Walter Benjamin i mistika božanskoga nasilja: Pravednost vs. sloboda?
Walter Benjamin and the Mysticism of Divine Violence: Justice vs. Freedom?

Summary/Abstract: the author, in the study of Benjamin’s political thinking in his writings on violence, justice, right, and the state during 1920’s, particularly deals with the analysis of the controversial concept “divine violence.” the concept at the end of the 20th century even today has become extremely theoretically commented, and above all with the impact of the so-called post-foundationalism in the philosophy of politics and political thinking, including authors as derrida, nancy, agamben, Critchley, and others. Since Benjamin’s view of politics is, directly and indirectly, related to the theory of sovereignty and power of Carl Schmitt and to the anarchist critique of the state, this article extensively discusses how the subject of resistance and criticism in the global context of corporate information capitalism has changed in the contemporary context when the “systematic violence” of the state has become obsolete. the novelty and lucidity of Benjamin’s messianic-political criticism of the authoritarian state and its mechanisms of execution of power can thus be understood as a critique of the systematic violence of the state on the ontological significance of the aims/purposes of politics beyond its classical antique feasibility in the categories of freedom and justice. It is therefore not by accident that justice, which has its origins in jewish eschatology, is put above freedom, and it might be evident that today in the era of the ideological-political crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal state the crucial becomes the question why the ideas of the rule of “human rights”, “legal state” and “normativism of rights” necessarily have to deal with calls for ” state of exception”. Benjamin, therefore, appears with Schmitt, but in a completely different way, as the predecessor of a new “political theology” that takes place in the logic of the inclusive exclusion of the subject of modern politics (“nation”) in democratic processes of shaping new power beyond the state and society.

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