INTRODUCTIONnonviolent violence is that of a messianic-Judaic ‘‘divine violence.’’ In Butler’s summary:
‘‘Divine violence is unleashed against thecoercive forceof that legal framework, against
the accountability that binds a subject to a specific legal system and stops that very subject
from developing a critical, if not a revolutionary point of view on that legal system’’
(p. 203).
As inPrecarious LifeandGiving an Account of Oneself,^113 the argument and sensibility
Butler distills from Benjamin’s engagement with the Marxist and anarchist, Zionist and
Judaic-messianic debates of his day—all of which are recast in light of his own earlier
metaphysical investigations—comes down to a subtle attempt to envision ‘‘the release
from legal accountability and guilt as a way of apprehending the suffering and the tran-
sience in life, of life, as something that cannot always be explained through the framework
of moral or legal accountability.’’ What can be gathered from Benjamin’s text, with its
theologico-political overtones, then, is an important lesson regarding the structure of
‘‘ethical address,’’ now seen as a ‘‘commandment’’ that ‘‘delivers an imperative precisely
without the capacity to enforce in any way the imperative it communicates.... an impera-
tive that doesnotdictate, butleaves openthe modes of its applicability, the possibilities of
its interpretation, including the conditions under which it may be refused’’ (pp. 203–5).
Close to Benjamin, in his critique of Hegelian dialectics, is the view of Franz Rosen-
zweig, whose ‘‘antisystem’’ deeply influenced Levinas in what resulted in a genuinely de-
mystifying and sobering ‘‘philosophy of war’’ and the violence of history. Ste ́phane Moses, in his contribution, makes it clear that Rosenzweig, in the opening pages ofThe Star of Redemption, and Levinas, in the preface toTotality and Infinity, take stock of the political, ontological, and metaphysical-religious repercussions of the two world wars, albeit it with different emphasis. Moses tracks the fateful consequence of the disintegration of the iden-
tity, presupposed in Western thought ‘‘from Ionia to Jena,’’ between the rational and the
real, being and totality, from Rosenzweig’s meditation on death and the human individual
against the backdrop of ‘‘total war’’ to Levinas’s reflection upon the totalitarian and sys-
tematic annihilation of peoples—and hence of a certain idea of humanity. In Levinas’s
conception of ‘‘absolute forsakenness, there is for the self no beyond war’’ (p. 222).
Whereas Rosenzweig seeks to postulate a ‘‘space of peace’’—namely, that of the subjective
‘‘I’’—outside the negative totality, the system of Spirit, ‘‘entirely governed by war,’’ Levi-
nas sees such recourse as being no longer available under present historical and more
broadly ontological conditions. He thus envisions war as ‘‘the permanent state of human-
ity,’’ revealing the ‘‘agonistic essence of the real,’’ indeed, of ‘‘reason itself,’’ against whose
backdrop the appeal to individuality or even morality seems illusory, a ‘‘naı ̈vete ́’’ (pp.
228–29). The Hegelian conception of mediating consciousnesses and states reduces them,
Levinas writes, to ‘‘bearers of forces that command them unbeknownst to themselves’’—
and hence commits them to war (p. 229). To this Levinas contrasts an ‘‘ethical optics,’’
which consist in considering man ‘‘outside all context.’’ In so doing, Moses suggests,
Levinas does not refute Rosenzweig’s appeal to singularity (here, the ‘‘extra-territoriality’’
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