, also those of mere administration and preser-
vation. The laws are constantly threatened by their possible suspension in the ‘‘exceptional
case.’’ Benjamin therefore calls police authority ‘‘ignominious’’: ‘‘its power is formless,
like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.’’^41
In modern democracies, the police even bears witness to the ‘‘greatest conceivable degen-
eration of violence.’’^42
Parliaments, Benjamin claims, cultivate a politics of compromise that has supposedly
banned all forms of violence. Denying the reality of lawmaking violence, parliaments are
in fact only taking refuge in a moreconcealedviolence, for compromises always presup-
pose a moment of compulsion. Benjamin quotes Erich Unger: ‘‘it would be better other-
wise, is the underlying feeling in every compromise.’’ Thus parliaments can only issue
legal decrees of which ‘‘the origin and outcome are attended by violence.’’^43 According to
Benjamin, the parliaments’ illusion that they embody a perfectly peaceful discussion turns
out to have a high price. The fact that a politics of compromise has to accept any position
as negotiable inevitably undermines the parliaments’ legitimacy. Parliaments fall into de-
cline as soon as they lose awareness of the presence of violence. In modern democracies,
Benjamin argues, parliaments offer a ‘‘woeful spectacle’’ because they have lost conscious-
ness of the lawmaking violence originally represented in them. They have fallen prey to
indecision.^44
After having discussed the notion that state violence is a manifestation of lawmaking
violence, Benjamin shifts his focus to the violence represented in critique itself. To escape
the aporia of positivism and natural law, he introduces the concept of ‘‘pure means [reine
Mittel].’’ Pure means do not serve any purpose outside themselves and are, strictly speak-
ing, no means at all butmedia: they open up a sphere of pure mediation, in which any
intention to intervene in moral relations is absent.^45 As Benjamin suggests, only a politics
of pure means can effectively criticize state violence, thus bringing the dialectic of law-
making and law-preserving violence to an end. This politics of pure means can ‘‘under
certain conditions’’ take the form of a revolutionary strike. Following the French anarcho-
syndicalist Georges Sorel’sReflections on Violence(1908), Benjamin distinguishes between,
on the one hand, a ‘‘political general strike,’’ which uses the threat of violence as a means
of forcing the state to accept compromises, and, on the other, a ‘‘proletarian general
strike,’’ which categorically rejects the use of violence and aims at the complete abolition
of the state.^46 Whereas the first form of work interruption is themeansof a lawmaking
violence, the second is themediumof a law-destroying violence.
In the political strike’s lawmaking violence, Benjamin recognizes the manifestation
of a mythical violence, which, by threatening retribution, only creates new boundaries
and thus causes a continuation of guilt. By contrast, the proletarian strike’s law-destroying
violence bears witness to a divine violence, which at the end of time will destroy the law
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