Justice as detotalization and situated critique. Considerations on the critique of law in Walter Benjamin

GISELA CATANZARO

Berlin

Seminario; Working with Benjamin on Law; 2021

Walter Benjamin Award for Young Researchers, Walter Benjamin Archive (Berlin), Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL, Berlin), International Walter Benjamin Society.

This text intends to discuss some of the objections usually made to the critique of legal violence formulated by Walter Benjamin in "For a critique of violence" proposing an interpretation of his invocation of the need to "do justice" as the putting into play a mechanism of detotalization of the present that, however, neither takes refuge in an instance transcendence nor is identified with a pure abstract negativism. According to our interpretation, in the Benjaminian critique of the traditional theory of knowledge, as well as in his critique of progressive humanism and in his critique of law, doing justice (to the object of knowledge, to the past and to the living, respectively) means to interrupt an order administrative, punitive and sacrificial patterned by a mythical circularity. But "interrupting" and "destroying" a mythical order are not synonymous, and what concerns justice both in the epistemological, moral and political fields is, for Benjamin, the situated indication of a certain currently operating reduction that criticism reveals as violence, which is why the appeal to justice cannot be generalized as if it were a kind of general truth, applicable a posteriori to certain situations that would illustrate it, but rather operates in situated conjunctures. As historical cases of this type of critical movement consisting of building public scenes in which, without destroying it, the limits of the law and its penal punitive system are indicated, the text finally proposes an interpretation of the slogans "not one less" and " apparition alive” supported respectively by feminist movements and human rights movements in Argentina.