Critique of Violence:
?the deposing of the law
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Irving Wohlfarth

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and violence from a cluster of projected and/or lost writings dating from his ‘theological’ period.1 Various philosophical readings of this difficult, singular essay have been published and discussed over the last ten years. During the same decade, a no less dense three-page draft from the same year, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, has attracted equal, but separate, attention.2 Their relation is both antithetical and contrapuntal. The one sketches the seemingly inescapable immanence of an all-encompassing world-historical dynamic; the other invokes the imminent possibility of ‘striking’ a way out. This polarity surely reverberates beyond its immediate context all the way into ours.

Since the early 1980s there has been a marked increase of interest in the early theological Benjamin and a concomitant decline of interest in the late materialist one. In some obscure way, these fluctuations could conceivably belong to the after-effects of the episode of the Red Army Faction (RAF), or at least to the larger political conjuncture in which it intervened. The argument might go roughly as follows. Globalization and the creation of a Weltinnenraum (‘world interior’) define the present age. In and through massive convulsions – revolutions, world wars and their attendant catastrophes – world history has steadily become more ‘integrated’. The Communist Manifesto described the prehistory of this accelerating dynamic and announced an imminent end to it; in the wake of the failed Russian Revolution and the Shoah, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) drastically rewrote the scenario; between the two, ‘Capitalism as Religion’ described a religion to end all religion – a secular, neo-mythic monotheism which promises no beyond, only the endless spatio-temporal extension of its own self-produced, self-enclosed hell. It was against the neocolonial expansion of this system – more precisely, against the US conduct of the Vietnam War – that the ‘68 student movements, and then the RAF, struck out, at a moment when a world-historical reversal initiated by Third World wars of liberation could still seem a possible prospect. Since then, entirely different, mainly Islamic terrorist movements have arisen, many directly or indirectly engaged in an unequal struggle against American imperialism. In the West, political radicalism has largely retreated within the confines of philosophy. With the successive collapse of the student movements, their terrorist offshoots and the Soviet empire, the erstwhile Left has fallen into long-term disarray. In Germany, many who once blamed Adorno for arguing the impossibility of forcing a way out have, openly or not, conceded his case; one of the former adherents to the ‘critical theory’ (die Kritische Theorie) of the Frankfurt School has announced the ‘end of critique’; in our post-communist era, others have variously turned to the early pre-Marxist Benjamin. The missed encounter between the ‘Critique’ and the RAF – the hypothetical object of the following remarks – has yielded to a long ‘Saturnine’ conjuncture between ‘Capitalism as Religion’ and the global present.3

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