Violence/Power/Force and Struggle over Time in Contemporary Brazil: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ at Its Centenary, Part V

Abstract

Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part V of the Forum, Rafael Barros Vieira argues that Benjamin’s essay ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (Critique of Violence/Power/Force) is deeply penetrated by the historical problems of the revolution and counterrevolution in Germany. In a certain sense, it is a conjunctural text, although it goes beyond its own context by seeking to apprehend historical phenomena of longue durée. Unfortunately, Vieira argues, this contextual aspect tends to disappear in readings that emphasize only a kind of philosophical ‘purity’ of this essay. Vieira hypothesizes that the essay, in addition to facing conjunctural problems, can be used to understand other conjunctures by highlighting the relations between law, history and social classes (in a wide conception of social classes that will be present in Benjamin’s work and will be made explicit in his late writings). The purpose of turning to this essay is to critically understand the exercise of violence/power/force in liberal states, particularly that of Brazil, highlighting the movement through which the authoritarian and fascist forces rise around liberal state structures. As Benjamin points out in one of the variants of the essay on the work of art, fascism is the conservation of relations of production and property through violence. However, violence is not a product only of this type of regime, although it certainly radicalizes it. Vieira proposes to understand how this is expressed in this recent period of Brazil, marked by the combination of the rise of a president with fascist traits, the reorganization of certain liberal institutions and the implementation of typically neoliberal reforms.