164 Hans-Jost Frey

only a withdrawal, but also the place of a power that makes it pos Alexander Garcia Duttmann
sible for the performers Baudelaire and Blanqui to play their roles
and perhaps even any role. The incognito in Benjamin's text is the
preserved affinity of poet and conspirator. This affinity is now no
longer only determined negatively. Certainly, the incognito i the
withdrawal of recognizability, but it depends less on that than on
the necessity of producing roles, which is announced by the lack of
a graspable identity. The role is the self-presentation of what lacks a The Violence
self. This self-presentation of the selfless leaps out of the brusque
confrontation of Blanqui's review and Baudelaire's poetry as what is of Destruction
presented in Benjamin's text.
How the boheme, which in the role-playing of the poet and the
conspirator turns out to be a theatrical performance, then relates to
For Werner Hamacher
the presentation of the boheme depends on how theater and treatise,
how the theatrical performance and what is called presentation in
the preface to the book on tragic drama, can be related to one an
other. They are similar to one another in that just as in the treatise
what is presented in the constellation of fragments of thought shines
forth as its noncommunicative possibility, the conspirator or poet
bursts out of the constellation of his roles as incognito, and both
affinities are presented in Benjamin's text as the community of what
remains hidden. All presentation is thus theatrical, since it does not Louis Althusser, in his "Defense of Amiens," contends that there is
say, but performs. The relationship between poet and conspirator, something "excessive" in the formulation of philosophical theses
as the aspect of the constellation named boheme most important for that belongs essentially to philosophy: thought should be possible
Benjamin, is presented in his text in such a way that it becomes the only if one sets up limit theses and only when one lingers at the site
metaphor of its being presented. The constellation of poet and con of the impossible. 1 For Althusser, it is a matter of distancing himself
spirator is based on the fact that they are both performers. Since from a "rationalist tradition'' in order to designate politico-histori
they are both lacking, they replace themselves with the role. The role cal relations of power, domination, and force, not merely by a radi
becomes the only possible self-presentation. But self-presentation in cal thesis, but by the radicalness of the thesis. If one disregards for a
the role is the incognito. The self is constituted in the role as the moment the context of this idea, then one can draw two opposing
incognito, just as what is presented in the treatise is constituted in conclusions from the thesis about the philosophical thesis, which
the discontinuity of the fragments of thought as the power that for some may perhaps already present itself as a limit thesis. On the
makes them effective as a constellation. one hand, philosophical thought does not proceed merely from in
dividual positings or from individual positions and does not return
Translated by Michael Shae
to such (revised, further determined, or maintained) positions, for
the formulation of limit theses as the task of philosophy necessarily
implies that one loses control over what is formulated, at least to a
166 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
certain extent. The formulated thesis proves to be a limit thesis only
when it can no longer be overtaken by thought, only when it cannot
maintain the stability of a thesis, only when its positing character is
already thwarted and one cannot recognize it simply as a thesis.
Only then can one speak in general (at least in one sense, which
Althusser's ideaforther radicalizes) of philosophical thought. But on
the other hand, it is the case that only a thought able to set up limit
theses can assume a position, if one understands by position a pos
iting that is not entirely dissolved in the process of the mediation of
thought, in the experience of the concept, in conceptual determin
ability: as positing, position is always positing of a limit thesis; it is
the surplus and excess that cannot be reduced to pure determina
tions of thought. On the one hand, the thesis must be recognizable
as such before one can speak of a thesis at all; on the other hand, the
thesis as such is the excess that thwarts any complete recognition
and that never can appear as such. This opposition within the con
cept of the thesis itself can be formulated as follows: to the extent
that it is a thesis, the thesis cannot be a thesis. Or even: to the extent
that it is a thesis, the thesis must be a limit thesis. Does not this
opposition circumscribe just that "site of the impossible," the site
that Althusser locates as that of thought?
Every positing is identified by a radical trait that indicates
the limit of every possible self-identification, but the limit of self
identification can no longer be simply identified. As a limit, every
positing holds an excess within limits and likewise exposes itself
without limit to an excess; because every positing is ex-posing, and
above all exposing of itself, the limit of positing does not extend as
a straight, uninterrupted line. Every positing conceals withi itself a
destructive violence that not only threatens another positing, but
also already itself. Due to the ideality inherent in positing as such,
however, a movement is unleashed by positing, a movement of re
turn and appropriation, of separation and of remembering experi
ence, from which thought cannot free itself. Through its exposing,
positing exposes itself within itself, in its own interior, to another
positing and thus to an excess that withdraws from conceptual de
termination; in order to sublate this relinquishing of conceptual
unity and to put an end to the continuation of a bad infinity, posit-
The Violence of Destruction 167
ing must completely merge with its ideality, and what is posited
must finally be with itself in the other that is given only by positing.
Recognition, by which otherness is determined and sublated, char
acterizes the speculative dialectical development of the concept. As
Hegel writes in the Encyclopedia:
The development of the concept-according to its determination,
its goal, or if you prefer, its purpose-is to be grasped as a positing
of what the concept is in itself. This development consists in the de
terminations of the concept's content coming into existence and be
ing manifested, not however as independent, self-sufficient beings,
but as posited moments of an ideal nature, which remain within its
unity. This positedness can therefore be grasped as an expression,
protrusion, exposition, or self-externalization insofar as the subjec
tivity of the concept loses itself in the juxtaposition of its determi
nations. It preserves itself within them as their unity and ideality,
however; and seen from the opposite side, therefore, this outward
movement of the center toward the periphery is just as much an
internal resumption of what is outward; it is a reminder that it is
the concept that exists in what is expressed. 2
The ideality of positing and the relation to unity consist con
sequently in remembrance, which determines the necessary relin
quishing to be that of the concept: what comes to existence is
grasped in its existing and is transformed into something returning,
which is also why the "resumption" spoken of by Hegel transfers
the coming of the concept to the "concept that has reached its mani
festation." Positing as the positing of what the posited is in itself
proves to be ideality, or has ideality, has therefore the truth of the
finite as its determination, because it must be grasped as the move
ment of becoming for itself: "The concept wants to break through
the rind of externality in order to become itself. Life is the concept
that has reached its manifestation and stands displayed in its clarity;
at the same time, however, it is the most difficult for the under
standing to come to terms with, because the understanding finds it
easiest to grasp whatever is simplest, abstract, and dead." If every
positing is "ideal," then one can glimpse in the dialectical interpre
tation of positing the unrestricted, complete, determined unfolding
of this ideality. In his lecture course on the Phenomenology of Spirit
166 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
certain extent. The formulated thesis proves to be a limit thesis only
when it can no longer be overtaken by thought, only when it cannot
maintain the stability of a thesis, only when its positing character is
already thwarted and one cannot recognize it simply as a thesis.
Only then can one speak in general (at least in one sense, which
Althusser's ideaforther radicalizes) of philosophical thought. But on
the other hand, it is the case that only a thought able to set up limit
theses can assume a position, if one understands by position a pos
iting that is not entirely dissolved in the process of the mediation of
thought, in the experience of the concept, in conceptual determin
ability: as positing, position is always positing of a limit thesis; it is
the surplus and excess that cannot be reduced to pure determina
tions of thought. On the one hand, the thesis must be recognizable
as such before one can speak of a thesis at all; on the other hand, the
thesis as such is the excess that thwarts any complete recognition
and that never can appear as such. This opposition within the con
cept of the thesis itself can be formulated as follows: to the extent
that it is a thesis, the thesis cannot be a thesis. Or even: to the extent
that it is a thesis, the thesis must be a limit thesis. Does not this
opposition circumscribe just that "site of the impossible," the site
that Althusser locates as that of thought?
Every positing is identified by a radical trait that indicates
the limit of every possible self-identification, but the limit of self
identification can no longer be simply identified. As a limit, every
positing holds an excess within limits and likewise exposes itself
without limit to an excess; because every positing is ex-posing, and
above all exposing of itself, the limit of positing does not extend as
a straight, uninterrupted line. Every positing conceals withi itself a
destructive violence that not only threatens another positing, but
also already itself. Due to the ideality inherent in positing as such,
however, a movement is unleashed by positing, a movement of re
turn and appropriation, of separation and of remembering experi
ence, from which thought cannot free itself. Through its exposing,
positing exposes itself within itself, in its own interior, to another
positing and thus to an excess that withdraws from conceptual de
termination; in order to sublate this relinquishing of conceptual
unity and to put an end to the continuation of a bad infinity, posit-
The Violence of Destruction 167
ing must completely merge with its ideality, and what is posited
must finally be with itself in the other that is given only by positing.
Recognition, by which otherness is determined and sublated, char
acterizes the speculative dialectical development of the concept. As
Hegel writes in the Encyclopedia:
The development of the concept-according to its determination,
its goal, or if you prefer, its purpose-is to be grasped as a positing
of what the concept is in itself. This development consists in the de
terminations of the concept's content coming into existence and be
ing manifested, not however as independent, self-sufficient beings,
but as posited moments of an ideal nature, which remain within its
unity. This positedness can therefore be grasped as an expression,
protrusion, exposition, or self-externalization insofar as the subjec
tivity of the concept loses itself in the juxtaposition of its determi
nations. It preserves itself within them as their unity and ideality,
however; and seen from the opposite side, therefore, this outward
movement of the center toward the periphery is just as much an
internal resumption of what is outward; it is a reminder that it is
the concept that exists in what is expressed. 2
The ideality of positing and the relation to unity consist con
sequently in remembrance, which determines the necessary relin
quishing to be that of the concept: what comes to existence is
grasped in its existing and is transformed into something returning,
which is also why the "resumption" spoken of by Hegel transfers
the coming of the concept to the "concept that has reached its mani
festation." Positing as the positing of what the posited is in itself
proves to be ideality, or has ideality, has therefore the truth of the
finite as its determination, because it must be grasped as the move
ment of becoming for itself: "The concept wants to break through
the rind of externality in order to become itself. Life is the concept
that has reached its manifestation and stands displayed in its clarity;
at the same time, however, it is the most difficult for the under
standing to come to terms with, because the understanding finds it
easiest to grasp whatever is simplest, abstract, and dead." If every
positing is "ideal," then one can glimpse in the dialectical interpre
tation of positing the unrestricted, complete, determined unfolding
of this ideality. In his lecture course on the Phenomenology of Spirit
168 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
held in the winter semester ofi930-31, Heidegger says that "all phi
losophy from first to last merely unfolds its presupposition" and that
"everything depends on how philosophy entertains the presup
position"; if in the case of Hegel "the understanding of the end is
plainly indispensable . . . because the end is already plainly the be
ginning and because the way in which the end is the beginning (and
vice versa) has already been decided," 3 then dialectical positing has
as a presupposition that it always already presupposes itself and in
its presupposing has suspended its exposure. Positing as the de
struction of tautology, as a manifestation of what persists first of all
tautologically and unmediated in itself, is in essence sublating, as
Derrida has on occasion emphasized.4
The question, therefore, of whether in the end positing does
not disappear in its absolute presupposing and is forgotten in its
absolute remembrance can be countered, from a speculative point
of view, with the other question of whether the suspension of pre
supposing and the forgetting that goes along with it does not ex
pose the ideality of positing to an "endless iteration of the alterna
tion between different determinations, each of which calls up the
other." 5 These two questions are about the difference between a
"true" and a "bad" infinity, between the endless exceeding of a limit
and the sublation of finitude. Hegel describes bad infinity in the
Encyclopedia with the words: "We posit a limit: then we pass it: next
we have a limit once more, and so on forever. All this is but super
ficial alternation, which never leaves the region of the finite be
hind." 6 In the section of the Science ofLogic that deals-with quantity,
one reads that bad quantitative infinity is "the perpetual movement
back and forth from one term of the lasting contradiction t0 the
other." Quantitative and qualitative infinity are not distinguished as
bad infinities: progress is presented not as a "going on and forth,"
but as "a repetition of one and the same thing, a positing, a sublat
ing, and then again a positing and again a sublating, an impotence
of the negative, for what it sublates is continuous with it, and in the
very act of being sublated returns to it." 7 Thought can be more than
the repetition of something already known, more than the confir
mation of ideological content, only through its excess, through its
irreducible irresponsibility. Therefore, it must be able to let itself be
The Violence of Destruction
carried away by destructive violence, which one can read in simpli
fication, in a barbaric, undialectical moment: it is as if positing
wanted to utter everything all at once. The excess of positing lies in
the fact that it must irrevocably abandon itself and the posited for
its own sake, in order to be able to posit anything at all. "How much
is lost, whenever one wants only to test it slowly": this line from a
novel by Robert Walser, which has in mind untested, incessant, un
mediated discourse, a discourse as pure positing and as pure expos
ing, seems to be engraved for positings. As a thought in limit theses,
as a thought that touches the limits of its positings, philosophical
thought stands before the question of the relationship between the
presupposing and the exposing of positing: either it thinks positing
essentially as a result and hypostatizes its ideality, or it exposes itself
to what can be dismissed solely under the presupposition of a truth
of the finite, as the endlessness of bad, untrue, impotently negative
infinity.
Walter Benjamin's essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" circles
around the concept of positing. To be sure, positing is thematized
in it only in the specific sense of a "law-positing violence"; Benja
min distinguishes, of course, between a "law-positing violence" and
a "law-preserving violence": "All violence, as a means, is either law
positing or law-preserving." 8 Positing as a positing of law is conse
quently not only a form of violence, but more precisely a form of
violence as means. But not every means stands in the service of a
law-positing or law-preserving violence: according to Benjamin, a
"politics of pure means" can be imagined that brings about a non
violent resolution of conflicts. Werner Hamacher has recently taken
issue with the idea of such a politics, which ultimately is unimag
inable and unpresentable, and has emphatically stressed that the
"sketch of a politics of pure mediacy," of a politics that is not ori
ented toward external ends, is a sketch of a politics of the "deposing
of the act of positing." 9 Next to violence as a pure and impure
means, violence as impurely and purely mediated violence, Benja
min poses an unmediated violence, which in its turn experiences
a division: while the "mythical manifestation of unmediated vio
lence" is identical to the manifestation of legal power and thus is far
froIll; "inaugurating a purer sphere" (a sphere in which positing and
168 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
held in the winter semester ofi930-31, Heidegger says that "all phi
losophy from first to last merely unfolds its presupposition" and that
"everything depends on how philosophy entertains the presup
position"; if in the case of Hegel "the understanding of the end is
plainly indispensable . . . because the end is already plainly the be
ginning and because the way in which the end is the beginning (and
vice versa) has already been decided," 3 then dialectical positing has
as a presupposition that it always already presupposes itself and in
its presupposing has suspended its exposure. Positing as the de
struction of tautology, as a manifestation of what persists first of all
tautologically and unmediated in itself, is in essence sublating, as
Derrida has on occasion emphasized.4
The question, therefore, of whether in the end positing does
not disappear in its absolute presupposing and is forgotten in its
absolute remembrance can be countered, from a speculative point
of view, with the other question of whether the suspension of pre
supposing and the forgetting that goes along with it does not ex
pose the ideality of positing to an "endless iteration of the alterna
tion between different determinations, each of which calls up the
other." 5 These two questions are about the difference between a
"true" and a "bad" infinity, between the endless exceeding of a limit
and the sublation of finitude. Hegel describes bad infinity in the
Encyclopedia with the words: "We posit a limit: then we pass it: next
we have a limit once more, and so on forever. All this is but super
ficial alternation, which never leaves the region of the finite be
hind." 6 In the section of the Science ofLogic that deals-with quantity,
one reads that bad quantitative infinity is "the perpetual movement
back and forth from one term of the lasting contradiction t0 the
other." Quantitative and qualitative infinity are not distinguished as
bad infinities: progress is presented not as a "going on and forth,"
but as "a repetition of one and the same thing, a positing, a sublat
ing, and then again a positing and again a sublating, an impotence
of the negative, for what it sublates is continuous with it, and in the
very act of being sublated returns to it." 7 Thought can be more than
the repetition of something already known, more than the confir
mation of ideological content, only through its excess, through its
irreducible irresponsibility. Therefore, it must be able to let itself be
The Violence of Destruction
carried away by destructive violence, which one can read in simpli
fication, in a barbaric, undialectical moment: it is as if positing
wanted to utter everything all at once. The excess of positing lies in
the fact that it must irrevocably abandon itself and the posited for
its own sake, in order to be able to posit anything at all. "How much
is lost, whenever one wants only to test it slowly": this line from a
novel by Robert Walser, which has in mind untested, incessant, un
mediated discourse, a discourse as pure positing and as pure expos
ing, seems to be engraved for positings. As a thought in limit theses,
as a thought that touches the limits of its positings, philosophical
thought stands before the question of the relationship between the
presupposing and the exposing of positing: either it thinks positing
essentially as a result and hypostatizes its ideality, or it exposes itself
to what can be dismissed solely under the presupposition of a truth
of the finite, as the endlessness of bad, untrue, impotently negative
infinity.
Walter Benjamin's essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" circles
around the concept of positing. To be sure, positing is thematized
in it only in the specific sense of a "law-positing violence"; Benja
min distinguishes, of course, between a "law-positing violence" and
a "law-preserving violence": "All violence, as a means, is either law
positing or law-preserving." 8 Positing as a positing of law is conse
quently not only a form of violence, but more precisely a form of
violence as means. But not every means stands in the service of a
law-positing or law-preserving violence: according to Benjamin, a
"politics of pure means" can be imagined that brings about a non
violent resolution of conflicts. Werner Hamacher has recently taken
issue with the idea of such a politics, which ultimately is unimag
inable and unpresentable, and has emphatically stressed that the
"sketch of a politics of pure mediacy," of a politics that is not ori
ented toward external ends, is a sketch of a politics of the "deposing
of the act of positing." 9 Next to violence as a pure and impure
means, violence as impurely and purely mediated violence, Benja
min poses an unmediated violence, which in its turn experiences
a division: while the "mythical manifestation of unmediated vio
lence" is identical to the manifestation of legal power and thus is far
froIll; "inaugurating a purer sphere" (a sphere in which positing and
170 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
counterpositing no longer reciprocally condition one another), the
divine manifestation of unmediated violence is the manifestation of
a pure violence, which is defined by the "absence of every positing
of law" and by the task of an "annihilation" of legal and therefore
of state power. Only the deposing of positing (in Benjamin's words),
which does not require another positing, inaugurates the pure and
nonviolent sphere of mediated and unmediated violence. Benjamin
characterizes this inauguration as annihilation. If positing is linked
to violence, it is, however, not annihilating: it is not nonviolent in
the sense of an annihilation, which occurs solely wherever the vio
lence of pure immediacy dominates and a politics of pure mediacy
prevails. The purity that is fundamentally lacking in positing is the
purity of an annihilation without relapse into the annihilated, of an
annihilation without remainder, without the annihilated that could
always haunt it in that form: annihilation as bad infinity, as infinite
affliction and endless restoration of the annihilated, is impure.
Benjamin does not identify pure and limitless annihilation with
the power of negativity; nevertheless, a clear relation exists between
what Hegel determines as bad infinity and the impure sphere of
(limit) positing. 10 The history of law, he writes, is a "dialectical up
and down." This is not due to the particular form that positing as
sumes in the realm of law; rather, the circulation that stands "under
the spell of the mythic forms of law" is brought forth by the char
acter of positing, which is inherent in law, so that everything that
Benjamin points out about the history and the structure of law can
be generalized and transferred to positing in general: "A regard
directed only at what is nearest can at most discern a dialecti
cal up and down in the forms of violence as law-positing and law
preserving. Its law of oscillation is based on the fact that every
law-preserving violence in its duration indirectly weakens the law
positing violence that is represented in it by the suppression of hos
tile counterviolences. This lasts until either new violences or the
previously suppressed ones are victorious over the previous law
positing violence and thereby establish a new law that itself will de
cline anew" ("Kritik," 2.1: 202). It seems to be valid for positing in
general that its own security, its preserving delimitation and oppo
sition, causes it to fluctuate, but if it requires security, it is because
The Violence of Destruction 171
it is excessive and must maintain itself against other positings to
which it remains exposed. Benjamin's formulation of the law of os
cillation to which positing is subjected translates bad infinity into
the language of a critique of violence. "Something becomes an
other, but the other is itself a something, and therefore becomes
itself an other, and so on into infinity": the process of bad infinity,
the "negation of the finite, which nevertheless arises again," is here
a violent suppression and a suppressing victory over what sup
presses. In the grounding "that will decline anew," the excessive, the
contradiction of the finite, is expressed: the finite is "both some
thing and its other."
One can raise three questions at this point: (1) If violence is
always positing or deposing violence, how are nature and idea re
lated to positing and deposing? (2) Why does Benjamin speak, on
the one hand, of a pure and an impure mediacy, but then, on the
other hand, of a pure and an impure immediacy? (3) What is a non
violent, pure, remainderless annihilation, an annihilation without
an annihilated, an annihilation that operates all the more annihi
latingly because it does not annihilate (anything)? (This paradox
is perhaps truth itself, wherever dialectical sublation expresses it,
which, in accord with its double sense, sublates the finite and thus
frees it from reflection, from bad or negative infinity, from the fini
tization of the infinite and the absolutization of the finite.)
1. The concept and the critique of violence are, as Benjamin
makes clear, inseparable from "moral relations" ("Kritik," 2.1: 179);
in order to be an "effective cause," violence must engage in such
relations. Only as an engagement of law or of justice can it become
an object of critique. If violence is thus not a "product of nature,"
if positing and deposing do not belong to the natural realm, then
one can ask how mythic and divine, positing and deposing violence
relate to that realm. On the one hand, the intervention of divine
violence does not simply present a conceptually graspable transi
tion to ideality (above all, because it cannot be recognized "with
certainty"); on the other hand, mythic, positing violence is not en
tirely foreign to the natural realm. "The unleashing of legal power
originates . . . in the culpability of mere natural life, which hands
over the living innocently and unhappily to atonement" ("Kritik,"
170 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
counterpositing no longer reciprocally condition one another), the
divine manifestation of unmediated violence is the manifestation of
a pure violence, which is defined by the "absence of every positing
of law" and by the task of an "annihilation" of legal and therefore
of state power. Only the deposing of positing (in Benjamin's words),
which does not require another positing, inaugurates the pure and
nonviolent sphere of mediated and unmediated violence. Benjamin
characterizes this inauguration as annihilation. If positing is linked
to violence, it is, however, not annihilating: it is not nonviolent in
the sense of an annihilation, which occurs solely wherever the vio
lence of pure immediacy dominates and a politics of pure mediacy
prevails. The purity that is fundamentally lacking in positing is the
purity of an annihilation without relapse into the annihilated, of an
annihilation without remainder, without the annihilated that could
always haunt it in that form: annihilation as bad infinity, as infinite
affliction and endless restoration of the annihilated, is impure.
Benjamin does not identify pure and limitless annihilation with
the power of negativity; nevertheless, a clear relation exists between
what Hegel determines as bad infinity and the impure sphere of
(limit) positing. 10 The history of law, he writes, is a "dialectical up
and down." This is not due to the particular form that positing as
sumes in the realm of law; rather, the circulation that stands "under
the spell of the mythic forms of law" is brought forth by the char
acter of positing, which is inherent in law, so that everything that
Benjamin points out about the history and the structure of law can
be generalized and transferred to positing in general: "A regard
directed only at what is nearest can at most discern a dialecti
cal up and down in the forms of violence as law-positing and law
preserving. Its law of oscillation is based on the fact that every
law-preserving violence in its duration indirectly weakens the law
positing violence that is represented in it by the suppression of hos
tile counterviolences. This lasts until either new violences or the
previously suppressed ones are victorious over the previous law
positing violence and thereby establish a new law that itself will de
cline anew" ("Kritik," 2.1: 202). It seems to be valid for positing in
general that its own security, its preserving delimitation and oppo
sition, causes it to fluctuate, but if it requires security, it is because
The Violence of Destruction 171
it is excessive and must maintain itself against other positings to
which it remains exposed. Benjamin's formulation of the law of os
cillation to which positing is subjected translates bad infinity into
the language of a critique of violence. "Something becomes an
other, but the other is itself a something, and therefore becomes
itself an other, and so on into infinity": the process of bad infinity,
the "negation of the finite, which nevertheless arises again," is here
a violent suppression and a suppressing victory over what sup
presses. In the grounding "that will decline anew," the excessive, the
contradiction of the finite, is expressed: the finite is "both some
thing and its other."
One can raise three questions at this point: (1) If violence is
always positing or deposing violence, how are nature and idea re
lated to positing and deposing? (2) Why does Benjamin speak, on
the one hand, of a pure and an impure mediacy, but then, on the
other hand, of a pure and an impure immediacy? (3) What is a non
violent, pure, remainderless annihilation, an annihilation without
an annihilated, an annihilation that operates all the more annihi
latingly because it does not annihilate (anything)? (This paradox
is perhaps truth itself, wherever dialectical sublation expresses it,
which, in accord with its double sense, sublates the finite and thus
frees it from reflection, from bad or negative infinity, from the fini
tization of the infinite and the absolutization of the finite.)
1. The concept and the critique of violence are, as Benjamin
makes clear, inseparable from "moral relations" ("Kritik," 2.1: 179);
in order to be an "effective cause," violence must engage in such
relations. Only as an engagement of law or of justice can it become
an object of critique. If violence is thus not a "product of nature,"
if positing and deposing do not belong to the natural realm, then
one can ask how mythic and divine, positing and deposing violence
relate to that realm. On the one hand, the intervention of divine
violence does not simply present a conceptually graspable transi
tion to ideality (above all, because it cannot be recognized "with
certainty"); on the other hand, mythic, positing violence is not en
tirely foreign to the natural realm. "The unleashing of legal power
originates . . . in the culpability of mere natural life, which hands
over the living innocently and unhappily to atonement" ("Kritik,"
 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
2.1: 199-200). Positing, "ideal" to the extent that it is not a natural
violence, remains, however, bound to what Benjamin names "mere
natural life," and therefore to the web of guilt that constitutes fate.
Does not the impurity of positing consist precisely in this mixture
of the ideal and the natural, which keeps the living from its authen
tic determination and lets the ideal revert again and again to the
natural? Must not a thought in limit theses, a positing and excessive
thought that is embedded in an infinite-finite movement that it it
self immortalizes, inevitably entangle itself in guilt?
But the ideality of the positing of law asserts itself at the same
time against "mere life," against the culpably natural.One can, that
is, read in it that law, "in the 'decision' fixed in place and time, ac
knowledges a metaphysical category by which it makes a claim to
critique" (2.1: 189). Benjamin underlines this metaphysical character
of decision, which he only mentions in the "Critique of Violence,"
in his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, where he opposes choice
and decision. It thus becomes apparent that decision annihilates
choice: "for choice is natural and may even be inherent in the ele
ments; decision is transcendent" ( Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,
1.1: 189). Precisely because it consists of a mixture of the ideal and
the natural, positing is never satisfied with itself; it not only suc
cumbs again and again to fate, it not only perpetuates violently the
bad infinity of the mythic cycle, but it also transcends the imma
nence of mere life through the decision that it makes possible.One
must keep in mind here that this transcending or this relation to a
transcendent is indebted in its turn to a destructive force, to the
annihilation of the nature-bound principle of choice.Benjamin had
already introduced the expression "annihilation'' in his dissertation,
where it is a matter of determining the. exact meaning that this
expression is given in German Romanticism. He designates as a
"Romantic terminus technicus" the "mediacy of irony," that is,
"the indirect refutation of the invalid through silence, through its
ironic praise, or through the high praise of the good" (Der Begriff
der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 1.1: 79-80 ). If in his 1921
essay "Toward a Critique of Violence," divine violence reigns "over
all life for the sake of the living," if immediate, pure violence thus
annihilates without annihilating (perhaps one must understand sal-
The Violence of Destruction 173
vation as precisely this annihilation without an annihilated), then in
his dissertation, published a year before, Benjamin says of annihilat
ing irony: "It not only destroys the work that it attacks, but draws
the work nearer to indestructibility.Through the destruction of the
specific form of presentation of the work in irony, the relative unity
of the individual work is drawn back more deeply into art as the
universal work....The ironization of the form of presentation is,
so to speak, the storm that raises the curtain on the transcendental
order of art" ("Der Begriff der Kunstkritik," 1.1: 86).
2. Positing violence, as impurely mediate, is likewise an unme-
diated violence:
The function of violence in the positing of law is twofold in the
sense that the positing of law pursues as its end what is imposed as
law, with violence as the means, but does not dismiss violence in
the moment of the imposition of what is aimed at as law. Rather, it
makes violence law-positing only immediately.and in the strictest
sense, by imposing an end that is not independent and free of vio
lence, but necessarily and intimately bound to it as law under the
name of power. The positing of law is the positing of power, and
to that extent an act of the immediate manifestation of violence.
("Kritik," 2.1: 198-99)
Violence as means or mediate violence-that is, violence pure and
simple, at least to the degree that violence has the function of a
means and manifests itself mediately, in regard to an end-passes
over into unmediated violence or is in its essence unmediated vio
lence: it is not a means that can be set aside after use and forgotten.
(Is the means that is ordinary and unremarkable not always some
thing forgotten?) One should consider positing as the imposing of
violence: with the characterization of the mediated violence of the
positing of law as an unmediated violence, Benjamin draws atten
tion to this imposing by which positing violence imposes itself. In
other words, the proof that mediated violence is actually unme
diated violence and that positing is actually the positing of power
implies that positing as such may indeed be stamped with a relation
to transcendence, but that it cannot accomplish the destruction, the
sublation, or the overcoming of the excessive, which abandons it to
the "dialectical up and down." If the impure mediacy of violence
 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
2.1: 199-200). Positing, "ideal" to the extent that it is not a natural
violence, remains, however, bound to what Benjamin names "mere
natural life," and therefore to the web of guilt that constitutes fate.
Does not the impurity of positing consist precisely in this mixture
of the ideal and the natural, which keeps the living from its authen
tic determination and lets the ideal revert again and again to the
natural? Must not a thought in limit theses, a positing and excessive
thought that is embedded in an infinite-finite movement that it it
self immortalizes, inevitably entangle itself in guilt?
But the ideality of the positing of law asserts itself at the same
time against "mere life," against the culpably natural.One can, that
is, read in it that law, "in the 'decision' fixed in place and time, ac
knowledges a metaphysical category by which it makes a claim to
critique" (2.1: 189). Benjamin underlines this metaphysical character
of decision, which he only mentions in the "Critique of Violence,"
in his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, where he opposes choice
and decision. It thus becomes apparent that decision annihilates
choice: "for choice is natural and may even be inherent in the ele
ments; decision is transcendent" ( Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,
1.1: 189). Precisely because it consists of a mixture of the ideal and
the natural, positing is never satisfied with itself; it not only suc
cumbs again and again to fate, it not only perpetuates violently the
bad infinity of the mythic cycle, but it also transcends the imma
nence of mere life through the decision that it makes possible.One
must keep in mind here that this transcending or this relation to a
transcendent is indebted in its turn to a destructive force, to the
annihilation of the nature-bound principle of choice.Benjamin had
already introduced the expression "annihilation'' in his dissertation,
where it is a matter of determining the. exact meaning that this
expression is given in German Romanticism. He designates as a
"Romantic terminus technicus" the "mediacy of irony," that is,
"the indirect refutation of the invalid through silence, through its
ironic praise, or through the high praise of the good" (Der Begriff
der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 1.1: 79-80 ). If in his 1921
essay "Toward a Critique of Violence," divine violence reigns "over
all life for the sake of the living," if immediate, pure violence thus
annihilates without annihilating (perhaps one must understand sal-
The Violence of Destruction 173
vation as precisely this annihilation without an annihilated), then in
his dissertation, published a year before, Benjamin says of annihilat
ing irony: "It not only destroys the work that it attacks, but draws
the work nearer to indestructibility.Through the destruction of the
specific form of presentation of the work in irony, the relative unity
of the individual work is drawn back more deeply into art as the
universal work....The ironization of the form of presentation is,
so to speak, the storm that raises the curtain on the transcendental
order of art" ("Der Begriff der Kunstkritik," 1.1: 86).
2. Positing violence, as impurely mediate, is likewise an unme-
diated violence:
The function of violence in the positing of law is twofold in the
sense that the positing of law pursues as its end what is imposed as
law, with violence as the means, but does not dismiss violence in
the moment of the imposition of what is aimed at as law. Rather, it
makes violence law-positing only immediately.and in the strictest
sense, by imposing an end that is not independent and free of vio
lence, but necessarily and intimately bound to it as law under the
name of power. The positing of law is the positing of power, and
to that extent an act of the immediate manifestation of violence.
("Kritik," 2.1: 198-99)
Violence as means or mediate violence-that is, violence pure and
simple, at least to the degree that violence has the function of a
means and manifests itself mediately, in regard to an end-passes
over into unmediated violence or is in its essence unmediated vio
lence: it is not a means that can be set aside after use and forgotten.
(Is the means that is ordinary and unremarkable not always some
thing forgotten?) One should consider positing as the imposing of
violence: with the characterization of the mediated violence of the
positing of law as an unmediated violence, Benjamin draws atten
tion to this imposing by which positing violence imposes itself. In
other words, the proof that mediated violence is actually unme
diated violence and that positing is actually the positing of power
implies that positing as such may indeed be stamped with a relation
to transcendence, but that it cannot accomplish the destruction, the
sublation, or the overcoming of the excessive, which abandons it to
the "dialectical up and down." If the impure mediacy of violence
1 74 Alexander Garcia Diittmann
induces Benjamin to conceive of a politics of pure mediacy, then the
self-imposing of violence in the act of positing seems to make nec
essary another violence, a pure unmediated violence that destroys
violence, but that nevertheless remains a violence. Annihilation
without an annihilated is an annihilation of violence.11
3. The law of oscillation of violence, which Benjamin uncov
ers in its duration, concerns its "forms as law-positing and law
preserving" violence. Consequently, the violence of destruction,
which manifests itself under the names of deposing and annihila
tion, is a "deforming" violence, if one may use here an expression
whose use Benjamin explains in an early fragment on fantasy. This
short text was probably written during the same period as the essay
on violence. Fantasy as "deformation'' is unconstructive, dissolving,
unconstrained, and free; it is "in the last day of the world and in the
first" ("Phantasie," 6: 117). Does not the last day of the world in the
"Critique of Violence" proclaim the "new historical era" intro
duced by the revolution and the victory of divine over mythic vio
lence? Is this day not the one on which a "deformation" exhausts
not j1,1st this or that formation, but formation itself ? Does not di
vine violence appear as annihilating only in relation to the mythic?
Whereas positing, because of its double character, is unable to free
human existence from violence, and annihilation, as the violent
transition to another positing, regularly reproduces what is annihi
lated, annihilating deposing opens the mythic circle. 'Nhy? Probably
because the double character of positing-its impurity-results
from an excess, from a mixture of the ideal and the natural, while
deposing, on the other hand, is purely annihilating and purely sav
ing, but pure annihilation and pure salvation coincide. Whether one
speaks of annihilation or salvation depends on the perspective from
which one argues. (Strictly speaking, the concept of perspective is
quite inappropriate here. It is used to distinguish two incompatible
yet not entirely disparate perspectives, but in the end its use per
petuates destructive violern;:e, since every perspective involves a fur
ther positing. Perspective is always the perspective of destructive vio
lence. Benjamin's idea of deforming-or deposing-consequently
does not go along with a mere perspectivism.) A series of notes on
world and time, which Benjamin left unfinished, contain comments
The Violence of Destruction 1 75
that deal with this pure double character of divine violence and also
recall the critique of theology in the so-called "Theologico-Political
Fragment": "Genuine divine power can manifest itself other than as
destroying only in the coming world (of fulfillment). On the other
hand, wherever divine violence enters the earthly world, it breathes
destruction. Therefore, there is nothing constant in this world and
no formation can be grounded on it, least of all sovereignty as its
highest principle" ("Welt und Zeit," 6: 99).
True, positive infinity in speculative dialectics is the ideality or
the truth of the finite, which raises thought above mere positing and
repositing, above the constantly excessive economy of the negative
that is never closed off as a whole, above the continual return of the
sublated through its sublation. The excess of positing, by which it
passes over into what is opposed to it, is no longer maintained as
such, as the finitude of the posited moments of the concept, which
are not unified in their mediation. But because it is only a bad in
finity, because it alone retains the last word for a thought of under
standing that hyp ostatizes the infinity of reflection, positing points
beyond itself; this pointing beyond belongs to it to the degree that
no veritable sublation of the finite occurs. "The finite . . . ought to
be sublated," Hegel writes of the bad infinity of criticism, and "the
infinite ought not to be merely a negative, but also a positive. That
'ought to be' betrays the incapacity of actually making good a claim
that is at the same time recognized to be right." 12 The law of oscil
lation of positing and opposing that is never recognized by a "glance
directed only at what is nearest," by a glance that cannot truly dis
criminate and decide, designates in Benjamin's critique of violence
this figure of the excessive or of bad infinity-certainly in a different
context of thought than that of the movement of the concept, which
is why one cannot speak here in the strictest sense of a bad infinity.
However, deposing as a politics of pure mediacy and as a manifes
tation of a pure divine violence is engaged solely because the "sov
ereignty of myth is already broken here and there in the present,"
and the "new does not lie at such an unimaginable distance that a
word against the law is resolved by itself " ( "Kritik," 2.1: 202). In
other words, it is engaged only because the immanence of positings
cannot be sealed against deposing violence.
1 74 Alexander Garcia Diittmann
induces Benjamin to conceive of a politics of pure mediacy, then the
self-imposing of violence in the act of positing seems to make nec
essary another violence, a pure unmediated violence that destroys
violence, but that nevertheless remains a violence. Annihilation
without an annihilated is an annihilation of violence.11
3. The law of oscillation of violence, which Benjamin uncov
ers in its duration, concerns its "forms as law-positing and law
preserving" violence. Consequently, the violence of destruction,
which manifests itself under the names of deposing and annihila
tion, is a "deforming" violence, if one may use here an expression
whose use Benjamin explains in an early fragment on fantasy. This
short text was probably written during the same period as the essay
on violence. Fantasy as "deformation'' is unconstructive, dissolving,
unconstrained, and free; it is "in the last day of the world and in the
first" ("Phantasie," 6: 117). Does not the last day of the world in the
"Critique of Violence" proclaim the "new historical era" intro
duced by the revolution and the victory of divine over mythic vio
lence? Is this day not the one on which a "deformation" exhausts
not j1,1st this or that formation, but formation itself ? Does not di
vine violence appear as annihilating only in relation to the mythic?
Whereas positing, because of its double character, is unable to free
human existence from violence, and annihilation, as the violent
transition to another positing, regularly reproduces what is annihi
lated, annihilating deposing opens the mythic circle. 'Nhy? Probably
because the double character of positing-its impurity-results
from an excess, from a mixture of the ideal and the natural, while
deposing, on the other hand, is purely annihilating and purely sav
ing, but pure annihilation and pure salvation coincide. Whether one
speaks of annihilation or salvation depends on the perspective from
which one argues. (Strictly speaking, the concept of perspective is
quite inappropriate here. It is used to distinguish two incompatible
yet not entirely disparate perspectives, but in the end its use per
petuates destructive violern;:e, since every perspective involves a fur
ther positing. Perspective is always the perspective of destructive vio
lence. Benjamin's idea of deforming-or deposing-consequently
does not go along with a mere perspectivism.) A series of notes on
world and time, which Benjamin left unfinished, contain comments
The Violence of Destruction 1 75
that deal with this pure double character of divine violence and also
recall the critique of theology in the so-called "Theologico-Political
Fragment": "Genuine divine power can manifest itself other than as
destroying only in the coming world (of fulfillment). On the other
hand, wherever divine violence enters the earthly world, it breathes
destruction. Therefore, there is nothing constant in this world and
no formation can be grounded on it, least of all sovereignty as its
highest principle" ("Welt und Zeit," 6: 99).
True, positive infinity in speculative dialectics is the ideality or
the truth of the finite, which raises thought above mere positing and
repositing, above the constantly excessive economy of the negative
that is never closed off as a whole, above the continual return of the
sublated through its sublation. The excess of positing, by which it
passes over into what is opposed to it, is no longer maintained as
such, as the finitude of the posited moments of the concept, which
are not unified in their mediation. But because it is only a bad in
finity, because it alone retains the last word for a thought of under
standing that hyp ostatizes the infinity of reflection, positing points
beyond itself; this pointing beyond belongs to it to the degree that
no veritable sublation of the finite occurs. "The finite . . . ought to
be sublated," Hegel writes of the bad infinity of criticism, and "the
infinite ought not to be merely a negative, but also a positive. That
'ought to be' betrays the incapacity of actually making good a claim
that is at the same time recognized to be right." 12 The law of oscil
lation of positing and opposing that is never recognized by a "glance
directed only at what is nearest," by a glance that cannot truly dis
criminate and decide, designates in Benjamin's critique of violence
this figure of the excessive or of bad infinity-certainly in a different
context of thought than that of the movement of the concept, which
is why one cannot speak here in the strictest sense of a bad infinity.
However, deposing as a politics of pure mediacy and as a manifes
tation of a pure divine violence is engaged solely because the "sov
ereignty of myth is already broken here and there in the present,"
and the "new does not lie at such an unimaginable distance that a
word against the law is resolved by itself " ( "Kritik," 2.1: 202). In
other words, it is engaged only because the immanence of positings
cannot be sealed against deposing violence.
 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
The impurity of violence creates no pure immanence. Must one
not even assume that the revolutionary violence of deposing in its
radical heterogeneity already affects the conservative violence that
preserves the "dialectical up and down," wherever this is effective
as such? Does not the law of oscillation of positings mean that every
positing must point beyond its finitude, in order to maintain itself
at all as a positing against another positing? Would not absolute
immanence or ari absolute identity paralyze every positing in ad
vance? The decisive, factually grounded, and not merely logical con
tradiction that one encounters in the course of such a critique of
violence is based on the fact that the relation between positing and
deposing is simultaneously incommensurable and differential. It
must be incommensurable in order for the purely deposing violence
to break through the bad infinity of positings, but it must also be
differential if the positing, impure violence is to reproduce itself in
bad infinity. Does this simultaneity of the incommensurable and the
differential not lead inevitably to a submission of the incommen
surable to the differential? Does the incommensurable at all permit
a simultaneity, is it not what is incommensurable in the face of every
simultaneity? Do positings not become, through simultaneity, ex
pressions of the incommensurable? The question of the newness of
the new promised by Benjamin is inseparable from this contradic
tion between the differential and the incommensurable, as is the
question of whether "a new historical age" can be grounded, which
is basically already raised with the formulation of the law of oscilla
tion: with a formulation that can itself no longer be a positing. As
the basis of all positing, as the basic law, the law of oscillation of
positings cannot be subject to itself. But it also cannot actually serve
as a basis: the knowledge of the essential instability of positing does
not refer to a preceding, absolutely indubitable and certain positing
of a basic principle or law. Such a first positing presupposes posit
ing, as Heidegger demonstrates in the context of Cartesian doubt,
which is itself in no way skeptical; it presupposes positing, regardless
of whether position "in the sense of predicative thought" is only
presupposed or not: "If something is given at all, then only . . .
positing, position, in the sense of predicative thought. Positing, the
principle, has only itself as what can be posited." 13 Thus, as a cri-
The Violence of Destruction 177
tique of the excess of all positings, the critique of violence leads in
the end to the question of whether the new, already dawning his
torical age can be grounded.
If Althusser vindicates the excess of positing for thought and
thus seems to locate its paradoxical condition of possibility in a cer
tain bad infinity, then perhaps what is called deconstruction sets out
to demonstrate, as the necessity of thought itself, the necessity of an
infinity that is no longer a bad infinity without thereby be_ing a true
infinity. One could describe deconstructive thought as a setting free
of the excessive ( Ubermassige) that from the outset unhinges every
positing, every regulated relation between individual positings and
between individual oppositions. (The uber in das Ubermassige is
also supposed to indicate what is without measure, the heteroge
neity of the excessive in regard to measure.) If it is anything at all,
then deconstruction is a radicalized, general exposing, transposing,
and deposing: as deconstruction of the privilege of synthesis and of
gathering (the two are not the same), it does not even cease before
that positing of Ge-setz that Heidegger contrasts with position "in
the sense of predicative thought": Death should "gather into the
whole of the already posited, into the positum of the entire relation,"
and as "this gathering of positing" should be "das Ge-setz." 14 "La
differance," Derrida's more or less programmatic essay from 1968,
ends with a discussion whose subject is Heidegger's treatise on the
Anaximander fragment. Derrida cites a passage from this text in
which the forgetting of Being is determined as the erasing of the
difference between Being and beings, as the "forgetting of the dif
ference." But it is not simply difference that is forgotten and erased;
rather, its "early trace" is. Derrida proceeds from this specifica
tion, in order to investigate the structure of the trace in general
and thus to call attention to an exposing of positing that is inscribed
in this structure. If one can still make use of the predicative form
here, one can say that the difference between Being and beings
leaves behind a trace not only belatedly: to the extent that this dif
ference does not assume the form of presence or absence, it is itself
a trace. What Derrida calls differance describes nothing other than
the movement of such a paradoxical, because original and therefore
"early," trace:
 Alexander Garcia Duttmann
The impurity of violence creates no pure immanence. Must one
not even assume that the revolutionary violence of deposing in its
radical heterogeneity already affects the conservative violence that
preserves the "dialectical up and down," wherever this is effective
as such? Does not the law of oscillation of positings mean that every
positing must point beyond its finitude, in order to maintain itself
at all as a positing against another positing? Would not absolute
immanence or ari absolute identity paralyze every positing in ad
vance? The decisive, factually grounded, and not merely logical con
tradiction that one encounters in the course of such a critique of
violence is based on the fact that the relation between positing and
deposing is simultaneously incommensurable and differential. It
must be incommensurable in order for the purely deposing violence
to break through the bad infinity of positings, but it must also be
differential if the positing, impure violence is to reproduce itself in
bad infinity. Does this simultaneity of the incommensurable and the
differential not lead inevitably to a submission of the incommen
surable to the differential? Does the incommensurable at all permit
a simultaneity, is it not what is incommensurable in the face of every
simultaneity? Do positings not become, through simultaneity, ex
pressions of the incommensurable? The question of the newness of
the new promised by Benjamin is inseparable from this contradic
tion between the differential and the incommensurable, as is the
question of whether "a new historical age" can be grounded, which
is basically already raised with the formulation of the law of oscilla
tion: with a formulation that can itself no longer be a positing. As
the basis of all positing, as the basic law, the law of oscillation of
positings cannot be subject to itself. But it also cannot actually serve
as a basis: the knowledge of the essential instability of positing does
not refer to a preceding, absolutely indubitable and certain positing
of a basic principle or law. Such a first positing presupposes posit
ing, as Heidegger demonstrates in the context of Cartesian doubt,
which is itself in no way skeptical; it presupposes positing, regardless
of whether position "in the sense of predicative thought" is only
presupposed or not: "If something is given at all, then only . . .
positing, position, in the sense of predicative thought. Positing, the
principle, has only itself as what can be posited." 13 Thus, as a cri-
The Violence of Destruction 177
tique of the excess of all positings, the critique of violence leads in
the end to the question of whether the new, already dawning his
torical age can be grounded.
If Althusser vindicates the excess of positing for thought and
thus seems to locate its paradoxical condition of possibility in a cer
tain bad infinity, then perhaps what is called deconstruction sets out
to demonstrate, as the necessity of thought itself, the necessity of an
infinity that is no longer a bad infinity without thereby be_ing a true
infinity. One could describe deconstructive thought as a setting free
of the excessive ( Ubermassige) that from the outset unhinges every
positing, every regulated relation between individual positings and
between individual oppositions. (The uber in das Ubermassige is
also supposed to indicate what is without measure, the heteroge
neity of the excessive in regard to measure.) If it is anything at all,
then deconstruction is a radicalized, general exposing, transposing,
and deposing: as deconstruction of the privilege of synthesis and of
gathering (the two are not the same), it does not even cease before
that positing of Ge-setz that Heidegger contrasts with position "in
the sense of predicative thought": Death should "gather into the
whole of the already posited, into the positum of the entire relation,"
and as "this gathering of positing" should be "das Ge-setz." 14 "La
differance," Derrida's more or less programmatic essay from 1968,
ends with a discussion whose subject is Heidegger's treatise on the
Anaximander fragment. Derrida cites a passage from this text in
which the forgetting of Being is determined as the erasing of the
difference between Being and beings, as the "forgetting of the dif
ference." But it is not simply difference that is forgotten and erased;
rather, its "early trace" is. Derrida proceeds from this specifica
tion, in order to investigate the structure of the trace in general
and thus to call attention to an exposing of positing that is inscribed
in this structure. If one can still make use of the predicative form
here, one can say that the difference between Being and beings
leaves behind a trace not only belatedly: to the extent that this dif
ference does not assume the form of presence or absence, it is itself
a trace. What Derrida calls differance describes nothing other than
the movement of such a paradoxical, because original and therefore
"early," trace:
178 Alexander Garcia Diittmann
Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence
that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no
site-erasure belongs to its structure. And not only the erasure
which must always be able to overtake it (without which it would
not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance),
but also the erasure which constitutes it from the outset as a trace,
which situates it as the change of site, and makes it disappear in its
appearance, makes it go out of itself in its very positing. The erasure
of the early trace ( die friihe Spur) of difference is therefore the
"same" as its tracing in the text of metaphysics. 15
If one can think nothing that is present, no presence and no being
such without the trace, then the exposing of positing (sortir de soi en
sa position) that belongs essentially to the structure of the trace, to
the assumption of a general, always open context of reference, leads
to the assumption of a "textual generality." 16 Thus, as Derrida
claims in the course of his radicalization of the thought of an "early
trace," it is always worth reading the text of metaphysics, the trace
and the trace of the erasing of the trace: as a trace, it is still readable,
and at the same time endlessly defers its readability. The reading of
the trace that marks this endless deferral is an exposure and a sus
pension of positing.
Derrida himself confirms, in his lecture on Benjamin's "Cri
tique of Violence," that one sees first in decontruction a manner of
study, an attentive reading, an exact and patient analysis of texts and
their metaphysical effects: "Deconstruction is generally practiced in
two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one on to the
other. One takes on the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical
allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or
more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, me
ticulous interpretations, and genealogies." 17 Deconstruction studies
texts: here one may recall that Benjamin, in his portrayal of Kafka,
describes law that is merely studied and no longer practiced with the
image of a "gate of justice." In this image of a law that no longer
stands under the law of oscillation that it has itself created, the gen
eral determination is already made that the "gate of justice" is study
("Franz Kafka," 2.2: 437). If deconstruction, as one can gather from
Derrida's lecture on Benjamin, deconstructs the positing of law "in
The Violence ofDestruction 179
the name" of a justice that is never incorporated in such positings
and is itself what cannot be deconstructed; if, therefore, deconstruc
tion, at least in this sense, repeats a Benjaminian gesture, then it is
thoroughly possible to characterize, with Benjamin, its style or its
mode of proceeding as the interruption of myth or as the exposing
of positing. Because it perhaps lives of. the annihilating power of
justice, it does not, as a continuing study, oppose itself to something
annihilated and also does not continually reproduce the annihilated.
The site of deconstruction is not justice, but rather its gate, if one
will: this gate is not a threshold still external to justice, but rather
the difference that justice conceals in itself. This difference sepa
rates-in Benjamin's terms-the coming world or the new histori
cal era, in which justice will no longer have annihilating effects, from
the world and time of positing, in which pure deposing prevails. It
is the promise of deconstruction. There is thus a promise of decon
struction, because justice is its "own" gate and the gate does not lead
to justice.
Can one draw a lesson from the study of the "Critique of
Violence"? Derrida seems to recognize a possible lesson in the ne
cessity of a compromise between two heterogeneous and incom
mensurable orders or dimensions. It is doubtless the case that Ben
jamin exposes parliamentary democracy to the power of deposing,
precisely because the democratic compromise denies law-positing
violence, which is represented by parliaments. A purely external
resolution of the conflict is distinguished, moreover, by its compul
sory character. But Benjamin links justice to the language of names,
to the idea of a language that eliminates violence and ihus actually
must be a language of pure mediacy or pure immediacy. This link
between justice and pure language appears even more clearly in the
essay on Karl Kraus, in which Benjamin speaks of the "image of
divine justice as language" and of how destruction reveals language
as the "matrix of justice" through the purifying and rescuing, sav
ing, and punishing citation: "Justice [i.e. language], which destruc
tively halts the constructive ambiguities of law [i.e. of positions], is
also destroying" ("Karl Kraus," 2.1: 367).
Derrida, then, refers to a passage in the Moscow Diary where
Benjamin considers unavoidable a compromise between the two
178 Alexander Garcia Diittmann
Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence
that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no
site-erasure belongs to its structure. And not only the erasure
which must always be able to overtake it (without which it would
not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance),
but also the erasure which constitutes it from the outset as a trace,
which situates it as the change of site, and makes it disappear in its
appearance, makes it go out of itself in its very positing. The erasure
of the early trace ( die friihe Spur) of difference is therefore the
"same" as its tracing in the text of metaphysics. 15
If one can think nothing that is present, no presence and no being
such without the trace, then the exposing of positing (sortir de soi en
sa position) that belongs essentially to the structure of the trace, to
the assumption of a general, always open context of reference, leads
to the assumption of a "textual generality." 16 Thus, as Derrida
claims in the course of his radicalization of the thought of an "early
trace," it is always worth reading the text of metaphysics, the trace
and the trace of the erasing of the trace: as a trace, it is still readable,
and at the same time endlessly defers its readability. The reading of
the trace that marks this endless deferral is an exposure and a sus
pension of positing.
Derrida himself confirms, in his lecture on Benjamin's "Cri
tique of Violence," that one sees first in decontruction a manner of
study, an attentive reading, an exact and patient analysis of texts and
their metaphysical effects: "Deconstruction is generally practiced in
two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one on to the
other. One takes on the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical
allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or
more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, me
ticulous interpretations, and genealogies." 17 Deconstruction studies
texts: here one may recall that Benjamin, in his portrayal of Kafka,
describes law that is merely studied and no longer practiced with the
image of a "gate of justice." In this image of a law that no longer
stands under the law of oscillation that it has itself created, the gen
eral determination is already made that the "gate of justice" is study
("Franz Kafka," 2.2: 437). If deconstruction, as one can gather from
Derrida's lecture on Benjamin, deconstructs the positing of law "in
The Violence ofDestruction 179
the name" of a justice that is never incorporated in such positings
and is itself what cannot be deconstructed; if, therefore, deconstruc
tion, at least in this sense, repeats a Benjaminian gesture, then it is
thoroughly possible to characterize, with Benjamin, its style or its
mode of proceeding as the interruption of myth or as the exposing
of positing. Because it perhaps lives of. the annihilating power of
justice, it does not, as a continuing study, oppose itself to something
annihilated and also does not continually reproduce the annihilated.
The site of deconstruction is not justice, but rather its gate, if one
will: this gate is not a threshold still external to justice, but rather
the difference that justice conceals in itself. This difference sepa
rates-in Benjamin's terms-the coming world or the new histori
cal era, in which justice will no longer have annihilating effects, from
the world and time of positing, in which pure deposing prevails. It
is the promise of deconstruction. There is thus a promise of decon
struction, because justice is its "own" gate and the gate does not lead
to justice.
Can one draw a lesson from the study of the "Critique of
Violence"? Derrida seems to recognize a possible lesson in the ne
cessity of a compromise between two heterogeneous and incom
mensurable orders or dimensions. It is doubtless the case that Ben
jamin exposes parliamentary democracy to the power of deposing,
precisely because the democratic compromise denies law-positing
violence, which is represented by parliaments. A purely external
resolution of the conflict is distinguished, moreover, by its compul
sory character. But Benjamin links justice to the language of names,
to the idea of a language that eliminates violence and ihus actually
must be a language of pure mediacy or pure immediacy. This link
between justice and pure language appears even more clearly in the
essay on Karl Kraus, in which Benjamin speaks of the "image of
divine justice as language" and of how destruction reveals language
as the "matrix of justice" through the purifying and rescuing, sav
ing, and punishing citation: "Justice [i.e. language], which destruc
tively halts the constructive ambiguities of law [i.e. of positions], is
also destroying" ("Karl Kraus," 2.1: 367).
Derrida, then, refers to a passage in the Moscow Diary where
Benjamin considers unavoidable a compromise between the two
180 Alexander Garcia Dilttmann
poles of "all linguistic essence," between expression and communi
cation. Expression does not destroy communication without a re
mainder. From such an expanded viewpoint, Derrida formulates
the lesson that he draws from the "Critique of Violence." It seems
as if with this renewed introduction of compromise (not between
equal representatives of the parliamentary system, but rather be
tween two entirely unequal orders, whose relation first opens the
space of the political), he would implicitly raise the objection to
Benjamin that Adorno expressed in a note to an unwritten essay.
Adorno underlines the moment of arbitrariness and immediacy in
Benjamin's positions and thought. (It should be added that Adorno,
with this objection, does not endeavor to absolutize the process
of the mediation of thought. Negative Dialectics, which deals with
a survival of philosophy after its neglected realization, and which
abandons philosophical thought to a bad infinity, since praxis at this
stage should be "adjourned to an unforeseeable time," is directed
against the transformation of infinity into something finite and
turns the argument of bad infinity against the attempt to raise phi
losophy above it: philosophy, which purports to "possess its object
as infinite," remains caught in a "finitude" that "blusters about in
finity and does not heed it.") 18 What compromise does the critique
of violence teach, if one reads it in the light of the entry in the Mos
cow Diary?
It is perhaps one of the lessons that we could draw here: the fatal
nature of the compromise between heterogeneous orders, which is a
compromise, moreover, in the name of the justice that would com
mand one to obey at the same time the law of representations (Auf
kliirung, reason, objectification, comparison, explication, the taking
into account of multiplicity, and therefore the serialization of the
unique) and the law that transcends representation and withholds
the unique, all uniqueness, from its reinscription in an order of
generality or of comparison. 19
The question arises whether deconstruction, which draws such a
lesson, does not in spite of everything take on the form of an un
happy consciousness that can never advance to a result. Is it, in the
end, the thought of a bad infinity that, split and torn by an uninter
rupted movement of positing and deposing, can never rest? 20 Is it a
The Violence of Destruction 181
thought that pursues deposing all the more, the less that the latter
succeeds in finally breaking through the circle of alternating ex
posing and imposing? Does deconstruction, which devotes itself to
study and lingers at the gate of justice, posit the bad infinity of pos
itings? But what value does such a first and likewise final positing
have, which is due to a perpetuated deposing?
A careful tracing of the emergence of deconstructive thought
would have to proceed from Derrida's early analyses of the phe
nomenological concept of genesis; these analyses lead to the outline
of a dialectic that seems in no way to sublate finitude and thus con
stitutes itself as endless dialectic: "The dialectic is endless," Derrida
writes in his first large work on Husserl, "because the constituting
subjectivity is synthetically one with time, and thus because exis
tence is a finitude 'for itself' (une finitude 'pour soi')." 21 From a
speculative perspective, is this unending dialectic of "the absolute
consciousness of an essential finitude," which is supposed to point
a way out of the alternative between the aporetic priority of a sub
jectivity that founds meaning and the no less aporetic priority of an
already constitutive time for all foundings of meaning-is this the
dialectic of a bad infinity? Derrida reproaches Husserl for a hyp os
tasis of bad infinity in a note to the extensive and significant intro
duction to his translation of The Origin of Geometry. Certainly it is
a matter here of a strategic argument that already proclaims the dif
ference between the emerging deconstruction and a thought caught
in bad infinity:
This hidden history will take its sense from an infinite telos that
Husserl will not hesitate to call God in his last unpublished writ
ings. It is true that this infinite, which is always already at work in
the origins, is not a positive and actual infinite. It is given as an Idea
in the Kantian sense, as a regulative "indefinite" whose negativity
does not affect the right of history. Not only the morality but also
the historicity of truth itself is preserved by this "falsification" of the
actual infinite into an indefinite or an ad infinitum, a falsification of
which Hegel accused Kant and Fichte. 22
In a well-known section of the title essay in Speech and Phenomena,
Derrida repeats this strategic argument in order to emphasize ex
pressly its strategic value and to distinguish the movement of the
180 Alexander Garcia Dilttmann
poles of "all linguistic essence," between expression and communi
cation. Expression does not destroy communication without a re
mainder. From such an expanded viewpoint, Derrida formulates
the lesson that he draws from the "Critique of Violence." It seems
as if with this renewed introduction of compromise (not between
equal representatives of the parliamentary system, but rather be
tween two entirely unequal orders, whose relation first opens the
space of the political), he would implicitly raise the objection to
Benjamin that Adorno expressed in a note to an unwritten essay.
Adorno underlines the moment of arbitrariness and immediacy in
Benjamin's positions and thought. (It should be added that Adorno,
with this objection, does not endeavor to absolutize the process
of the mediation of thought. Negative Dialectics, which deals with
a survival of philosophy after its neglected realization, and which
abandons philosophical thought to a bad infinity, since praxis at this
stage should be "adjourned to an unforeseeable time," is directed
against the transformation of infinity into something finite and
turns the argument of bad infinity against the attempt to raise phi
losophy above it: philosophy, which purports to "possess its object
as infinite," remains caught in a "finitude" that "blusters about in
finity and does not heed it.") 18 What compromise does the critique
of violence teach, if one reads it in the light of the entry in the Mos
cow Diary?
It is perhaps one of the lessons that we could draw here: the fatal
nature of the compromise between heterogeneous orders, which is a
compromise, moreover, in the name of the justice that would com
mand one to obey at the same time the law of representations (Auf
kliirung, reason, objectification, comparison, explication, the taking
into account of multiplicity, and therefore the serialization of the
unique) and the law that transcends representation and withholds
the unique, all uniqueness, from its reinscription in an order of
generality or of comparison. 19
The question arises whether deconstruction, which draws such a
lesson, does not in spite of everything take on the form of an un
happy consciousness that can never advance to a result. Is it, in the
end, the thought of a bad infinity that, split and torn by an uninter
rupted movement of positing and deposing, can never rest? 20 Is it a
The Violence of Destruction 181
thought that pursues deposing all the more, the less that the latter
succeeds in finally breaking through the circle of alternating ex
posing and imposing? Does deconstruction, which devotes itself to
study and lingers at the gate of justice, posit the bad infinity of pos
itings? But what value does such a first and likewise final positing
have, which is due to a perpetuated deposing?
A careful tracing of the emergence of deconstructive thought
would have to proceed from Derrida's early analyses of the phe
nomenological concept of genesis; these analyses lead to the outline
of a dialectic that seems in no way to sublate finitude and thus con
stitutes itself as endless dialectic: "The dialectic is endless," Derrida
writes in his first large work on Husserl, "because the constituting
subjectivity is synthetically one with time, and thus because exis
tence is a finitude 'for itself' (une finitude 'pour soi')." 21 From a
speculative perspective, is this unending dialectic of "the absolute
consciousness of an essential finitude," which is supposed to point
a way out of the alternative between the aporetic priority of a sub
jectivity that founds meaning and the no less aporetic priority of an
already constitutive time for all foundings of meaning-is this the
dialectic of a bad infinity? Derrida reproaches Husserl for a hyp os
tasis of bad infinity in a note to the extensive and significant intro
duction to his translation of The Origin of Geometry. Certainly it is
a matter here of a strategic argument that already proclaims the dif
ference between the emerging deconstruction and a thought caught
in bad infinity:
This hidden history will take its sense from an infinite telos that
Husserl will not hesitate to call God in his last unpublished writ
ings. It is true that this infinite, which is always already at work in
the origins, is not a positive and actual infinite. It is given as an Idea
in the Kantian sense, as a regulative "indefinite" whose negativity
does not affect the right of history. Not only the morality but also
the historicity of truth itself is preserved by this "falsification" of the
actual infinite into an indefinite or an ad infinitum, a falsification of
which Hegel accused Kant and Fichte. 22
In a well-known section of the title essay in Speech and Phenomena,
Derrida repeats this strategic argument in order to emphasize ex
pressly its strategic value and to distinguish the movement of the
182 Alexander Garda Duttmann
trace or of differance not only from the opposition of finite and in
finite, but also from its dialectical sublation in a truth of the finite
or in a positive infinity.23
The whole phenomenological discourse is ...caught up within the
schema of a metaphysics of presence which relentlessly exhausts
itself in trying to make difference derivative.Within this schema
Hegelianism seems to be more radical, especially at the point where
it makes clear that the positive infinite must be thought through
(which is possible only if it thinks itself) in order that the indefi
niteness of differance appears as such. Hegel's critique of Kant would
no doubt also hold against Husserl.But this appearing of the Ideal
as an infinite differance can only be produced within a relationship
with death in general.Only a relation to my-death could make the
infinite differing of presence appear.By the same token, compared
to the ideality of the positive infinite, this relation to my-death be
comes an accident of empirical finitude.The appearing of the infi
nite differance is itself finite.Consequently, differance, which does
not occur outside this relation, becomes the finitude of life as an
essential relation with oneself and one's death. The infinite diffe
rance is finite. It can therefore no longer be conceived within the
opposition of finiteness and infinity, absence and presence, negation
and affirmation.24
The thought of differance thus appears as the attempt to think fini
tude beyond the opposition of bad and positive infinity, which is
also why the unavoidable and yet impossible originary compromise,
which produces no balance between the finitude of positing and the
infinity of deposing, marks a politics of differance that constantly
proves itself excessive in the face of its equation with a bad infinity
and that justifies compromise, negotiation, and strategy ("the gen
eral strategy of deconstruction") solely on the basis of its irreducible
dependence on an excess.25 But this excess is not simply that of a
finite positing that is opposed to an infinite deposing; rather, it is
the excess that makes it impossible to oppose infinite deposing and
finite positing, even if for the purpose of a sublation of this opposi
tion. (Here is the decisive move by which the thought of differance
turns against the radicality of speculative idealism.) Perhaps one
could link the politics of differance to an ontologically or quasi
ontologically construed idea of a perpetual, permanent revolution
The Violence ofDestruction
(the perpetuation would probably also consist in no longer being
able to resist "messianic nationalism" and the complementary
"bureaucratic-abstract internationalism" in the name of a true
Marxist internationalism, as Trotsky did).
If political reaction in the United States reproaches deconstruc
tion for neglecting to deconstruct itself,26 then this objection shows
clearly that deconstruction is not understood as a thought, but
rather as a mode of more or less effective and efficacious procedure.
Is such an understanding, which is often based on willful ignorance,
in the end not already implied in the announcement with which
Derrida expressly identifies his lecture on Benjamin as an exercise
in deconstructive thought? What happens to a thought if it becomes
the object of a reflection that displays how one can interpret a text
or a work of art in the sense of this thought? For example, does not
the paradoxical limit of a theory of literature consist in the fact that
it must always remain without an object, regardless of how it thinks
its relation to the object and its own status as theory? That decon
struction cannot be deconstructed can be explained by neither a
dogmatic, obscurantist ban on critique or thought nor by the ruses
and cunning of those whose names one associates with this thought.
Deconstruction does not exempt itself from deconstruction: it is,
"as such,"so to speak, the nondeconstructible "itself."The possibil
ity of speaking of a deconstruction implies (before all possible cri
tique ), that everything can be deconstructed, even the situation in
which the word "deconstruction"is being used-everything can be
deconstructed, except deconstruction.
Deconstruction occurs, it has always already occurred, because
it is the nondeconstructible: if it could be deconstructed "in its
turn,"there would be no deconstruction.The nondeconstructible
is the immemorial event of deconstruction or deconstruction is an
immemorial event.In his lecture on Benjamin, Derrida names this
event "justice": "Deconstruction is justice," but "justice ...is not
deconstructible"("la justice ..n'est pas deconstructible").27 To the
extent that positing does not oppose itself to deposing, but rather
has its condition of possibility in the impossibility of thinking a pure
deposing-just as presence is produced by the trace-one could
perhaps say that deconstruction as the nondeconstructible is the ex-
182 Alexander Garda Duttmann
trace or of differance not only from the opposition of finite and in
finite, but also from its dialectical sublation in a truth of the finite
or in a positive infinity.23
The whole phenomenological discourse is ...caught up within the
schema of a metaphysics of presence which relentlessly exhausts
itself in trying to make difference derivative.Within this schema
Hegelianism seems to be more radical, especially at the point where
it makes clear that the positive infinite must be thought through
(which is possible only if it thinks itself) in order that the indefi
niteness of differance appears as such. Hegel's critique of Kant would
no doubt also hold against Husserl.But this appearing of the Ideal
as an infinite differance can only be produced within a relationship
with death in general.Only a relation to my-death could make the
infinite differing of presence appear.By the same token, compared
to the ideality of the positive infinite, this relation to my-death be
comes an accident of empirical finitude.The appearing of the infi
nite differance is itself finite.Consequently, differance, which does
not occur outside this relation, becomes the finitude of life as an
essential relation with oneself and one's death. The infinite diffe
rance is finite. It can therefore no longer be conceived within the
opposition of finiteness and infinity, absence and presence, negation
and affirmation.24
The thought of differance thus appears as the attempt to think fini
tude beyond the opposition of bad and positive infinity, which is
also why the unavoidable and yet impossible originary compromise,
which produces no balance between the finitude of positing and the
infinity of deposing, marks a politics of differance that constantly
proves itself excessive in the face of its equation with a bad infinity
and that justifies compromise, negotiation, and strategy ("the gen
eral strategy of deconstruction") solely on the basis of its irreducible
dependence on an excess.25 But this excess is not simply that of a
finite positing that is opposed to an infinite deposing; rather, it is
the excess that makes it impossible to oppose infinite deposing and
finite positing, even if for the purpose of a sublation of this opposi
tion. (Here is the decisive move by which the thought of differance
turns against the radicality of speculative idealism.) Perhaps one
could link the politics of differance to an ontologically or quasi
ontologically construed idea of a perpetual, permanent revolution
The Violence ofDestruction
(the perpetuation would probably also consist in no longer being
able to resist "messianic nationalism" and the complementary
"bureaucratic-abstract internationalism" in the name of a true
Marxist internationalism, as Trotsky did).
If political reaction in the United States reproaches deconstruc
tion for neglecting to deconstruct itself,26 then this objection shows
clearly that deconstruction is not understood as a thought, but
rather as a mode of more or less effective and efficacious procedure.
Is such an understanding, which is often based on willful ignorance,
in the end not already implied in the announcement with which
Derrida expressly identifies his lecture on Benjamin as an exercise
in deconstructive thought? What happens to a thought if it becomes
the object of a reflection that displays how one can interpret a text
or a work of art in the sense of this thought? For example, does not
the paradoxical limit of a theory of literature consist in the fact that
it must always remain without an object, regardless of how it thinks
its relation to the object and its own status as theory? That decon
struction cannot be deconstructed can be explained by neither a
dogmatic, obscurantist ban on critique or thought nor by the ruses
and cunning of those whose names one associates with this thought.
Deconstruction does not exempt itself from deconstruction: it is,
"as such,"so to speak, the nondeconstructible "itself."The possibil
ity of speaking of a deconstruction implies (before all possible cri
tique ), that everything can be deconstructed, even the situation in
which the word "deconstruction"is being used-everything can be
deconstructed, except deconstruction.
Deconstruction occurs, it has always already occurred, because
it is the nondeconstructible: if it could be deconstructed "in its
turn,"there would be no deconstruction.The nondeconstructible
is the immemorial event of deconstruction or deconstruction is an
immemorial event.In his lecture on Benjamin, Derrida names this
event "justice": "Deconstruction is justice," but "justice ...is not
deconstructible"("la justice ..n'est pas deconstructible").27 To the
extent that positing does not oppose itself to deposing, but rather
has its condition of possibility in the impossibility of thinking a pure
deposing-just as presence is produced by the trace-one could
perhaps say that deconstruction as the nondeconstructible is the ex-
 T

Alexander Garcia Duttmann

cess that produces the movement of differance, the movement that Tom McCall
at the same time makes positing possible and thwarts it. Is there not
a certain analogy between the thought of a nondeconstructible de
construction and that of a deposing, of a destructive violence, whose
dominance in a coming world or in a new historical era will no
longer be annihilation?
Derrida asserts at the end of his lecture (or more precisely, in a
section added later) that he has been guided by the difference be Momentary Violence
tween deconstruction and the destructions of the thought of Being
and the critique of violence. But this difference consists likewise in
the fact that both Benjamin and Heidegger seem to pursue the vio
lence of destruction even further: while the late Heidegger attempts
to think a "retreat into the event" that signifies the end of the history
of Being (but not a transition to positive infinity), and Benjamin in
his critique of violence would like to think the pure deposing of
finite positing (and consequently a certain end of history) in con
junction with the dawning of a new historical era (the concept of a
"'philosophy' of history" and the quotation marks Benjamin uses
["Kritik" 2.1: 182, 202] deserve particular attention here), decon
struction is a thought that may provoke the suspicion of "bad
infinity." Why? Because while it marks deconstruction "itself " as
the nondeconstructible, the interruption of deconstruction 28 is still By way of introduction, consider the following preliminary ac
thought in the first instance as an enabling, even where the affir counts of three terms, interlinked in this essay: myth, law, critique.
mative, positive character of deconstructive strategies is empha Myth. Myths are absolute and comprehensive representations
sized. Perhaps the task of a deconstructive thought is thus deter that exhibit what may be called a "violence of mythic subsump
mined by the urgency of thinking its "own" interruption (an inter tion," the capability to generate fictive totalities from diverse the
ruption implicated in the consistency of deconstruction) without matic elements. This "mythical violence" pertains to the forceful
thereby falling back into a philosophy of history. articulations of mythical na:r:ratives, which, in seeming to coincide
Translated by Michael Shae
with the real, may come to be taken for it. Mythical speech acts,
such as the oracle, the voodoo spell, the charm, the curse, or the
prayer, serve as instances of mythical violence, a verbal force, hard
or impossible to resist, that sutures experience seamlessly. If you
stand within the verbal spell, it will get you; if you pray within the
verbal aegis, there will be an answer (and even no answer is still
an answer). Indeed, the common mythological motifs of prayer,
curse, and oracle are paradigms for the mythical force of words
and exemplify any discourse that has the authority of myth to pro-
234 Notes to Pages 133-48
In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter into me where I am, who only shows it.
You in turning toward me, you could find only
On the wall of my glance your dressed shadow.
I am unhappy like the mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them, my eye is empty, and like them used
To your absence that makes blindness.
19. Paul Valery, Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2: 1284.
20. According to the new arrangement, based on a recently found manu
script. See the editorial notes in Gesammelte Schriften, 7.2: 661-65.
21. In a letter of June 5, 1917 to Georg Groddeck, Freud comments on a
mysterious remark in his essay "The Unconscious": "In my essay on the
Ucs . . . you will find an inconspicuous note: 'We save the mentioning of
another significant privilige of the unconscious for another context.' I will
disclose to you what was kept back there: the assertion that the unconscious
act has an intensive formative effect [eine intensive plastische Einwirkung]
on somatic events." Sigmund Freud, Briefe, 1873-1939 (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1980), 332.
/ Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 9: 36-37, 251.
Frey, "On Presentation"
1. Parenthetical references will first refer to the German edition of Ben
jamin's writings, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989);
where appropriate, a second reference indicates an English translation of
Benjamin's work. Translations of Benjamin are modified from the following
sources: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973); "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933),
trans. Knut Tranowski, New German Critique 17 (spring 1979): 65-69; The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso,
1977); Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter
Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978); "The Task
of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken, 1969), 69-82.
2. See Werner Hamacher,- "The Word Wolke-If It Is One," in Benja
min's Ground, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1988), 147-75; and Thomas Schestag, "Asphalt," MLN 106, no. 3 (1991),
589-621.
3. "The Task of the Translator" was written in 1923, between the 1919 note
Notes to Pages 154-70 235
Garcia Duttmann, "The Violence of Destruction"
NOTE: This text originated as a lecture, which I first gave at the North
Rhine-Westphalian Culture Institute in Essen (July 1991).
1. Louis Althusser, "Soutenance d'Amiens," in Positions (Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1976), 146ff. All translations are by Michael Shae unless otherwise
designated.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 2 in
3. Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad
and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 36-37.
4. See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), 167.
5. Hegel, Enzyklopadie 1, in Werke, 8: 199, 94.
6. Ibid., supplement.
7. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, 5: 264.
8. Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritikder Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989), 2.1: 190. All subsequent references to Benja
min's writings will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the
text; parenthetical references to this edition will give volume, part, and page
numbers. Further references to "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" given in the text
will use the short title "Kritik.''
9. Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike," Cardozo Law Review 13, no.
4 (December 1991): 1139-40..
10. An investigation of the-discrete?-use of the concept of infinity in
Benjamin would have to consider the important fragment "The Infinite
Task" and the critique of the "ambiguity" of this neo-Kantian formula. The
meaning of "infinite task" in Benjamin can perhaps be understood in this
way: a task is more than the (infinite) search for infinitely many (finite)
 Notes to Pages 174-80
solutions only if it is not given and cannot be given.Consequently,only the
task that is related to "solubility in general " is infinite in the paradoxical
sense of such a "more " -of such a suspension of the task.As infinite task,
science in its unity and before any material determination does not corre
spond to this or that solution-or positing. Benjamin notes: "Science is
neither solution nor does it consist of tasks: thus "infinite task." ("Frag
mente," 6: 52.) Since the "infinite task " does not inaugurate the bad infin
ity of its uninterrupted renewal "through solutions " -but rather means
"solubility in general," one can no longer designate its infinity as "bad." It
is striking that Benjamin is not interested in solutions,but in solubility,not
in communications, but in communicability, not in reproductions, but in
reproducibility.It is as if he wishes to counter bad infinity with the thought
of an actualization of possibility as such, and thus attempts to get beyond
the opposition of possibility and act without which there is no bad infinity.
See also Alex Garcia Dilttmann, "Tradition and Destruction: Benjamin's
Politics of Language," trans.Debra Keates,in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy,
ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Rout
ledge,1994 ),32-59.
n.This genitive expresses the extreme ambiguity of a critique of violence
that seems to proceed in the simultaneity of the incommensurable and the
differential. (See also the following arguments.)
12.Hegel,Enzyklopiidie 1,in Werke, 8: 200.
13.Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tubingen: Max Nie
meyer,1975 ), So.
14.Martin Heidegger,"WozuDichter?" in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Kloster
mann,1980 ),300.
15.Jacques Derrida, "La differance," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris:
Minuit,1972 ),25.The translation is from Margins ofPhilosophy, trans.Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1982 ),24.
16.Jacques Derrida,"Hors livre," in La dissemination (Paris: Seuil,1972 ),
27.
17.Jacques Derrida,"Force de loi," Cardozo Law Review 12.2 (July-Au
gust 1990 ): 958.
18.Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr
kamp, 1975 ), 25. Already in his first Habilitationsschrift, "Der Begriff des
UnbewuBten in der Transzendentalen Seelenlehre," whose critical points
of departure were the doctrine of paralogism and psychoanalysis and which
sought to give a formulation of the unconscious in terms of the philosophy
of conscious-ness, Adorno repeatedly criticized the positivization of the in
finite,which hypostatized a limit concept at the cost of becoming entangled
Notes to Page 180 237
in the antinomies of reason. The following passages may be cited: "But
to make any statement (about experience as such )-and the statement of
its transcendence is already a positive statement, and the theses derived
from that statement are highly determined material claims-is impossible.
Even the claim of an infinite progression of our experience is,strictly speak
ing, not allowed; we know only that experience can be continued beyond
every positively specifiable limit. ... Its infinity as transcendence and fini
tude as immanence can be asserted only under the presupposition of a
complete givenness of the positively infinite conditions of the possibility of
experience ....But to speak positively of a general psychic determinism ...
means making that presupposition of a fully given infinity and thus already
succumbs to the Kantian critique of the antinomies." Theodor Adorno,
Philosophische Fruhschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1973 ),143,153,
299. Peter von Haselberg has recently drawn attention to Adorno's early
seminar on Kracauer's Detektivroman (1925 ); it is also well known that
Adorno made his first intensive study of the Critique of Pure Reason to
gether wh his older friend, who dedicated his "philosophical treatise " to
him. If one reads a passage from that treatise in conjunction with the
radically-critical argument about infinity that one encounters in Ador
no's first Habilitationsschrift, one finds the philosophy of the antisystem in
nuce. The critical argument seems to be suggested already in Kracauer:
"Like the legal,the system asserts itself outside of relation,and its construc
tions, which intend to capture totality, proceed as legal arbitrary actions
do,from initial positings, or even experiences, without dealing with reality
any further. If it happened, the whole would result only from the tension
toward it, and the series of insights would be, as a cognitive process, dis
continuous,since it would possess continuity solely as the coherence of the
totality of human experiences." Siegfried Kracauer, Schriften, 8 vols.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1971-), 1: 155.
19. Derrida,postscript to "Force de loi," 1044.
20.Rodolphe Gasche has investigated in detail the relationship of decon
struction to "bad infinity." He leaves no doubt that this is a decisive (philo
sophical ) question: "The verdict of philosophy upon spurious infinity is
firm and definite: the concept of spurious infinity remains indebted to or
dinary thought-it does not raise itself one inch above the empirical. It
does not live up to the most fundamental requirements of thought as com
pletion, unity, totality. The question, then, seems obvious: Does Derrida's
philosophy,with its continuous emphasis on the infinite, the endless sub
stitutability of play, the text's infinite reference, the infinite task of inter
pretation, not fall prey to Hegel's, and eo ipso, philosophy-in-general's
 Notes to Pages 174-80
solutions only if it is not given and cannot be given.Consequently,only the
task that is related to "solubility in general " is infinite in the paradoxical
sense of such a "more " -of such a suspension of the task.As infinite task,
science in its unity and before any material determination does not corre
spond to this or that solution-or positing. Benjamin notes: "Science is
neither solution nor does it consist of tasks: thus "infinite task." ("Frag
mente," 6: 52.) Since the "infinite task " does not inaugurate the bad infin
ity of its uninterrupted renewal "through solutions " -but rather means
"solubility in general," one can no longer designate its infinity as "bad." It
is striking that Benjamin is not interested in solutions,but in solubility,not
in communications, but in communicability, not in reproductions, but in
reproducibility.It is as if he wishes to counter bad infinity with the thought
of an actualization of possibility as such, and thus attempts to get beyond
the opposition of possibility and act without which there is no bad infinity.
See also Alex Garcia Dilttmann, "Tradition and Destruction: Benjamin's
Politics of Language," trans.Debra Keates,in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy,
ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Rout
ledge,1994 ),32-59.
n.This genitive expresses the extreme ambiguity of a critique of violence
that seems to proceed in the simultaneity of the incommensurable and the
differential. (See also the following arguments.)
12.Hegel,Enzyklopiidie 1,in Werke, 8: 200.
13.Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tubingen: Max Nie
meyer,1975 ), So.
14.Martin Heidegger,"WozuDichter?" in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Kloster
mann,1980 ),300.
15.Jacques Derrida, "La differance," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris:
Minuit,1972 ),25.The translation is from Margins ofPhilosophy, trans.Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1982 ),24.
16.Jacques Derrida,"Hors livre," in La dissemination (Paris: Seuil,1972 ),
27.
17.Jacques Derrida,"Force de loi," Cardozo Law Review 12.2 (July-Au
gust 1990 ): 958.
18.Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr
kamp, 1975 ), 25. Already in his first Habilitationsschrift, "Der Begriff des
UnbewuBten in der Transzendentalen Seelenlehre," whose critical points
of departure were the doctrine of paralogism and psychoanalysis and which
sought to give a formulation of the unconscious in terms of the philosophy
of conscious-ness, Adorno repeatedly criticized the positivization of the in
finite,which hypostatized a limit concept at the cost of becoming entangled
Notes to Page 180 237
in the antinomies of reason. The following passages may be cited: "But
to make any statement (about experience as such )-and the statement of
its transcendence is already a positive statement, and the theses derived
from that statement are highly determined material claims-is impossible.
Even the claim of an infinite progression of our experience is,strictly speak
ing, not allowed; we know only that experience can be continued beyond
every positively specifiable limit. ... Its infinity as transcendence and fini
tude as immanence can be asserted only under the presupposition of a
complete givenness of the positively infinite conditions of the possibility of
experience ....But to speak positively of a general psychic determinism ...
means making that presupposition of a fully given infinity and thus already
succumbs to the Kantian critique of the antinomies." Theodor Adorno,
Philosophische Fruhschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1973 ),143,153,
299. Peter von Haselberg has recently drawn attention to Adorno's early
seminar on Kracauer's Detektivroman (1925 ); it is also well known that
Adorno made his first intensive study of the Critique of Pure Reason to
gether wh his older friend, who dedicated his "philosophical treatise " to
him. If one reads a passage from that treatise in conjunction with the
radically-critical argument about infinity that one encounters in Ador
no's first Habilitationsschrift, one finds the philosophy of the antisystem in
nuce. The critical argument seems to be suggested already in Kracauer:
"Like the legal,the system asserts itself outside of relation,and its construc
tions, which intend to capture totality, proceed as legal arbitrary actions
do,from initial positings, or even experiences, without dealing with reality
any further. If it happened, the whole would result only from the tension
toward it, and the series of insights would be, as a cognitive process, dis
continuous,since it would possess continuity solely as the coherence of the
totality of human experiences." Siegfried Kracauer, Schriften, 8 vols.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1971-), 1: 155.
19. Derrida,postscript to "Force de loi," 1044.
20.Rodolphe Gasche has investigated in detail the relationship of decon
struction to "bad infinity." He leaves no doubt that this is a decisive (philo
sophical ) question: "The verdict of philosophy upon spurious infinity is
firm and definite: the concept of spurious infinity remains indebted to or
dinary thought-it does not raise itself one inch above the empirical. It
does not live up to the most fundamental requirements of thought as com
pletion, unity, totality. The question, then, seems obvious: Does Derrida's
philosophy,with its continuous emphasis on the infinite, the endless sub
stitutability of play, the text's infinite reference, the infinite task of inter
pretation, not fall prey to Hegel's, and eo ipso, philosophy-in-general's
 Notes to Pages 181-82
condemnation of spurious infinity?" Rodolphe Gasche, "Nontotalization
Without Spuriousness: Hegel and Derrida on the Infinite," Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 17, no.3 (October 1986): 295.Gasche also
refers to an essay by Manfred Baum on the prehistory of Hegel's concept of
infinity; in a section of this essay dealing with Hegel's early theological writ
ings, it becomes clear how the question of the difference between a bad and
another (true) infinity can be connected to the question of freedom: "In
this context, Hegel makes the distinction between 'true infinity' and that
infinity 'proper' to reason, which deceives reason when it reaches it....
Thus, for the determination of the content of true infinity, only this re
mains: that it is the (nonreflected) 'completion' of the limited, which is not
limited again like the 'proper' infinity of reason itself whose possibility re
quires in its turn something limiting (a negatio for its determinatio).It is
this superrational 'completion' that contains all limitation in itself, even
that of the finite by the infinite that is a mere deception of a reason con
stantly advancing to new limitations.It thus does not itself require another
limitation in order to be the unique determination that it is. Its deter
mination is a consequence of self-determination, of freedom." Manfred
Baum, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Hegelschen Unendlichkeitsbegriff," in Hegel
Studien (Bonn 1976), n: 107-8.
21. Jacques Derrida, Le probleme de la genese dans la philosophic de Hus
serl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 172.
22.Derrida, "Introduction," L'origine de la geometric de Husserl (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 29.
23.Derrida, moreover, confirms this argumentation in a lecture on the
relation of deconstruction to negative theology: he alludes again to this
section and characterizes the structure of the trace in general as the pos
sibility of an experience of finitude.
24.Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phenomene (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1967), 114.The translation is from Speech and Phenomena: And
Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans.David B.Allison (Evanston,
Ill.: Nortliwestern University Press, 1973), 101-2. In a work on Derrida,
Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of the infinity that is inherent in finitude: "Perhaps
one must say that per definitionem there is nothing beyond being, nothing
beyond its folding, and in this consists an absolute limit.But an absolute
limit is a limit without an outside, without a foreign, neighboring land, an
edge without an outer side.It is thus no longer a limit, or rather: it is a limit
to/of nothing [limite de rien]. Such a limit is an unlimited extension, an
extension from nothing to nothing, if then being itself is nothing. It con
stitutes the infinite proper to finitude." Jean-Luc Nancy, "Sens elliptique,"
Notes to Pages 182-83 239
in Une pensee finie (Paris: Galilee, 1991), 283.On the question of radically
finite thought, see Alex Garcia Diittmann, "Transcendences, Imma
nences," in Paragraph, June 1993 (Edinburgh University Press).
25.Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 56. Here, perhaps,
between discourse theory's grounding of morality and the deconstructive
approach to justice and law, certain parallels appear that are connected to
a Kantian tendency of deconstruction and discourse ethics (even if Derrida
would not like to have justice understood as a-regulative-idea, and even
if Habermas attempts to abandon the "metaphysics of the doctrine of tlie
two realms").Is tlie mediation of "idealizing de-limitation" and concrete
situations not the horizon in which the impossible "compromise" between
law and justice takes shape, if justice is understood as radically unlimited,
not in the sense that Habermas himself lends to the concept when he dis
tinguishes it from solidarity? See Jurgen Habermas, Erliiuterungen zur Dis
kursethik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 156. Certainly: precisely
because he thinks within tlie horizon of a regulative idea, Habermas en
deavors throughout to restrict as far as possible a "decisionism" that he
surmises in Derrida, specifically, wherever the latter demonstrates the ur
gency of a decision about which knowledge would have to be confused
(never mind whetlier or not one can speak here of "decisionism" at all; is
tliere a decisionism without a subject of the decision?).But it is not just
tliat the moment of confusion and madness is found in tlie finitude by
which, as Habermas himself concedes, every action is distinguished.One
must also wonder whether idea and horizon (the "idealizing de-limita
tion'' ) are not affected by the condition that one sometimes-and not only
"for the time being"-cannot validate any better argument: "It could turn
out that descriptions of the problem ...are always indissolubly interwoven
with individual self-descriptions of persons and groups, thus with their
identities and life projects, viz., life forms" (ibid., 166).If contextuality can
not be stripped away, then discourse ethics can no longer take a position in
general on the problem of how the "desecularization of norms that is the
unavoidable step for achieving a grounding can be undone" (ibid., 25).In
oilier words: the "impotence of the ought"-bad infinity-reproduces it
self again here: the more one ought, the less one can.The problem of dis
course ethics thus consists of fundamentally demonstrating the possibility
of a btter argument.Eitlier tliere is always a better argument, but then
communication is nothing other than the setting aside of its own sem
blance, or there isn't always such an argument, but then the scheme of
achieving a grounding is endangered in its essence.
26."In fact deconstructionists treat some works witli uncharacteristic re-
 Notes to Pages 181-82
condemnation of spurious infinity?" Rodolphe Gasche, "Nontotalization
Without Spuriousness: Hegel and Derrida on the Infinite," Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 17, no.3 (October 1986): 295.Gasche also
refers to an essay by Manfred Baum on the prehistory of Hegel's concept of
infinity; in a section of this essay dealing with Hegel's early theological writ
ings, it becomes clear how the question of the difference between a bad and
another (true) infinity can be connected to the question of freedom: "In
this context, Hegel makes the distinction between 'true infinity' and that
infinity 'proper' to reason, which deceives reason when it reaches it....
Thus, for the determination of the content of true infinity, only this re
mains: that it is the (nonreflected) 'completion' of the limited, which is not
limited again like the 'proper' infinity of reason itself whose possibility re
quires in its turn something limiting (a negatio for its determinatio).It is
this superrational 'completion' that contains all limitation in itself, even
that of the finite by the infinite that is a mere deception of a reason con
stantly advancing to new limitations.It thus does not itself require another
limitation in order to be the unique determination that it is. Its deter
mination is a consequence of self-determination, of freedom." Manfred
Baum, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Hegelschen Unendlichkeitsbegriff," in Hegel
Studien (Bonn 1976), n: 107-8.
21. Jacques Derrida, Le probleme de la genese dans la philosophic de Hus
serl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 172.
22.Derrida, "Introduction," L'origine de la geometric de Husserl (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 29.
23.Derrida, moreover, confirms this argumentation in a lecture on the
relation of deconstruction to negative theology: he alludes again to this
section and characterizes the structure of the trace in general as the pos
sibility of an experience of finitude.
24.Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phenomene (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1967), 114.The translation is from Speech and Phenomena: And
Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans.David B.Allison (Evanston,
Ill.: Nortliwestern University Press, 1973), 101-2. In a work on Derrida,
Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of the infinity that is inherent in finitude: "Perhaps
one must say that per definitionem there is nothing beyond being, nothing
beyond its folding, and in this consists an absolute limit.But an absolute
limit is a limit without an outside, without a foreign, neighboring land, an
edge without an outer side.It is thus no longer a limit, or rather: it is a limit
to/of nothing [limite de rien]. Such a limit is an unlimited extension, an
extension from nothing to nothing, if then being itself is nothing. It con
stitutes the infinite proper to finitude." Jean-Luc Nancy, "Sens elliptique,"
Notes to Pages 182-83 239
in Une pensee finie (Paris: Galilee, 1991), 283.On the question of radically
finite thought, see Alex Garcia Diittmann, "Transcendences, Imma
nences," in Paragraph, June 1993 (Edinburgh University Press).
25.Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 56. Here, perhaps,
between discourse theory's grounding of morality and the deconstructive
approach to justice and law, certain parallels appear that are connected to
a Kantian tendency of deconstruction and discourse ethics (even if Derrida
would not like to have justice understood as a-regulative-idea, and even
if Habermas attempts to abandon the "metaphysics of the doctrine of tlie
two realms").Is tlie mediation of "idealizing de-limitation" and concrete
situations not the horizon in which the impossible "compromise" between
law and justice takes shape, if justice is understood as radically unlimited,
not in the sense that Habermas himself lends to the concept when he dis
tinguishes it from solidarity? See Jurgen Habermas, Erliiuterungen zur Dis
kursethik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 156. Certainly: precisely
because he thinks within tlie horizon of a regulative idea, Habermas en
deavors throughout to restrict as far as possible a "decisionism" that he
surmises in Derrida, specifically, wherever the latter demonstrates the ur
gency of a decision about which knowledge would have to be confused
(never mind whetlier or not one can speak here of "decisionism" at all; is
tliere a decisionism without a subject of the decision?).But it is not just
tliat the moment of confusion and madness is found in tlie finitude by
which, as Habermas himself concedes, every action is distinguished.One
must also wonder whether idea and horizon (the "idealizing de-limita
tion'' ) are not affected by the condition that one sometimes-and not only
"for the time being"-cannot validate any better argument: "It could turn
out that descriptions of the problem ...are always indissolubly interwoven
with individual self-descriptions of persons and groups, thus with their
identities and life projects, viz., life forms" (ibid., 166).If contextuality can
not be stripped away, then discourse ethics can no longer take a position in
general on the problem of how the "desecularization of norms that is the
unavoidable step for achieving a grounding can be undone" (ibid., 25).In
oilier words: the "impotence of the ought"-bad infinity-reproduces it
self again here: the more one ought, the less one can.The problem of dis
course ethics thus consists of fundamentally demonstrating the possibility
of a btter argument.Eitlier tliere is always a better argument, but then
communication is nothing other than the setting aside of its own sem
blance, or there isn't always such an argument, but then the scheme of
achieving a grounding is endangered in its essence.
26."In fact deconstructionists treat some works witli uncharacteristic re-
 240 Notes to Pages 183-87
spect, and their authority is left unchallenged. Marx, for instance, never
seems to be deconstructed .... Derrida ...appear[s] to enjoy immunity,"
writes D'Souza, for example. Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education (New
York: Free Press,1991),182.
27.Derrida, "Force de loi," 944. Just as little, perhaps, as the khora:
"Here the limit would pass less between the Babelian project and its decon
struction than between the Babelian place (event, Ereignis, history,revela
tion, eschato-teleology,messianism,address,destination,response and re
sponsibility, construction and deconstruction) and 'some thing' without
thing, like a nondeconstructible khora: the place that gives rise to Babel
would be nondeconstructible, not as a construction of which the founda
tions would be secure, sheltered from all internal or external deconstruc
tion,but as the very spacing-out of de-construction." Jacques Derrida,Sauf
le nom (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 104. On the problematic of the khora in the
Timaeus, see also Derrida,Khora (Paris: Galilee,1993).That deconstruction
is nothing but justice (and justice thus the nondeconstructible),cannot be
interpreted as meaning that one deconstructs with reference to or in the
name of justice, or that therefore justice is an instance to which one can
recur whenever one seeks to legitimate the deconstructive undertaking.
Perhaps one could say that justice is the khora of deconstruction ("the very
spacing-out "), but under the aspect of questions such as those raised by
Benjamin's "C ritique of Violence." In a traditional context, one would
probably designate these as questions of the legal institutionalization of
moral-political action.
28.On this point, as well as on the connection between deconstruction
and Ereignis, see the following works by Alexander Garcia Dilttmann:
"Rieu a voir: Radicalite d'une deconstruction," in Art et phenomenologie,
La part de l'oeil, vol. 7, Brussels, 1991; Uneins mit AIDS: Wie iiber einen
Virus nachgedacht und geredet wird (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,1993),132
(forthcoming in English,Stanford University Press); and "La deconstruc
tion se demarque," in Le passage des frontieres (Paris: Galilee,1994).
I 6.The passage appears in Jephcott's translation as follows: "If mythical
Notes to Pages 187-89 241
Legal Studies movement may be combined.See The Alchemy of Race and
Rights (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press,1991).
3.In a reading of Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater, Paul de Man
marks a turn of argument as follows: "We have moved on to the question
of reading as the necessity to decide between signified and referent,between
violence on the stage and violence in the streets. The problem is ... the
ability to distinguish between actual meaning and the process of significa
tion." Especially witli critique and critical reading,everything comes down
to this question regarding the "ability to distinguish." See The Rhetoric of
Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,1984),280-81.
4.Foucault's account of the relations between knowledge and power
("les relations de pouvoir-savoir ") is quite close in some respects to the
Benjaminian articulation.In each,force is a singularity existing outside of
institutions, which integrate always singular, radically local forces into
structures of power; to study this power is not to apprehend force in its
singularity,since institutions (including "knowledge," its concepts and ar
guments) are only particular mobilizations and concatenations of a general,
unstructured field of forces that will always exceed any of its particular
instantiations.For both Foucault and Benjamin,forces exist at the level of
the micro,below and before any of their actualized hyp ostatizations; there
fore, the theory of force will be differential. Yet there are also significant
differences between the two.Some of these depend on the way in which
Gewalt and other terms get translated. Gewalt can mean both violence and
force; yet violence,in the text of Foucault,is only a concomitant of the use
of force and cannot play the constitutive role that force does.But for Ben
jamin, violence, being also force, is constitutive.Violence for Foucault is
mostly limited to specific material entities,such as bodies,upon which per
petrated violence can produce visible changes; violence in Benjamin's text
is pervasive,and can exist without its phenomenal marks, as with the in
stance of the pure justice (violence) of God in the Korah story.God strikes
and leaves no mark.Concerning Foucault,see,for example, La Volonte de
Savoir (Paris: Gallimard,1976).
5.Walter Benjamin,"Zur Kritik der Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften,
ed.Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser,7 vols.(Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp,1974-1989),2.1: 198. Translations are the author's unless
otherwise noted.Subsequent references to this edition of Benjamin's essay
will be given parentlietically in the text by volume,part,and page number.
violence is law-making,divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets
boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence
 244 Note to Page 203

condition of the mythical is itself pure reiteration, eternal return-as also

it is with literary modes close to myth, such as the lyric of folklore, love
song, or nursery rhyme. But law and the legal formation are readable, "cri
tique-able" in a way that myth is not. Legal violence is the disappearance
of position; mythical violence its endurance. This explains why law, not
myth, exhibits history as "decay" (Verderblichkeit). Law is just this evanes
cence or temporalizing of the mythical position. Law is the frenetic, cine
matic repetition of a position that fails to be mythical, whose very failure
makes readable the two positions oflaw. Index of Names
12. Walter Benjamin, "Schicksal ist der Schuldzusammenhang des Le
bendigen," in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1: 175.

In this index an "f " after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page ,
and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous dis
cussion over two or more pages is indicate d by a span of page numbers , e.g., " 57-
59." Passim is use d for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence.

Adorno , Theodor W., 3, 39, 119, 180,
211n5, 216n39, 236 m8
Althusser, Louis, 165-66, 177
Aragon, Louis, 233nm6,18
I I Aristotle , 213 m8
I'
Baudelaire , Charles, 40-41, 46-49,
118-20, 124-38 passim, 145, 151,
152-64, 219nm4,15
Benjamin, Walter: Berlin Chronicle,
94-117, 141f, 144, 152, 157; "Central
Park," 42, 119; The Concept ofArt
Criticism in German Romanticism, 1,
50-74 passim, 172, 23on22; "Doc
trine of the Similar," 105, 112, 144;
"Eidos und Begriff," 222n3; "Franz
Kafka," 178-79; Goethe's Elective
Affinities, 3, 48, 121, 147, 160, 172;
"Holderlin," 222n3; "Karl Kraus,"
179; Moscow Diary, 179-80; "On
Language as Such and on Human
Language," 77-93 passim, 106, 113,
230 mo ; "On Some Motifs in Baude
laire," 21-23, 40-49 passim, 122-38
passim, 157-61; "On the Concept of
History," 1, 6, 15-17; "On the Mi
meticFaculty," 151; One-Way Street,
15of; The Origin of the German
Mourning Play, 40, 96, 114, 121, 139-
47 passim, 161, 222n3, 226n11; "The
Paris of the Second Empire in Bau
delaire," 122, 152-57, 161; Passagen-

245

I
 Index of Names
Werk, 7-17 passim, 23-25, 152, 154;
"Phantasie," 174; "Sache der Tra
dition," 128; "Theologico-Political
Fragment," 175; "Toward a Critique
ofViolence," 169-77 passim, 187-
206; "Welt und Zeit," 175; "The
Work of Art in the Age oflts Tech
nical Reproducibility," 17-22, 32-
49 passim, 132-35
Bergson, Henri, 128, 132
Brecht, Bertolt, 132, 138
Buck-Morss, Susan, 212mo
Cohen, Hermann, 226 nu
de Man, Paul, 22, 41, 47, 206n2, 210n4,
219 nm3,18, 222m, 24on3
Derrida,Jacques, 39, 168, 177-84,
216n40, 222m, 233m7, 237n20,
238 nn23,24, 239 n25, 240 n27
Dilthey, Friedrich, 127-28, 232m3
D'Souza, Dinesh, 239n26
Diittmann, Alexander Garcia, 210 n3
Fichte,Johann Gottlieb, 56, 57-58
Foucault, Michel, 241n4
Freud, Sigmund, 120-29 passim, 135,
157, 233m5, 234n21
Fynsk, Christopher, 210n3, 211n8,
213m7
Gasche, Rodolphe, 214n23, 222m,
237n20
Goethe,Johann Wolfgang von, 137,
229mo, 230m7
Habermas,Jurgen, 239
Hamacher, Werner, 112, 169, 210n3,
229n11
Haselberg, Peter von, 236m8
Haverkamp, Anselm, 213m9
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11-
14, 19, 120, 167-68, 170, 175, 237n20
Heidegger, Martin, 3-10, 23-35
passim, 39, 168, 176f, 184, 211 n8,
212 nnn,12,15, 213 n16, 214 n22,
216n36, 218nn6,7, 224n6, 226n11,
232m4, 233m7, 238nn23,24, 239n25,
24on27
Hering,Jean, 222n3
Holderlin, Friedrich, 84-85, 120,
227n22, 228n23
Husserl, Edmund, 75-80 passim, 86, 181,
216n37, 222n3, 223n4, 224n6, 228m4
Kant, Immanuel, 54-55, 76-90 pas
sim, 224n7, 227m2, 228m5
Kleist, Heinrich von, 135
Kracauer, Siegfried, 219m6, 236m8
Lacan,Jacques, 233nm6,18
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 50, 2.12m2,
220m, 242n7
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 82
Linke, Paul, 78, 223 n3
Marinetti, Emilio, 47
Marx, Karl, 119
Menninghaus, Winfried, 5of, 220m,
227m2
Nagele, Rainer, 229m1
Nancy,Jean-Luc, 50, 220m, 238n24
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 121
Novalis, 59
Proust, Marcel, 16, 128f, 134, 212m3,
214n21
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 233m8
Roberts, Julian, 211 n8
Schlegel, Friedrich, 59-72 passim
Scholem, Gershom, 210m
Tiedemann, Rolf, 28, 217 n2
Trotsky, Leon, 183
Valery, Paul, 133
Virilio, Paul, 22om9
Walzel, Oskar, 123
Weber, Samuel, 210 n3
Wellbery, David, 211n8
Williams, PatriciaJ., 240 n2
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 224n8
Zizek, Slavoj, 240m