Post Secular Messianism Against The Law PDF

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law:
Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and

‘Sacred Life’
Karyn Ball
Law and Critique
ISSN 0957-8536
Law Critique
DOI 10.1007/s10978-016-9184-1
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Law Critique
DOI 10.1007/s10978-016-9184-1
Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith

Butler on Walter Benjamin and ‘Sacred Life’
Karyn Ball1
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways:

Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical
motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian
ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s
post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the ‘‘Human’’
Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he
enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of
‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In under-
scoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living
persons’ over and against ‘‘‘the human’’ conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a
state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at
stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’.
In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s
non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts.
A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-
endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment
in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm.
I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s
grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’
forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers
Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radical-
izing the passivity that refracts it.
Keywords Cohabitation Jewish messianism Post-secular critique Sacred life

Sixth commandment
& Karyn Ball

karyn.ball@ualberta.ca
1
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
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K. Ball
In recent years, Judith Butler’s criticism of Israel has, predictably, provoked her
Zionist opponents to disqualify her speech as ‘Jewish self-hatred’, a reaction that
positions her as the enemy within among the occupation’s fiercest rationalizers.1
Responding in Mondoweiss to a Jerusalem Post article that challenged her merit as
the 2012 Adorno Prize recipient,2 Butler dismisses apocryphal claims that she
supports Hamas and Hezbollah, or that she favours an unequivocal boycott of every
Israeli and Israeli institution3; she also counters ‘Jewish self-hatred’ allegations by
recalling her tutelage under Rabbi Daniel Silver at The Temple in Cleveland, where
she ‘developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish ethical thought’. This
background not only shapes her self-image as a scholar who defends ‘a Jewish
1
Gil Anidjar (2007) focuses on the ‘disappearance’ of the figure of the Semite—alternately Jew and
Arab—as the demonic others of Christian self-invention, or respectively, the enemy within and the enemy
without. If, as Anidjar argues, ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ once served equally as avatars of race and religion for
Europeans, in its secular turn, the West occults the ongoing power of Christianity as the ‘Semite’ fantasm
fades into the repressed. Religion and race nevertheless continue to function as ‘coextensive and co-
concealing categories’ (2007, p. 28); as a result, the mark of ‘religion’ eclipses the power and effects of
‘race’ and vice versa (2007, p. 21), polarizing ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ while separating religion from
nationalism and opposing it to modern politics as such.
2
See Benjamin Weinthal, ‘Frankfurt to award US advocate of Israel boycott,’ Jerusalem Post (August
26, 2012) and ‘Judith Butler responds to attack: ‘‘I affirm a Judaism that is not associated with state
violence’’,’ Mondoweiss (27 August 2012b). As reported in a U.C. Berkeley press release, the Adorno
Prize is ‘a highly coveted German award that recognizes outstanding achievement in philosophy, theater,
music or film. The prize, which brings 50,000 Euros or about $64,000, was established by the city of
Frankfurt in 1977 to commemorate sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno. It is conferred every
3 years on 11 Sept., Adorno’s birthday.’ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/09/12/butler-wins-adorno-
prize/.
3
Butler supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) in two specific ways: by
‘[opposing] investments in companies that make military equipment whose sole purpose is to demolish
homes’ and by not ‘[speaking] at Israeli institutions unless they take a strong stand against the
occupation’. She does not, however, align herself with ‘any version of BDS that discriminates against
individuals on the basis of their national citizenship, and [she maintains] strong collaborative
relationships with many Israeli scholars’ (‘Response’ 3). This essay was partly inspired by the continual
denunciation of Butler’s positions, as illustrated by the campaign mounted against her speaking
engagement with Omar Barghouti on the topic of BDS at Brooklyn College in February 2013. In this
connection, see ‘Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS’ in The Nation (13 January 2013);
and Katha Pollitt, ‘New York Dems Shouldn’t Make Political Hay of Brooklyn College’s Panel on BDS’
(5 February 2013). See also The Nation’s defence of academic freedom, ‘Open Letter on Academic
Freedom from ‘‘The Nation’’ to New York Elected Officials,’ The Nation (5 February 2013). Hot-headed
protest preceded and followed Butler’s acceptance of an honorary doctorate degree from McGill
University. Darin Barney observes that the accusations against Butler made by Hillel McGill and McGill
Students for Israel are not only shamefully anti-democratic, but also seem to be marred by ‘a willful lack
of intelligence’: ‘What is so discouraging about all this is that it is doubtful those who have denounced
Butler so aggressively, and have protested against her honorary McGill degree so vehemently, have ever
read a single piece of her scholarly work, or heard or read any of the published material in which she
actually discusses her views on BDS and Israel. Instead, they are content to malign her, and to undermine
serious consideration of the difficult issues her scholarship and activism raise, by recycling tired
allegations based on willful misconstruals of two isolated sentences ripped from the context in which they
might actually have meant something. And all of this simply to police and bully those who might
contemplate criticizing the actions of the state of Israel or acting on those criticisms.’ See Barney’s ‘In
Defense of Judith Butler’, Huffington Post (28 May 2013). See also Karen Seidman, ‘Honorary Degree
Recipient Judith Butler a Controversial Figure,’ The Montreal Gazette (23 May 2013). For an opinion on
Butler’s commitment to BDS, see Mohan Matthen, ‘Judith Butler and the Boycott of Israeli Universities’
(8 February 2013).
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Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith Butler on…
ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt’, but
also clarifies her vision of the Jewish public intellectual’s role: to accept ‘that we are
called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its
alleviation’. According to Butler, hearing this call enjoins Jewish intellectuals to
speak out against injustice even as we recognize that our speech risks ‘a new
injustice’ (‘Response’ 1).
Butler makes no apologies for denouncing the occupation without endorsing
violent resistance;4 indeed, she promotes Jewish traditions that oppose violence
while pursuing social justice in the name of Tikkun (repairing the world)
(‘Response’ 1). Yet as she readily concedes, her ‘actual position’ and perhaps her
pacificism above all, will never be heard by her detractors, whose ad hominem
tactics aim ‘to destroy the conditions of audibility’ and, concomitantly, the
conditions of reasonable exchange (‘Response’ 1).
In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Butler excoriates the tendency to
equate criticisms of the occupation and Israeli-state violence as such with anti-
Semitism, reminding us that, for Arendt, ‘neither Judaism nor Jewishness
necessarily leads to the embrace of Zionism’ (Medietta and Van Antwerpen
2011, p. 73). In ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’, the fifth chapter of Parting Ways:
Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) devoted to Arendt’s critique of the
nation-state, Butler suggests that its diasporic condition permits us to understand
Jewishness as an ‘anti-identitarian project’ that upholds the ideal of ethical and
political equality in a socially plural world (Butler 2012a, p. 117).5 The challenge
she sets for ‘diasporic ethics’ is to construct the terms for dismantling the
occupation in consonance with a Jewish thought that paradoxically delineates
‘Jewishness’ as a displacement of identity (2012a, p. 74).
While it is tempting to interpret her writings about Emmanuel Levinas, Walter
Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Primo Levi as contraventions against the Zionist
4
In his review of Parting Ways, Chaim Ganz (2012) comments on Butler’s characterization of Zionism:
‘What supports and excuses Butler’s view of Zionism as having a ‘‘structural commitment to state
violence against minorities’’ is the fact that since the 1970s, Zionist policies cannot but be identified with
the most abhorrent interpretations of this ideology and with this structural commitment.’ Ganz argues that
Zionism before 1967 ‘could reasonably claim to be justified by the necessity created by the fact that the
Jews had suffered from persecution in Europe culminating in the Holocaust and by the Arabs’ total
rejection of any form of Zionism’; however, the Israeli victory in 1967 rescinded such claims to necessity.
According to Ganz, Butler putatively recognizes that ‘morally acceptable’ interpretations of Zionism are
possible; hence, he writes, ‘in order to reject Israeli policies of the last four decades, it is not necessary to
reject all the possible interpretations of Zionism. The demand that Israel act according to morally
acceptable interpretations of Zionism would be sufficient’ [http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/36335-parting-ways-
jewishness-and-the-critique-of-zionism/ (downloaded on 27 May 2013)].
5
Butler’s ethos corresponds with Arendt’s self-presentation ‘as a Jew who can and will take various
political stands, whether or not they conform to anyone else’s idea of what views a Jew should hold or
what a Jew should be’. In this vein, Butler praises Arendt for criticizing the increasingly uncompromising
strategies that defined the Zionist state building project while stressing the latter’s definition of politics as
a rebuke to both assimilationism and Zionism, which ‘‘‘arise out of a shared Jewish fear of admitting that
there are and always have been divergent interests between Jews and segments of the people among
whom they live’’. In other words’, as Butler explains, ‘living with others who have divergent interests is a
condition of politics that one cannot wish away without wishing away politics itself’. See ‘I merely
belong to them’, Butler’s review of The Jewish Writings in the London Review of Books 29.9 (10 May
2007): pp. 26–28.
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K. Ball
neutralization of her ‘Jewish’ voice, Butler herself claims to reject the specious
logic that distills her ‘Jewishness’ from a dialogue with Jewish writers. She avows
that the ethical strains in their writings are not ‘purely’ Jewish, and she honours
Edward Said in the introduction, first, and final chapters of Parting Ways as an
inspiration for her assessment of the occupation as well as her formulation of a
diasporic ethics that approves the hybridity of translations between ‘Jewish’ and
‘non-Jewish’ ideas and practices instead of deploring ‘impurities’.
Since the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), Butler has made myriad
contributions to the ‘post-secular’ deconstruction of a latently Protestant public
sphere. These interventions anticipate the distinctively Jewish-messianic ethics that
she outlines in ‘Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘‘Critique of
Violence’’’ (Butler 2006), in de Vries and Sullivan’s 2006 Political Theologies
collection, which appears, in a revised form, in Parting Ways. As Catherine Kellogg
points out, Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ has seemingly served as an ‘ur-text’
for a generation of theorists—Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek
prominent among them—‘grappling with the connections between law, violence
and religion’ (2013, p. 72).6 Butler’s reading of the ‘Critique’ in Parting Ways
commends Benjamin’s pacifist conception of responsibility over and against the
tyrannical cycle of lawmaking and law-preserving violence that defines contem-
porary Israel’s occupation politics along with the Zionist redemption narrative that
rationalizes it.
Beginning with her contributions to recent dialogues about post-secularism in my
first section, I follow with a discussion of how Parting Ways configures diaspora as
a trope shaped by Benjamin’s Jewish-mystical imagery in the ‘Critique of
Violence’, ‘The Theologico-Political Fragment’, and ‘Theses on the Philosophy
of History’.7 The second section is also where I trace Butler’s amplification of
Benjamin’s oblique remarks in the ‘Critique of Violence’ about the non-coercive
disposition of the sixth commandment and the inner struggle prompted by its
provisional applicability. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through her
emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle that compels us to abandon a
solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its
eternally transient rhythm. As I contend in the third and final section, Butler
employs Arendt’s understanding of politics as grounded in cohabitation to
supplement the anti-identitarian motif of self-dispossessed suffering. While
Benjamin’s ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil
disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s diasporic ethics to transcend Benjamin’s
Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.
6
My colleague Catherine Kellogg interprets Butler’s return to the ‘Critique of Violence’ in light of her
long-running debate with Slavoj Žižek, who has also taken up Benjamin’s 1921 essay in recent years. In
Zižek’s view, Butler’s Benjamin reading, ‘makes use of the possibility left open in Levinas’ work to think
the third term in terms of a divine ‘‘being,’’ whereby the ‘‘face’’ becomes something ultimately readable
(in its very unreadability) as vulnerable, or precarious’ (Kellogg 2013, p. 84). In this connection, see
Slavoj Žižek (2005, 2008).
7
Butler cites the previously standard translations of Benjamin’s selected essays collected in Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Benjamin 1986c) and Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections (Benjamin 2007a). Where she cites ‘Critique of Violence’, I have added corresponding
page numbers from the more recent 1996a Belknap edition.
123
Butler’s intensifying public criticisms of Israel comprise a logical extension of

publications since September 11th that focus on state violence and the multi-front
‘war on terror’. To the extent that Butler has, in recent years, endeavoured to
deconstruct the secular ratio that occludes what Derrida after Benjamin identified as
the ‘mystical ground’ of the state’s legal authority, it will be helpful first to sketch
the contours of the post-secular ethics that informs her navigation of the mystical
caesuras in his ‘Critique of Violence’.
In the 2004 collection of essays entitled Precarious Life, Butler analyzes an
ethnically-slanted expropriation of Muslims as the irrationally angry others of
liberal-democratic civilization. This putative exceptionality provides the implicit
rationale for the United States’ recourse to extraordinary rendition, torture, and
internment without trial under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’. It is here that Butler
also recalibrates Agamben’s Homo Sacer theses about the state-level consolidation
of sovereign power through a biopolitical dominion over ‘bare life’, which he
contrasts with the political ontology of belonging to a community (Butler 2004,
p. 67). In Butler’s reading of Agamben, the irreducible expendability of ‘bare life’
constitutes what is at stake in Levinas’s emphasis on the other’s vulnerability.
Insofar as certain lives are more precarious than others, our ethical obligation,
according to Butler, is to shelter the other from our self-preservative violence, an
obligation that enjoins critics and activists to adjudicate vulnerabilities to state
violence contingently on a case-by-case basis.
Post-secular critique has sometimes responded to the racialization of Muslims
by foregrounding the Judeo-Christian underbelly of liberal-democratic institutions
and values that American pundits herald as the enlightened fruit of progressive
secularization. The principal target of Butler’s ‘Sexual politics, torture, and
secular time’, a talk delivered at the London School of Economics and published
by the British Journal of Sociology in 2008, is the Dutch ‘Civic Integration
Exam’, since discontinued, which tested presumably Muslim applicants with
photographs of two men kissing in order to gauge their attitudes about gay
people’s rights ‘to open and free expression’ (Butler 2008, p. 3). In this
intervention, Butler lambasts the hypocritical rhetoric of tolerance that instru-
mentalizes ‘sexual freedom’ to install a culturally specific and allegedly secular
grounding ‘that functions as a prerequisite for admission into the polity as an
acceptable immigrant’ (2008, p. 4) while exempting a ‘presumptively modern’
non-Muslim class. In this situation, as Butler remarks, the Dutch tolerance test
could not sidestep the shadow of an unbridled misogyny and homophobic
violence, which announced itself in the uncanny jouissance of American soldiers
photographed while torturing Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib. A tolerance exam
that singled out Muslims was implicated in this torture insofar as both presuppose
a ‘progressive civilization’ versus ‘premodern intolerance’ matrix that exception-
alizes Islam ‘as not of this time or our time, but as another time, one that only
anachronistically emerged in this time’ (2008, p. 6).
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K. Ball
The broader aim of the 2008 essay is to expose the developmental narratives that
denigrate Islam as an aberrant anachronism from the standpoint of a liberal-
democratic teleology and thereby rationalize torture. To the extent that Muslims are
pre-excluded from the ‘civilizational trajectory’ that delimits the ‘human proper’,
the ‘mature’ defenders of civilization feel entitled both to ‘update’ these ‘failures of
psycho-cultural development’ (2008, p. 8) and to target them still more violently as
a threat to humanity: ‘when some group of people comes to represent a threat to the
cultural conditions of humanization and of citizenship’, Butler writes, ‘then the
rationale for their torture and their death is secured’ (Butler 2008, p. 18). As the
material for this ‘technique of modernization’, the tortured are unveiled as ‘the
permanent, abased, and aberrant outside’ in monolithic opposition to a ‘civilized’
subject formation. In this manner, a spectacle of torture that should expose the
perpetrators’ cruelty perversely confirms mythical presumptions about the victims’
‘thwarted development’. For Butler, then, the Dutch deployment of sexual tolerance
as a criterion for citizenship goes hand in hand with the imperialist mission to
civilize ‘the throwbacks’ while at the same time immunizing the perpetrator-state
against critique.
The British Journal of Sociology essay reappears in Butler’s Frames of War
collection from 2009, where she refines the positions she articulates in both
Precarious Life and ‘Sexual Politics’ in the course of distinguishing precariousness
from precarity. Although ‘[l]ives are by definition precarious’, she writes, the
design of ‘[p]olitical orders, including economic and social institutions’, should
serve needs that, if ignored, intensify mortal risk. ‘Precarity’, in contrast, ‘designates
that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing
social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to
injury, violence, and death’ (Butler 2009a, p. 25). A situation of ‘maximized
precariousness’ also afflicts those groups that are subjected to arbitrary state
violence but ‘have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they
need protection’ (2009a, p. 26). For Butler, then, the urgent obligation of any
oppositional politics is to shelter the vulnerable from biopolitical abjection. Such a
politics calls for a transnational coda that safeguards inalienable equality and that
‘citizens of the world’ would be prepared to defend, even and perhaps especially
when such a defence demands disloyalty to the state.
To gain some critical leverage on Butler’s ‘transnational coda’, it is worth
considering how Talal Asad has weighed the pressures on this commitment to
inalienable equality in his chapter on ‘Redeeming the ‘‘human’’ through human
rights’ from Formations of the Secular (2003). Asad cites the first part of Article 25
of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well
being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical
care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of
unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of
livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (Asad 2003, pp. 128–129)
The problem with Article 25, in Asad’s reckoning, is that ‘the responsibility for
ensuring the conditions in which these rights can be realized is assigned solely to
123
individual sovereign states, each of which is defined in part by its right to govern’
(2003, p. 129). For this reason, ‘[d]amage done to the economy of another country
[…] does not constitute a violation of human rights even if it causes immense
suffering because in the final analysis the responsibility for the damage is borne by
the governors of ‘‘the national economy’’, and in any case it is considered a short-
term cost of a long-term benefit’ (2003, p. 129). The question, then, for Asad in this
context, is ‘how, in a secular system like human rights, responsibility is assigned for
[cruelty]’ (2003, p. 129).
To address this issue, Asad paraphrases Arendt’s percipient lament in The
Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1966) about the practical limits of human rights
insofar as they depend on national rights ‘that constitute, protect, and punish one as
the citizen of a nation-state’ (Asad 2003, p. 135). The implication, according to
Asad, is that the state has the power to use human rights discourse to coerce its own
citizens—just as colonial rulers had the power to use it against their own subjects.
Asad extends Arendt’s insight when he stresses the secular state’s inability or
refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘‘‘the human’’
conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural
law. By extension, ‘[e]very real person who belongs to a particular nation-state is
always subject to its institutional violence—including the violence of its law’ (2003,
p. 143). Asad’s post-secular critique enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state
of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights
under secular law (2003, p. 135). The possibilities for violence proliferate in this
gap insofar as the obligatory conduct that staves off cruelty depends upon
subliminally formed habits of civility that are neither formalized nor guaranteed
through explicit political consent (2003, p. 134).
What might be at stake in Butler’s readings of Benjamin and Arendt, as I will
show further on, comes to the fore as Asad evaluates the effectivity of Malcolm X’s
and Martin Luther King’s rhetorical tactics. In contrast to King’s prophetic language
about an ideal America that redeems its glory before God by fulfilling its egalitarian
promise, Malcolm X’s ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’, which he delivered on 3 April
1964 at the Cory Methodist Church, ‘defiantly asserts the humanity of African
Americans quite independently of—in hostile opposition to—the American state’
and its ‘profound crisis of justice’ (2003, p. 142). In Asad’s view, this speech hereby
defines ‘the human’ as someone born with ‘certain inalienable rights’, who can call
on a world court to judge the United States for its domestic abuses of its own
citizens, which is to propose that human rights should protect everyone across the
globe (2003, p. 143). Inasmuch as the vocabulary of civil rights keeps blacks ‘under
Uncle Sam’s jurisdiction’, or ‘in his pocket’, as Malcolm X declares, ‘the only level
you can do it on [take the United States to world court] is the level of human rights’,
which are not only ‘God-given’ but are also ‘recognized by all nations of this earth’
(Breitman 1965, p. 35).
If King’s language of redemption was nevertheless successful and Malcolm X’s
references to ‘God-given’ natural rights and the ‘gospel’ of black nationalism
(Breitman 1965, pp. 35, 41) were not, in Asad’s estimation, it is because the former
harkened back to the Judeo-Christian heritage of American democracy with which a
predominantly Christian white public could identify. Asad recognizes the
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K. Ball
exceptionalist language of redemption as typically conflating ‘freedom’ and

‘America’ (as a ‘light unto nations’) in working ‘to globalize human rights’ (Asad
2003, p. 147). Given the hypocrisies and asymmetries that such a rhetoric ordains
both at home and abroad, ‘the secularist ideological order separating public politics
from private belief is seen’, from a post-secular perspective, ‘to crumble’, and ‘a
discourse of human rights that can either be taken as sacred or profane’ comes to
occupy ‘the new terrain’ (Asad 2003, p. 155).
Asad’s appraisal of Malcolm X’s ‘failure’ and King’s ‘success’ pinpoints the
strategic import of rhetorically engaging a theological structure of feeling that
moulds the socio-moral support for a state bearing the sovereign power to guarantee
or revoke human rights under the rubric of civil rights. Butler’s 2009 exchange with
Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Wendy Brown in Is Critique Secular? articulates this
same prospect in the course of weighing the oppositional potential of a post-secular
ethos while decrying the hierarchical polarizations of cultural identity that Samuel
Huntington and his enthusiasts promulgate.8 Notably, Butler’s contribution to this
exchange highlights the messianic temporality of Benjamin’s conception of critique.
As Butler writes: ‘For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and
continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of
capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts
into the modern.’ She asks:
Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the
progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachro-
nisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity and
prove central – and potentially fatal – to its operation? (Butler 2009b, p. 111)
Yet Butler does not adopt Benjamin’s messianic heuristic in order to counter a
secularized political theology with a ‘Jewish’ one, but to configure an anti-
identitarian coda for non-violent resistance from the mystical motifs that traverse
Benjamin’s writings.9
Butler upholds diaspora in Parting Ways as a figurative and ethical departure
point for condemning Zionist rationalizations of the occupation. It is also in this
context that she makes explicit the reasons for her recourse to Benjamin’s anarcho-
messianic schema: to elucidate his rejection of ‘the violence that states commit
precisely through their legal structure’ and to explore, with Zionist historiography in
mind, his repudiation of historicist progress narratives that ‘realize an ideal over
time’ while eliding the debris they leave in their wake (Butler 2012a, pp. 69, 113).
8
Samuel Huntington’s notorious ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis (1993, 1996) assumed a dangerous
currency in the aftermath of 9/11. Butler and Wendy Brown have been admirably vigilant about calling
out ‘civilization’ versus ‘barbarism’ rhetoric in the decade after 9/11. Butler targets Thomas Friedman
who has prototypically argued that ‘Islam has not yet achieved modernity’, which relegates it to ‘a
childish state of cultural development’ while proclaiming that ‘the norm of adulthood is represented more
adequately by critics such as himself’ (Butler 2008, p. 6). In this connection, see also Brown’s Regulating
Aversion (2006).
9
In Butler’s analysis, Benjamin’s messianic stance contests ‘those forms of political nationalism that
depend on founding and continuing forms of expulsion and subjugation’ and thus dispatches with the
uncritical Zionist premise that self-preservation justifiably unbridles an endlessly iterable state violence
(Butler 2012a, p. 99).
123
Toward this aim, Butler’s third chapter on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’

transfigures his reflections on the sixth commandment into the hinge of a divine
‘violence against violence’ that redeems ‘sacred life’ at the expense of mere
existence defined by soul-murdering guilt (Butler 2012a, p. 82). Correspondingly, in
her fourth chapter on ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (2007b), she affirms his
inclination to catch hold of oppressed pasts in order to explode homogenizing
temporalities and recover chances to save that were missed. Yet even as Butler
welcomes Benjamin’s interpretative messianism, she ultimately circumvents the
‘revolutionary nihilism’ (Rabinbach 1997, p. 34) that infuses the ‘Critique’’s deus-
ex-machina topos. The result, as I will argue, is a ‘messianized’ civil disobedience
that transcends Benjamin’s postwar quietism while remaining consistent with
Butler’s absolute opposition to violence.
II
Butler’s interpretation of ‘Critique of Violence’ reprises Benjamin’s core questions:

‘how does legal violence become possible? What is law such that it requires
violence or, at least, a coercive effect in order to become binding on subjects? But
also: what is violence such that it can assume this legal form?’ These questions open
up a second line of speculation about the prospect of ‘a noncoercive violence that
could subtend the coercive force of law’ (Butler 2012a, p. 70). In this respect and
others, Butler follows Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ (Derrida 2002) in charting a course
through the ends-justifying-means Scylla of natural law and the (legal) means-
justifying-ends Charybdis of positive law, the double impasse that preoccupies
Benjamin in the ‘Critique’.10 Abiding with Derrida, Butler links the longing for
justice with the aims of deconstruction; however, to the extent that Derrida in ‘Force
of Law’ ‘worried openly’ about Benjamin’s ‘messianic-Marxist’ embrace of
destruction, the philosopher seeks to distance deconstruction from this theme while
maintaining ‘an ideal of justice that exceeds any specific of positive law’ (Butler
2012a, p. 76).11
10
Prompted by Athena Athanasiou, her interlocutor in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political,
Butler acknowledges that the law’s performativity as evinced in Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ inspired her
deconstruction of gender as an ‘internal essence’. In that context, Derrida’s reading of Franz Kafka’s
‘Before the Law’ demonstrates for Butler how the law’s truth ‘never fully materializes in any full or
definitive way’, yet its eternal inaccessibility propels anticipations of its fulfilment from which it derives
both its force and promise. This point is key to Butler’s analysis of Benjamin’s messianism, for if, as she
writes, ‘there is a sense of the messianic within the performative, it would doubtless be a way of thinking
about this anticipatory form of positing that fails to achieve a final resolution’ (Butler and Athanasiou
2013, p. 129).
11
Butler questions the grounds for Derrida’s worry about Benjamin writing to Carl Schmitt ‘the same
year he published ‘‘The Critique of Violence’’’, since a two-line letter thanking Schmitt for sending his
book ‘is hardly the basis for inferring that Benjamin condones Schmitt’s book in part or in whole’ (Butler
2012a, p. 77). Of course, Derrida is not the only one who worried about this relationship, though it seems
pointless to deny it, since Benjamin was neither the only leftist nor Jewish intellectual to find inspiration
in Schmitt’s writings. Horst Bredekamp cites the 1923 letter to Gottfried Salomon and the short
curriculum vitae of 1928, where Benjamin acknowledges Schmitt’s Politische Theologie as the ‘political-
theoretical basis in a central chapter of his Habilitation on The Origin of German Tragic Drama’
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Butler is less interested in Benjamin’s dialogue with Marxism and more

preoccupied with the figural valences of messianic destruction as a means of
overcoming the self-perpetuating interdependency between lawmaking and law-
preserving violence that both natural and positive law dissemble. Law-instating
violence does not come into being ‘organically’ as Butler underscores; neither can it
be justified through recourse to an exterior law; rather, as a founding act, it ‘creates
the conditions for such justificatory procedures and deliberations to take place’. It
becomes necessary, then, to sustain the force of the law by reasserting its ‘binding
character’, thereby re-inscribing ‘the founding act in a regulated way’ (Butler
2012a, pp. 71–72). This vicious cycle lies at the crux of Benjamin’s ‘Critique’,
where he declares ‘the gravely problematic nature… of all legal violence’
(Benjamin 1986c, p. 393; 1996b, p. 247).
The latent coercion that Benjamin exposes at the roots of the violence permitted
by law guides his figuration of a ‘mythic violence’ that installs fate retroactively
through arbitrary and unforeseeable punishment. Butler unpacks the messianic
connotations of Benjamin’s move to align this mythic violence with law while
associating the divine violence that annuls legal coercion (and guilt) with Georges
Sorel’s proletarian strike. To follow her logic, it will be helpful to review the
context for Benjamin’s messianic transfiguration of Sorel’s antitheses between an
instrumental ‘political strike’ and a non-teleological ‘proletarian strike’.
Anson Rabinbach disinters the seeds of a ‘radical, secular, and messianic’
sensibility in the years leading up to the onset of the First World War when
discomfort with the Enlightenment contributed to the ‘uncompromising’ disposition
of modern Jewish messianism among the generation of 1914 (Rabinbach 1997,
p. 27). The contours of Benjamin’s own familiarity with the Jewish mystical
tradition sharpen against the backdrop of his relationship with Gershom Scholem,
whom he met for the first time in Munich in 1915, when they were both young men
(ages 23 and 17, respectively). Benjamin and Scholem exchanged manuscripts
throughout the years the one-time Berliner shifted between Ibiza, Paris, Svendborg,
and San Remo while the latter produced what came to be regarded as indispensable
Footnote 11 continued
Benjamin (2003), published 2 years later (Bredekamp 1999, p. 249). While remarking that, ‘Walter
Benjamin’s esteem for Carl Schmitt is one of the most irritating incidents in the intellectual history of the
Weimar Republic’ (1999, p. 247), Bredekamp identifies Benjamin’s use of Schmitt’s political theory to
clarify the former’s concept of art as well as his own understanding of sovereign violence, as that which
‘decides what law is’, as Kellogg suggests (Kellogg 2013, p. 76). Whereas Schmitt ‘views the state of
exception as the conditio sine qua non for the establishment of sovereignty, Benjamin’, as Bredekamp
contends, ‘sees sovereignty as existing in order to avoid the state of exception in the first place’ (Bre-
dekamp 1999, p. 260). Thus, even though, in 1930, he praises Schmitt’s work on Diktatur, Benjamin
‘criticizes authority as a masquerade of the chaotic state of nature, the endless repetition of change
without substance, and the meaningless use of pliable allegories’ (Bredekamp 1999, pp. 260–61). Ulti-
mately, then, ‘[i]nasmuch as Benjamin views the absence of sovereignty as catastrophic,’ Bredekamp
writes, ‘he remains, despite his ‘‘theological anarchism’’, within the Schmittian framework’ (1999,
p. 261). Beatrice Hanssen reads Benjamin’s ‘messianized’ Sorel as counteracting Schmitt’s decisionism
as well as the Catholic jurist’s anti-liberal scaffolding of sovereignty, which justifies autocratically
determined exceptions to the state’s protective guarantees and glorifies warfare as an existential mode: a
primordial opposition between friend and enemy that founds the political ‘in belligerent violence’. She
nevertheless finds that Benjamin’s Sorelian Schmitt falls short of his goal to ‘think through the para-
doxical politics not of a legal but a legitimate mode of violence’ (Hanssen 2000, p. 23).
123
commentaries on Jewish messianism, the Kabbalah, and their histories in the course
of witnessing (with growing disappointment) the hard-nosed and despiritualizing
politicization of Zionist ideals in an increasingly volatile Palestine after he
emigrated there in 1923.
As their published correspondence attests (Scholem 1992), the inspiration that
Benjamin and Scholem drew from Jewish mysticism clearly propelled the former’s
rejection of historicist and positivist frameworks of causality as part of a broader
critique of ‘rational’ historiography and its teleological presumptions, and
Scholem’s reflections on the ‘restorative’ and ‘utopian’ tensions in the Jewish
‘messianic idea’ striated Benjamin’s adaptation of mystical motifs throughout his
writings. In its restorative avatar, Scholem explains, messianic hope nurtures the
idea of returning to ‘an original state of things’, an idealized ‘life with the
ancestors’, associated with Paradise where there was intimate communion rather
than shameful distance between the Creator and His creation. In messianism’s
utopian mode, hope abides in the promise of returning to ‘a state of things which has
never existed’ (Scholem 1995, p. 3).
While noting that restorative and utopic strains in the messianic tradition are not
only co-extensive, but also co-constitutive, Scholem speaks at length about an
‘acute’ form of messianism emerging in Medieval Judaic thought that assumes ‘the
catastrophic and destructive nature of the redemption on the one hand and the
utopianism of the content of realized Messianism on the other’ (Scholem 1995,
p. 7). According to Scholem, the prophets and apocalyptists relish ‘the lack of
transition between history and the redemption’. Spurred by the idea of ‘transcen-
dence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes’, the
apocalyptists ‘have always cherished a pessimistic view of the world. Their
optimism, their hope, is not directed to what history will bring forth, but to that
which will arise in its ruin free at last and undisguised’ (Scholem 1995, p. 10).
Scholem thus uncovers an anarchic element ‘in the very nature of Messianic
utopianism: the dissolution of old ties which lose their meaning in the new context
of Messianic freedom’ (Scholem 1995, p. 19).12
The revolutionary inflections in Benjamin’s apocalyptic inclinations bear the
influence of his conversations with the Marxist Ernst Bloch, beginning in 1919,
when former Dadaist Hugo Ball introduced them. As resolute opponents of the First
World War, both Benjamin and Bloch were drawn to the apocalyptic lineage of
Jewish messianism spurned by Hasidism, which tended to promote personal
purification as the path toward inner redemption (Rabinbach 1997, p. 35). Their
‘esoteric intellectualism’, as Rabinbach refers to it, also motivated a mutual
opposition to political Zionism because it reduced the Jewish mission to a ‘prosaic’
nationalism that sundered an esoteric figuration of redemption from its messianic
12
Anson Rabinbach suggests that apocalyptic messianism lends itself to Marxist adaptations because it
acknowledges an aspiration to transform the current order and thereby achieve a completely realized
justice that thrives in the dust of the system it overturns. In this vein, Benjamin’s admixture of restorative
and utopian motifs conveys modernity simultaneously as a process of decline and as an anticipation of
apocalyptic renewal.
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K. Ball
roots (Rabinbach 1997, pp. 53, 42–44).13 Yet Benjamin’s reaction against World
War I and the episodic political violence that followed it ultimately diverged from
Bloch’s insofar as the former stubbornly clung to the esoteric valence of apocalyptic
figures, steadfastly averring his faith in a messianic idea that could never be
subsumed by revolutionary politics. The disagreement with Bloch registers in a
mystically refurbished Sorel, which divests Benjamin’s project of ‘both the natural
right justification of revolutionary terrorism derived from the French revolution and
the gradualism that seeks to replace one form of state power over another’
(Rabinbach 1997, p. 61).
Chastened by the events in 1919, which included the Social Democratic Party of
Germany’s violent suppression of the Spartacus uprising in Germany as well as the
military containment of a General Strike in Switzerland, Benjamin’s recourse to
Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalist mythos serves to deflect rather than affirm organized
political action. The political strike, as Sorel defines it, is strategically orchestrated
by opportunists—the ‘social parliamentarians’ who ‘appeal to the discontented
without troubling about the place they occupy in the world of production’ (Sorel
2004, p. 66). These alleged reformers would domesticate the spirit of revolt through
apparent concessions that ultimately shore up the state’s power to perpetuate
exploitative conditions. Sorel’s proletarian general strike, in stark contrast, is non-
coercive and open-ended: it is a spontaneous irruption that ‘does not seek to
implement this or that particular reform within a given social order’, as Butler
writes, but ‘to undo the entire legal basis of a given state’ (de Vries and Sullivan
2006, p. 203). In this measure, ‘the general strike has a character of infinity’, as
Sorel stipulates, because ‘it puts on one side all discussion of definite reforms and
confronts men with a catastrophe’ (Sorel 2004, p. 46, n. 31). He relishes his
conjecture that people ‘who pride themselves on their practical wisdom are very
much upset by such a conception, which puts forward no definite project of future
social organization’ (ibid).
Benjamin finesses the redemptive potential of actual revolutionary violence by
aligning the ‘infinity’ that Sorel attributes to the proletarian strike with the
messianic atemporality of divine violence while dispensing with ‘myth’, as the
French syndicalist calls it, to refer to a heroic picture people form ‘for themselves of
an action before completing it’ (Sorel 2004, p. 42).14 The general strike ‘that brings
the entire legal system to its knees’, as Benjamin depicts it, hereafter re-emerges as
a worldly avatar of a ‘pure, immediate, unalloyed’ violence, which is ‘at once
13
Benjamin’s predilection for apocalyptic visions fits into this ‘esoteric intellectual’ mould while his
restorative-messianic inclination resonates with a melancholic tradition of ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, as
Georg Lukács called it, which codifies the theme of a European culture in decline (Rabinbach 1997,
p. 28). Romantic anti-capitalists converge in their desire for the transcendence of Europe’s ‘spiritual
crisis’ that arises as the repressive forces of civilization bear down upon the free play of the imagination.
The romantic thematics of spiritual decline meshed intimately with the Jewish-messianic trope of post-
Paradise exile that is inseparable from a Tikkunic longing for a ‘world made whole’ while providing a
‘pre-political’ vehicle for an anarchical rejection of quotidian politics (1997, p. 29). On romantic anti-
capitalism, see Rabinbach (1997), Sayre and Löwy (1984), and Heller (1972).
14
Sorel conceives myth as inspiring a crucial desire for glory among the workers while provoking fear
among those who subscribe to the cult of the state. Benjamin’s mythical violence that inexorably imposes
fate does not seem to share any elements with Sorel’s myth.
123
revolutionary and divine’ inasmuch as it cannot be hastened or predicted and it

transpires outside of positive law (Butler 2012a, p. 86). Divine violence thus
emerges as a ‘pure means’ that anarchically instaurates justice in the moment of
deposing the system that failed to realize it.
The chasm that divides the this-worldly violence associated with law creation
and preservation from other-worldly (divine) interventions might be read as a
recalcitrant inscription of Benjamin’s ‘politics against politics’ in the face of Ball’s
and Bloch’s attempts in Bern to convince him of the necessity of concerted political
activity. According to Beatrice Hanssen, Benjamin’s ‘ill-fated ‘‘politics of pure
means’’’ detaches Sorel’s proletarian strike from the latter’s militaristic captivation
with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ‘radical anarcho-syndicalism’ (Hanssen 2000,
pp. 22–23). Contending that Benjamin’s Sorel recourse props up a refusal to
transform his utopic vision ‘into a clear program of political emancipation’
(Hanssen 2000, pp. 64–65), Hanssen seemingly channels Ball’s and Bloch’s
frustration with Benjamin’s reluctance to prescribe or fulfil a Marxist commitment
to organizational strategies that could bring about socioeconomic equality.
Considering Butler’s own activist commitment to non-violence, it remains to be
seen how she grapples with Benjamin’s unwillingness to delineate a course of
action, an abnegation that Hanssen condemns as a ‘failure’.
On a logical level, the esoteric ‘Critique’ becomes paradoxical if not counter-
intuitive when Benjamin juxtaposes Sorel’s proletarian strike with divine violence.
The alignment between the proletarian strike and divine violence insinuates a
parallel between the political strike and mythical violence that obscurely shapes an
ensuing association between mythic and lawmaking violence: ‘If mythic violence is
lawmaking’, Benjamin asserts, then
divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter
boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and
retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter
strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.
(Benjamin 1996b, pp. 249–250)
The sedimentation of binaries here intimates an ambiguous analogy: as a messianic
avatar of Sorel’s proletarian strike, Benjamin’s divine violence shares the non-
teleological disposition of the former while remaining ‘bloodless’ and, thus, non-
violent in messianic terms as it apocalyptically destroys the eternal cycle of
lawmaking and law-preserving violence that maintains the current order. Yet if only
mythic violence is intelligible, ‘the expiatory power’ of divine violence is, as
Benjamin concedes, ‘invisible to men’; it therefore remains unclear whether or not a
revolutionary strike serves as a vehicle for an ex machina divine violence ‘which is
the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch’ (Benjamin 1996b,
pp. 252). Moreover, if, from a Jewish-mystical standpoint, the messiah’s coming
cannot be hastened, why sustain the hope for such an intercession?
The answer to this question coalesces in Butler’s parsing of Benjamin’s
adaptation of the Niobe myth, where she discovers the guilt-inducing logic, or ‘bad
conscience’ of juridical subject formation from which divine violence redeems us.
In his recounting of this story, Niobe is transformed into a weeping stone when
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K. Ball
Apollo and Artemis strike down each of her fourteen children after she boasts about
her fertility at the goddess Leto’s expense. In Benjamin’s interpretation, Niobe’s
hubris ‘calls down fate upon her not because her arrogance offends against the law
but because it challenges fate—to a fight in which fate must triumph, and can bring
to light a law only in its triumph’ (Benjamin 1996b, p. 248). The lawmaking agency
of mythic violence in this scenario sheds light, then, on its metaleptic force:
mythical retribution only seems like a punishment because its unsuspecting victims
cannot forestall the punitive consequences of a law that will be instated only as they
transpire. More crucially, perhaps, the fundamental identity Benjamin posits
between mythic and ‘all legal violence’ (Benjamin 1996b, p. 249) betrays how the
moment of instating ‘specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by
violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power’
(1996b, p. 248). If, as Benjamin, suggests, mythic violence ‘shows itself
fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning
the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function’, then, as he
concludes, its destruction ‘becomes obligatory’ (1996b, p. 249). The stage is now
set for Benjamin to summon an apocalyptic violence that will ‘purify the guilty, not
of guilt, however, but of law’ itself (1996b, p. 250).
As Butler remarks, Niobe is not breaking any law when she brags about her
fertility at Leto’s expense. The law arrives retroactively as ‘fate’ when the angry
goddess sends her twins Apollo and Artemis to massacre Niobe’s children, offering
mercy to the youngest, only after a lethal arrow has already been launched. Niobe’s
metamorphosis into a weeping stone following this slaughter implies, for Butler, a
permanent internalization of the meaning of her punishment. Soul-petrifying guilt
effects the bereaved mother’s legal subjectification as one who is unremittingly
obligated to and formed by the law, before it becomes intelligible as such. The
murderous retribution through which Leto’s twins enact fate is represented as the
‘specific consequence of an angry act that responds to an injury,’ even though
‘neither that injury nor that anger are circumscribed in advance by law’ (Butler
2012a, p. 78).
Yet Butler must take a loxodromic tack to demystify a particularly opaque
passage, where Benjamin derives,
the dissolution of legal violence from the guilt of a more natural life, which
consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that ‘expiates’ the
guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however,
but of law. For with mere life the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythical
violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure
power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice, the
second accepts it. (Benjamin 1986c, p. 297; 1996b, p. 250).
Butler’s explication of mythical violence partially explains Benjamin’s perplexing
opposition above between ‘the guilt of a more natural life’, over which mythical
violence exerts its bloody power, and ‘the living’, on behalf of which divine
violence bloodlessly intercedes. To determine the content of the sacrifice that
mythical violence ‘demands’ and divine violence ‘accepts’, she explores the
123
connotations of Benjamin’s conjunction between mythical violence and ‘mere life’

on the one hand, and between divine violence and ‘the living’ on the other.
Focusing on the obscure schema that relegates ‘mere life’ to ‘the living’, Butler
finds that the soul of the living is, at once, the proto-victim of law and the sacred aim
of the divine violence that bloodlessly extinguishes the current order. Butler’s issue
here is how to fathom life’s ‘mere-ness’, as it were, ‘once the soul has been
destroyed’ (Butler 2012a, pp. 80–81). In contrast to its mythical nemesis, Benjamin
regards divine violence as ‘bloodless’ in reprieving the living from a soul-calcifying
legal order. The political stakes of ‘coercing’ versus ‘accepting’ sacrifice hereby
become palpable; for insofar as divine violence is charged with the mission of
safeguarding the soul of the living from a positive law that ‘seeks to constrain life
for its own sake’, the implication, as Butler infers, is that ‘what is done for the sake
of ‘‘the living’’ may well involve the taking of mere life’. In other words, ‘life itself
is not a necessary or sufficient ground to oppose positive law, but the soul of the
living may be’ (Butler 2012a, p. 81).15 Her agenda hereafter is to craft a basis for
heeding the ‘soul of the living’ and ‘sacred life’ as such without instituting an
identitarian conception of the human proper.
Butler revisits the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’ to clarify Benjamin’s
oblique opposition between ‘mere life’ and ‘sacred life’, or ‘the living’ as he
predicates it. In the ‘Fragment’, Benjamin alludes to the inner man’s ethical
solicitude, conditioned by suffering (misfortune or fate), as a ‘site of messianic
intensity’ (Butler 2012a, p. 87). If, ‘in happiness, all that is earthly seeks its
downfall’, as Benjamin writes, then the infinite repetition of this downfall, ‘is part
of life itself’, as Butler suggests, ‘and may constitute what is sacred in life’
(Butler 2012a, p. 87 citing Benjamin’s ‘Fragment’ in Reflections 1986b
pp. 312–313). Butler dwells on the redemptive capacity of transient suffering to
depose a first-person point of view by inspiring acceptance of the ‘eternal rhythm
of downfall’. To accept that one is ‘afflicted’ alongside others is to diffuse ‘both
guilt and revenge’ and thereby endow life with the cadences of happiness ‘that
would in no sense be purely personal’ (Butler 2012a, p. 91).16 With a Levinasian
intonation, she recasts this impersonal allegiance to sacred life as an inter- and
intra-subjective bond with the other, whose alterity subtends ‘any enclosed and
self-referential notion of belonging’, including a traumatic fixation on past
afflictions. At the core of Butler’s ethics is the paradoxical premise that ‘it is only
15
Toward the end of his ‘Critique’, Benjamin asserts that ‘[h]owever sacred man is (or however sacred
that life in him which is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in
his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men’ (Benjamin 1996b, p. 251).
16
Butler’s emphasis on transient suffering echoes Rabinbach’s exposition of the ‘Theologico-Political
Fragment’. According to Rabinbach, even if ‘the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the
messianic direction’, as Benjamin insists, ‘the actions of human beings can, ‘‘just as force can, through
acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction’’’. This is how, for Benjamin, ‘‘‘the order
of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the messianic Kingdom’’. It does this by
bringing about misfortune and suffering which, in its transience, presses toward the messianic epoch.’ In
effect, then, Benjamin proclaims that nature itself is messianic ‘by reason of its eternal and total passing
away’ (Rabinbach 1997, p. 59 citing Benjamin 1986c, p. 313).
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K. Ball
possible to struggle to alleviate the suffering of others if I am both motivated and

dispossessed by my own suffering’ (Butler 2012a, p. 127).17
In its endorsement of self-dispossession, Butler’s diasporic ethics might be read
as revising a Lurianic-Kabbalist longing for redemption as the universal legacy of
Jewish exile. In The Messianic Idea, Scholem traces the traumatic impact of the
Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492 in the cosmic myth of Exile and Redemption
that emerged in the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-1572). In
Scholem’s account, Lurianic Kabbalah registered the trauma of expulsion in
representing ‘[a]ll that befalls the world’ as the disastrous face of a ‘primal and
fundamental Galut’, or Diaspora, the ‘terrible and pitiless state permeating and
embittering all of Jewish life’ that nevertheless extends beyond it to encompass ‘the
condition of the universe as a whole’ (Scholem 1995, p. 43). To the extent that post-
expulsion Kabbalists viewed the condition of exile as ‘inherent in the world’s being’
rather than as ‘a historical accident’, their cosmology endows Jews with the ‘power
to repair the universal flaw’ (Scholem 1995, p. 46).
Supplanting the Spanish Kabbalists’ ‘simpler idea of creation’, the Lurianic
imagination mapped by Scholem memorializes a boundlessly infinite Creator who
‘made a place for the universe’ by limiting Himself to a ‘more concentrated infinity’
17
Butler’s reflections on dispossession bear the sediments of myriad intellectual lineages. Previously, in
Bodies that Matter, Butler cites Gayatri Spivak’s concept of an ‘enabling violation’ to refer to the
paradoxical agency the ‘I’ accrues from the ‘mesh of interpellations’ that constitute and traumatically
wound it as well as from its implication in the very power relations it opposes (Butler 1992, pp. 122–123).
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler draws upon Jean Laplanche to argue that, ‘the ego is not an entity
or a substance, but an array of relations and processes, implicated in the world of primary caregivers in
ways that constitute its very definition’ (Butler 2005, p. 59).
Butler’s engagements with Spivak and Laplanche prefigure her demarcation, in conversation with
Athena Athanasiou, of a relational form of dispossession conditioned by the interdependencies that
constitute our susceptibility to others. In Dispossession (2013), Butler and Athanasiou also identify an
oppressive form of privative dispossession that transpires ‘when populations lose their land, their
citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence’ (Butler and
Athanasiou 2013, p. 3), or when neoliberal policies (austerity and debtocracy) induce economic
abandonment in certain populations through a differentially rationalized distribution of precarity (2013,
pp. 173–174). The exchange with Athanasiou spurs Butler to reiterate her commitment to finding ethical
and political means of opposing forcible and privative forms of dispossession without valorizing the
possessive-individualist ideal of self-sufficiency (2013, p. 7).
In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Butler expands upon her conception of
relational dispossession by citing Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, which posits a body’s openness
‘onto the body of another, or a set of others’ (Butler 2015, p. 129). According to Butler, bodies are not
‘self-enclosed’ entities, since, as she claims, their ‘ecstatic relation to the supporting conditions [they
have] or must demand’ means that they ‘are always in some sense outside themselves’ (Butler 2015,
pp. 128, 129). Because we are inextricably dependent upon sustaining institutions and networks, she
writes, ‘we are, always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us’ (2015, p. 87). This ecstatic
body concept aligns with Levinas’s view of sensibility as a ‘region of responsiveness that implies a
dispossession of the egological’ (2015, p. 91); it also accords with Arendt’s insistence on the unchosen
valence of cohabitation, which, as Butler phrases it, ‘yields the radical potential for new modes of
sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and
expulsion’; hence, as Butler confirms, ‘[w]e are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless
unchosen together’. Butler’s ethics hereby derives a normative or universal force from the one-time
Jewish refugee’s recognition of her own ‘obligation not to belong to the ‘‘chosen people’’ but, rather, to
the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to
exist and to lead a livable life’ (2015, pp. 102–103).
123
(Scholem 1995, p. 44). This space was created as God’s ‘potencies’ were distributed
into ‘vessels’ that, if broken, would revert Him back to an undifferentiated infinity.
In Scholem’s account, when divine light shattered these vessels upon entering them,
‘[m]uch of it returned to its source’ and while ‘some portions, or ‘‘sparks’’, fell
downward and were scattered, some rose upward’ (1995, p. 45). As bearers of the
universal flaw as well as the potential for healing it, ‘the children of Israel’ are
ideally positioned to carry out the special task of ‘lift[ing] up the sparks not only
from the places trodden by their feet in their Galut, but also, by their deeds, from the
cosmos itself’ (1995, p. 46).
According to Scholem, Lurianic redemption bids Jews to work ‘for the
amendment of the world and the ‘‘selection’’ of good and evil’. Insofar as the
Jewish fate is bound up with ‘the hidden forces operating in the world at large’,
Scholem reiterates, ‘[a] man who observes a commandment is no longer merely
observing a commandment: his act has a universal significance, he is amending
something’ (1995, p. 47 sic). Lurianic Kabbalah thus universalizes the act of
respecting the commandment, thereby portraying it as a chance to repair the world
for everyone, and not only for exiled Jews.
Butler hears this universal appeal in Benjamin’s insistence upon the ‘noncoercive
and unenforceable’ disposition of the sixth commandment as a law against violence
itself (Butler 2012a, p. 80). Responsibility emerges, for Butler, in the course of
wrestling with oneself in relation to ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which is, emphatically,
neither coercive nor violent according to Franz Rosenzweig (Butler 2012a, p. 80
citing Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption 1985, pp. 191–192). While we cannot
ignore the commandment, this struggle vouchsafes a ‘semblance of freedom’ over
and against either obedience or duty. Insofar as Benjamin portrays the command-
ment as ‘a guideline [Richtschnur des Handelns]’ rather than an incontrovertible
absolute (Butler 2012a, p. 84), he overturns conventional misconceptions about a
vengeful and punitive Mosaic God who induces guilt rather than an incontrovertible
absolute (Butler 2012a, pp. 74 and 80). ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ ‘has no police force’,
as Butler quips (Butler 2012a, p. 83), and this irreducible non-coerciveness
contravenes against the bad conscience of a law that metaleptically recodes
misfortune as guilt, leaving ‘paralysis, self-berating and endless sorrow’ in its wake
(Butler 2012a, p. 89).
In addition, the commandment’s provisional applicability links it with the open-
endedness of both the proletarian strike and divine violence. In keeping with the
topos of an infinite yet unpredictable potential for slate-cleaning expiation, Butler’s
‘Benjamin’ frames the commandment as ‘a noncoercive ground’ for apprehending
the recurrent rhythm of mortal suffering, a transience that is ‘sacred’ because it
‘exceeds moral causality’ and therefore takes precedence over a ‘mere life’ petrified
by ‘the fugitive narcissism of guilt’. Butler understands this ‘apprehension’ as the
fulcrum of a proscription against killing that does not extend to legally subjected
‘mere life’ when protecting it violates the sacred (Butler 2012a, p. 89).
Scholem’s narration of the Lurianic tradition brings to the fore the cosmological
figure of Tikkun, which refers to ‘the re-establishment of the harmonious condition
of the world’ (Scholem 1995, p. 13). World-mending desire imbues Butler’s
analysis of ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, the fourth chapter of Parting
123
K. Ball
Ways, where she discovers Tikkunic imagery in Benjamin’s ‘flashing up transpo-

sition of oppression across time and space’ (Butler 2012a, p. 69). As Butler
observes, ‘[s]udden illuminations have a history in Benjamin’ whose messianic
pyrotechnics recall, ‘the kabbalistic sephirot, those scattered and quasi-angelic
illuminations that break up both the suspect continuity of the present along with the
amnesia and expulsion it ritually and seamlessly performs’ (Butler 2012a, pp. 104,
106). A scribe in search of his scripture,18 Benjamin gleans the mending power of
‘primeval light’ not only from language, but also from the rubble of progressive
history, the physiognomy of cities, the social sediments of obsolescent things, and
the torsions of forsaken dreams. The imagery that distinguishes Benjamin’s
‘Theses’ manifestly reprises the Kabbalistic goal of uplifting the holy sparks in
bidding us to ‘seize’ memories of suffering in abeyance as they ‘flash up’
[aufblitzen]. As Stéphane Mosès discerns, this seemingly modernist shock aesthetic
favours the unforeseeable impact of ‘sudden emergences’ that bring history to a halt
(Mosès 2009, p. 80). These erratic truth blitzes explode the ‘inertia of past
injustices’, by alerting us to the ever-present possibilities of transformation that
progressive histories have bypassed or buried (Mosès 2009, pp. 108–109). In
addition, Benjamin politicizes this luminescent figure of redemption in calling on
readers of cultural production and consumption to reanimate lost hopes as
revolutionary energies. The undertaking of a messianic critique is, thus, to take
‘on the memory of the forgotten’ and ‘the nameless’, the ‘history of the
vanquished’, and the ‘heritage of the losers’ squashed by triumphalist narratives
(Mosès 2009, pp. 107, 109).
Countering the amnesia that distinguishes historicist teleologies, the history of
suffering ‘flashes up’, according to Butler, ‘not as something that did happen but as
something happening still’ (Butler 2012a, p. 107). For Butler, then, ‘to fight for the
oppressed past is not simply or only to document, or give it monumental form’
(Butler 2012a, p. 106). Neither does she condone an entrenchment in traumatic
history, and the Shoah in this context, to rationalize state violence and thus
‘foreclose the possibility of opening to a different future’ (Butler 2012a, p. 200).
Instead, remnants of ‘suffering’s past’ explode the ‘amnesiac surface of time’,
thereby pulling the ‘emergency break’ on ‘that motor of pain called progress’ and
permitting a seemingly modernist memory to alter the present in a ‘fragmentary and
scattered form’ (Mosès 2009, pp. 106–107).
In consonance with Benjamin, Butler quotes Arendt’s allusion to the Lurianic
motif of uplifting the scattered sparks (Butler 2012a, p. 122 citing Arendt 2007,
p. 390), a task that Lurianic Kabbala confers upon a scattered people in Scholem’s
account. Butler converts this redoubled dispersal into motifs that amplify her
commitment to follow Arendt in ‘throwing in her lot’ with the unchosen (Butler
2012a, p. 151).19 Arendt contributes to Butler’s diasporic poetics by averring the
ineluctability of cohabitation: the premise that ‘[t]hose with whom we cohabit the
earth are given to us, prior to choice and so prior to any social or political contracts
we might enter through deliberate volition’. Butler uses Arendt’s cohabitation
18
Rabinbach (1992, xxxviii), citing Scholem (2003), Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 53.
19
See Footnote 15 above.
123
concept to caution us against hierarchizing painful pasts and to spur our attunement
to their present convergences and vicious cycles (Butler 2012a, p. 130). To the
extent that Arendt identifies cohabitation as a necessary condition of plurality, it
also constitutes a precondition for her concept of action. In its passage through
Arendt, Butler’s post-secular messianism consequently moves beyond passively
waiting for a messiah whose coming cannot be hastened. Instead, for ‘[t]hose who
seize the chance to fight for the oppressed past’, an ethics conditioned by the
pluralizing impact of cohabitation enjoins a ‘struggle to transmute suffering into
political claims for justice, especially when’, as Butler stresses, ‘there is no
historical guarantee that justice will develop or manifest in time’ (Butler 2012a,
p. 113).
III
Rabinbach has noted that when Benjamin foregrounds a Jewish creative intellectual
who would not restrict ‘culture to any single part of humanity’, he renders Jewish
intellectual identity emblematic of a far-reaching concern for a broken world,
thereby inverting the identification that so intimately motivates it (Rabinbach 1997,
p. 42).20 This paradoxically anti-identitarian regulative idea unmistakably governs
Butler’s activism and published writings as a whole.
In the introduction to Parting Ways, Butler asks her readers to rethink the
dispersion in which so many Jews have survived as, not simply a geographical
situation, ‘but also as an ethical modality’. It is this principle of dispersion that
‘must be ‘‘brought home’’ to Israel/Palestine’, according to Butler, ‘in order to
ground a polity where no one religion or nationality can claim sovereignty over
another, where’, as Butler asserts, ‘sovereignty itself will be dispersed’ (Butler
2012a, p. 6). Once rearticulated with her ‘diasporic’ framework, Butler’s anti-
identitarian ethics serves the purpose of targeting the rhetoric of nationalist
condensation that justifies Zionist militarism at the expense of cohabitation and bi-
nationalism. The counter-doctrinal impetus of Benjamin’s messianism in its
multiple variants serves this purpose by encouraging an ‘effort to break with
temporal regimes that produce guilt, obedience, extend legal violence, and cover
over the history of the oppressed’ (Butler 2012a, p. 70). In Butler’s perspective, this
effort should guide us to view the messianic as a ‘promissory note for the future’,
which, in Israel’s case, ‘may well involve suspending self-defense as the
permanently legitimizing ground for state violence’ (Butler 2012a, p. 93). Along
the continuum of her other writings, Benjamin’s messianism serves as well to
advance her post-secular agenda to ‘find constellations where the opposition to
racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence remain the clear goals
of political mobilization’ (Butler 2009b, p. 134).
Butler’s enunciation of Benjamin’s emphasis on the sixth commandment’s
provisionality is pivotal to the task of tying the sacred value of ‘the living’ to the
ineluctable transience of suffering. Her attention to this link resonates with her
20
Rabinbach cites Benjamin’s letter to Ludwig Strauss from 7 January 1913.
123
K. Ball
prioritization, which I touched on earlier, of Levinas’s conception of a mortally and

thus divinely-limned vulnerability. Once again, Butler draws upon this conception
to translate Agamben’s bare life into biopolitically-induced precarity so as to
specify the dire consequences of state-manufactured abjection. Butler’s engage-
ments with Levinas and Agamben prompt a question about whether or not precarity
so defined coincides with Benjamin’s ‘mere existence’ deprived of transcendence
insofar as the latter is utterly subject to the law that renders guilt with judgment, or,
conversely, whether it is ‘sacred’ precisely because mortal life is vulnerable over
and against legal subjectification. As I will subsequently argue, this is a question
that Malcolm X might be heard as addressing in his conditional call for violence
against violence.
Though she does not mention Asad in her analysis of ‘Critique of Violence’, I would
like to conclude by imagining Butler’s ‘Benjamin’ as a rejoinder to the former’s
criticism of Malcolm X and as an answer to his claim that states refuse to accord
sacredness to ‘real living persons’ in recycling an abstract notion of the human
presupposed by natural and positive law. Benjamin’s messianic challenge to the
disavowed quasi-theological ground of state violence obtains a contemporary relevance
in Butler’s reappraisal of our responsibility for treating vulnerable life as ‘sacred’ before
and beyond the law. What I will sketch briefly is how this reassessment might be slanted
so as to ‘messianize’ Malcolm X’s recognition of the moment when non-violent
resistance no longer suffices to save ‘the living’ from a justice-preempting system.
Butler encapsulates the principal aporia that animates Benjamin’s ‘Critique’:
‘Violence brings a system of laws into being, and this law-founding violence is
precisely one that operates without justification’ (Butler 2012a, p. 77). Her
treatment of this aporia transfigures divine violence into ‘a sign of law’s lack’—its
urgent need for the ‘supplement’ that an ethics of non-violence proffers (Kellogg
2013, p. 88). Clearly, Butler draws a tactical lesson from Benjamin’s figuration of
divine violence that explodes complicity with a state apparatus and thereby prevents
subjects from ‘developing a critical, if not revolutionary point of view on that legal
system’. The ‘bonds of accountability’ to a legal order must be undone, as Butler
proclaims, to redeem ‘those who suffer under its coercion’. In such a situation,
‘doing the right thing according to established law is precisely what must be
suspended in order to dissolve a body of established law that is unjust’ (Butler
2012a, pp. 72–73; Butler’s emphasis).
When Butler demands a vigilant non-compliance with laws that violate the
dignity of resisting injustice while negating their own accountability, she arrives at a
standpoint that undercuts Asad’s contention that Malcolm X was naively secular
insofar as he failed to engage the United States’ theological underpinnings. In ‘The
Ballot or the Bullet’, Malcolm X exhorts black nationalists to abandon faith in the
false promise of justice from a self-sanctifying white-American conscience and
voices his attendant longing to see the hypocritical legal system that reproduces
racial inequity held up to the judgment of a transnational court of human rights. Yet
if we look back at this speech through the lens of Butler’s ‘Benjamin’, then we
might hear Malcolm X advocating for a refusal to act that ‘is directed at the
imperative to act itself’ in order to unhinge the vicious cycle of law-instating and
law-sustaining violence (Butler 2012a, p. 92).
123
Though he is typically remembered for inciting African-Americans to pursue

equality and freedom from oppression ‘by whatever means necessary’ (Breitman
1965, p. 24), it should be recalled that Malcolm X advised his Cleveland audience of
3 April, 1964 to commit violence only against violence and to resort to non-
compliance when the law acts non-violently to preserve itself. ‘[Y]ou should never
be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence’, he urges: ‘I’m nonviolent with
those who are nonviolent with me’. However, when resistance is legal and moral,
when it transpires ‘in accord with justice’, yet the state nevertheless responds with
violence, then ‘die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be
reciprocal’ (Breitman 1965).
Even though Butler repudiates violence in all situations, including righteous
resistance, her messianic recoding of civil disobedience in defence of sacred life
echoes Malcolm X’s remarks from ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ on the inalienability of
the right to resist injustice. Perhaps Malcolm X also imagined the advent of a
multitude that, as Butler proposes, ‘refuses to implement the demands of law,
wrestling with another commandment whose force is decidedly undespotic’ (Butler
2012a, p. 91). Butler hears ‘the rhythm of the messianic’ in the ongoing struggle
with this other commandment, which Benjamin’s ‘Critique’ likens to a generally-
striking population.
Butler’s messianic reformulation of civil disobedience sharpens the tactical value
of Benjamin’s Sorel recourse in the ‘Critique’. Sorel takes pains in ‘The Political
General Strike’ chapter to distinguish between force and violence, aligning the
former with the compromising and fearful machinations that mark the political
strike and the latter with anti-programmatic spontaneity of the proletarian strike that
obliterates the system (Sorel 2004, pp. 171–179). While the aim of force is to bolster
a social order in which a minority retains its authority to govern by fostering
‘automatic obedience’, violence would destroy that order and thereby ‘smash’ the
minority’s authority (Sorel 2004, pp. 171, 178).
Benjamin’s mediation of Sorel intimates a parallel between the bloodlessness of
divine violence and the proletarian strike. One possible reading of this parallel, as
Butler suggests, is to understand the divine as siding with and aiding the proletariat.
Butler’s interpretation of this parallel nevertheless places more emphasis on a
mutual refusal of coercion, which, in an Arendtian vein, she connects with ‘an
exercise in deliberative freedom that alone serves as the basis of human action’
(Butler 2012a, p. 91).
This image of a non-coerced and non-coercive ‘action’ inverts the quietist mood
of a Jewish-messianism that accepts suffering with a patience bordering on futility,
but also exceeds it. Rather than acquiescing to the impossibility of any action that
would bring about a divine expiation, Butler’s reading of Benjamin transforms the
Jewish-messianic negativity of open-ended waiting into ‘a failure to show, to
comply, to endorse, and so to perpetuate the law of the state’ (Butler 2012a, p. 92);
she thus confers the anarchic force of divine violence upon a stateless desire ‘to
release life from a death contract with the law, a death of the living soul by the
hardening force of guilt’ that calcifies Niobe into a self-maligning ‘legal subject’
(Butler 2012a, p. 82; Butler’s emphasis). This is to grant the moral authority of
Malcolm X’s international civil rights court to anyone who contravenes on behalf of
123
K. Ball
the living, regardless of nationality, by occupying ‘a provisional criminality that

fails to preserve the law and thus undertakes its destruction’ (Butler 2012a, p. 92).
Butler’s self-dispossessive ethics hereby transforms the anarchical disruption of
divine violence into a potential for non-coercive solidarity that becomes most
‘Jewish’ when it is least invested in discrete identity.
Acknowledgments I am grateful to Bradley Lafortune, Melissa Haynes, and Eyal Amiran for their
feedback about various drafts of this essay.
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Post-secular Messianism Against the Law:

Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and

Law and Critique

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways:

Keywords Cohabitation Jewish messianism Post-secular critique Sacred life

& Karyn Ball

Butler’s intensifying public criticisms of Israel comprise a logical extension of

exceptionalist language of redemption as typically conflating ‘freedom’ and

Toward this aim, Butler’s third chapter on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’

Butler’s interpretation of ‘Critique of Violence’ reprises Benjamin’s core questions:

Butler is less interested in Benjamin’s dialogue with Marxism and more

revolutionary and divine’ inasmuch as it cannot be hastened or predicted and it

connotations of Benjamin’s conjunction between mythical violence and ‘mere life’

possible to struggle to alleviate the suffering of others if I am both motivated and

Ways, where she discovers Tikkunic imagery in Benjamin’s ‘flashing up transpo-

prioritization, which I touched on earlier, of Levinas’s conception of a mortally and

Though he is typically remembered for inciting African-Americans to pursue

the living, regardless of nationality, by occupying ‘a provisional criminality that

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