Must the real revolution be anarchist? Pure violence as catastrophe and annihilation in Benjamin and Sorel
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2022.66.24Keywords:
Political violence, anarchism, myth, cruelty, law, State, powerAbstract
One hundred years after its first publication, Benjamin’s Critique of Violence continues to be a reference text for the study of political violence. However, the anarchist ideas that move implicitly and explicitly throughout its pages -and that lend historical meaning to his concept of divine violence- have been relativized by the prevailing messianism in certain contemporary analyses. This paper studies in-depth the anarchist horizon of radical political transformation that Benjamin takes from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence: The idea of a final catastrophic revolution whose intrinsic morality will be demonstrated in its capacity to destroy the dialectical historical cycle between violence and power.
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