HENT DE VRIESthe political, jurisprudence, and international law, as well as into the forms of individual
and shared lives. In her studyPrecarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, she
had addressed the impossibility, in contemporary post 9/11 American public life, for
certain groups and individual voices to be heard, let alone be mourned. Butler takes up
the question of the distinction in Benjamin’s ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ between ‘‘law-instat-
ing’’ and ‘‘law-preserving’’ violence, as well as the relationship between them, and ad-
dresses the difficult question of what it is that he counterposes to these conceptions. She
thereby prepares the ground for a reassessment of the political and politics at a mo-
ment—in Benjamin’s time and, not so differently, our own—of a redefining of the rulings
and jurisdiction of legal courts, an increase in the intermediary role of ‘‘the police,’’ and
an increasing role of the military in matters of national and international security and
intelligence (with the checks and balances between them rapidly—and disturbingly—
fading). While not blurring important historical and moral-political distinctions, Butler
makes it explicit that Benjamin’s ‘‘opposition to the binding, even coercive character of
law seems less savory once we consider the rise of fascism, as well as the flouting of both
constitutional and international law that characterizes U.S. foreign policy in its practices
of war, torture, and illegal detention’’ (p. 206).
Recalling that Benjamin provides a critique of ‘‘legalviolence, the kind of violence
that the state wields through instating and maintaining the binding status that law exer-
cises on its subjects’’ (p. 201), Butler raises the question of what alternative trajectory might
possibly also be opened here, albeit in an idiom and argumentation that remains in need
of translation into our own historical context. The answer, she suggests, lies in a further
unfolding of a now seemingly theological, then again political perspective, epitomized by
what Benjamin calls ‘‘divine intervention’’ and ‘‘the general strike,’’ terms and figures that
are formally almost interchangeable. Benjamin takes one from the tradition mediated by
his friend Gershom Scholem, the other from the anarcho-syndicalist theorist Georges
Sorel. This dual influence leads us to the heart of the problem, for Benjamin, Butler notes,
is ‘‘elaborating, on the one hand, the conditions for a general strike that would result in
the paralysis and dissolution of an entire legal system, and, on the other, the notion of a
divine god whose commandmentoffers a kind of injunction that is irreducible to coercive
law’’ (p. 204).
Not the least interesting motivation behind Benjamin’s view may be the fact that his
essay, as Butler explains, should be understood as intervening in an intellectual context
in which such intellectuals as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber took
critical issue with Zionism as a an attempt to establish a legal and political territoriality
for Judaism, which, they felt, could only result in compromising its spiritual mission.
Benjamin’s essay should thus be seen as exploring the possibility of another form of
violence or authoritative force that would be noncoercive or, as Butler puts it, ‘‘a violence
that can be invoked and waged against the coercive force of law,’’ and that hence, in a
sense, would be fundamentally nonviolent (p. 201). Benjamin’s term for this alternative,
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