NOTES TO PAGES 202–14German from Walter Benjamin,Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsa ̈tze, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-
kamp, 1965). Page numbers in the text and notes refer to the English translation.
- Benjamin’s word for ‘‘fate’’ isdas Shicksal,which is more aptly translated as ‘‘destiny.’’
- Rosenzweig argues that the commandment is a verbal and written effort on the part of God
to solicit the love of his people (The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo [Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985], 267–70). His focus on love corresponds to the efforts during
that time to revive the spiritual dimension of Judaism over and against rabbinic reforms that fo-
cused on the elaboration of rules and the science of their interpretation. Rosenzweig’s concern with
Judaism as a spiritual movement led him to argue that ‘‘the Jewish people must deny itself the
satisfaction the peoples of the world constantly enjoy in the functioning of their state’’ (332). He
argues further that ‘‘The state symbolizes the attempt to give nations eternity within the confines
of time.’’ For such an eternity to be secured, however, nations must perpetually be refounded, and
they require war to perpetuate themselves. In Rosenzweig’s view, life is constituted by preservation
and renewal. Law emerges as antilife to the extent that law establishes an endurance and stability
that works against life and becomes the basis for state coercion. He sought to understand Judaism
as beyond the contradictions that afflict nations, and so to distinguish the idea of the Jewish people
from the Jewish nation (329). - For a record of Benjamin’s indecisive relation to Zionism, see the correspondence between
Benjamin and Scholem in the summer of 1933,The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Ger-
shom Scholem, 1932–1940(New York: Schocken, 1989). - See Jacques Derrida,Force de loi(Paris : Galile ́e, 1994), 69.
- Hannah Arendt, ‘‘On Violence,’’ inCrises of the Republic(New York: Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich, 1972). - Benjamin associates atonement and retribution with myth both in this essay and in several
other essays of the period. He also clearly opposes the operation of critique to myth, which, in his
view, wars against truth. See, e.g., ‘‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’’ in Benjamin,Selected Writings,
1:297–362. This essay was written between 1919 and 1922. - Also in 1921, Benjamin writes of ‘‘the immeasurable significance of the Last Judgment, of
that constantly postponed day which flees so determinedly into the future after the commission of
every misdeed. This significance is revealed not in the world of law, where retribution rules, but
only in the moral universe, where forgiveness comes out to meet it. In order to struggle against
retribution, forgiveness finds its powerful ally in time. For time, in which Ate [moral blindness]
pursues the evildoer, is not the lonely calm of fear but the tempestuous storm of forgiveness which
precedes the onrush of the Last Judgment and against which she cannot advance. This storm is not
only the voice in which the evildoer’s cry of terror is drowned; it is also the hand that obliterates
the traces of his misdeeds, even if it must lay waste to the world in the process’’ (‘‘The Meaning of
Time in a Moral Universe,’’ Benjamin,Selected Writings, 1:287).
Forgiveness, which we might ordinarily understand as a capacity achieved upon reflection
when passions have quieted down, is here figured as a storm, a storm with a hand and a voice, and
so a divine force, butnotone that is based on retribution. Importantly, this storm of forgiveness
constitutes a radical alternative to the closed economy of atonementandretribution. For a further
discussion of this issue of forgiveness in Benjamin, see my ‘‘Beyond Seduction and Morality: Benja-
min’s Early Aesthetics,’’ in Dominic Willsdon and Diarmuid Costello, eds.,Ethics and Aesthetics
(London: Routledge, forthcoming). - ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ in Walter Benjamin,Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Auto-
biographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. and introd. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 312–13; originally published in Benjamin,Kritik der Gewalt und andere
Aufsa ̈tze, 95–96.
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