Dr Tom Houseman

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 II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele dos Santos Leal draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman inter rogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order – which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence – divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is ‘lethal without spilling blood’. Because the exercise of such ‘power over all life’ is exercised ‘for the sake of living,’ Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the ‘God’s eye view’ inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin’s text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing – at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence – a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele’s reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy’s role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin’s contribu tions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political strug gles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city’s harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory

The recent engagement with ‘post-secular’ thought has been especially pronounced within the critical tradition, in which messianic eschatology has been variously rehabilitated or reaffirmed. Amongst others, the thought of Theodor W. Adorno has recently been enlisted in this endeavour, culminating in a synthesis of critical theory and Jewish Gnosticism. This article argues that such a reading not only misrepresents Adorno’s thought, but also misses its critical contribution. In contrast to the project of revivifying the messianic in order to save critical theory from aimless nihilism, Adorno’s eschatology, inherited through a critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx and Benjamin, is a negative imprint, devoid of the theism, teleology and promises of salvation that characterise and secure other appropriations of the eschatological tradition. To recognise the originality and potency of Adorno’s critical reworking of eschatology, I argue, we must understand the theological role played by Auschwitz throughout his writings. Adorno constructs a constellation in which Auschwitz is the eschaton, the horrific fulfilment of the promise of history. In doing so, he reconfigures the ethical impulse of the critical tradition: critical theory derives its purpose and urgency not from the promise of a better world, but from the horror of the present one.

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Marxian heritage, on the promise and risks of hauntology, on the ghostly potential for justice amidst devastation, and on the paradox of deconstruction’s legacy itself.

This chapter elaborates a critical theory approach to class, through a series of critical engagements with the concept of class in sociology, orthodox Marxism, and political economy. Based especially on the work of Adorno and Marx, the chapter argues that class must be theorised as a relation of struggle, and that it is a necessarily negative concept, a contradiction which critical theory does not seek to reconcile. Against sociological views of class, as a social system of economic stratification, critical theory locates class struggle as the antagonistic basis of capitalist society. However, class struggle takes an inverted form in capitalism: first as the movement of economic categories (social relations that take the form of a relation between things), then as the personification of these categories by human individuals. This situation, in which human individuals play out the class roles generated by economic categories, has a specific social constitution: the creation of the doubly free labourer who has no access to the means of subsistence beyond the sale of her labour power. This chapter articulates critical theory’s approach to class but also describes the antagonistic social relations upon which, according to Adorno, rest the necessity and possibility of critical theory.