Yes. This essay argues that it is possible to transcend political and legal violence through Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence on Critique of violence. Starting by disseminating Benjamin’s essay, I will bring different artists and theorists which ideas and thought can help us grasp the complexity of the possibility of a divine violence. In this respect, I will start with Giorgio Agamben’s essay On the limits of violence, which in itself is a reading of Benjamin’s text. This essay will help us deconstruct the link of non-violence and language on the latter, through the notions of ‘revolutionary violence’ and ‘poetic language’. In this context, I will recur to Franco Berardi’s notion of poetry on The uprising, in order to showcase which kind of violence can be found in ‘poetic language’ and its possibilities to render a world anew. Nevertheless, reflecting on the limits of poetry through Boris Groys’ comments on our contemporary context, I will challenge Berardi’s claims of poetic language by analysing the inclusion of aesthetics on poiesis and art via Agamben’s Man without content; which I consider analogue to Benjamin’s reflection on the relation between means and ends. In this perspective, I will argue that the ‘crisis on art’ that Agamben talks about can actually be extrapolated to violence and politics, which in a way is connected through this relation of means and ends that is used to determine the singular through the other. This will allow me to comment on art and its distinction from aesthetics, to promote a reappropriation (acknowledge) of one’s own potentiality to do, but instead of limiting it in order to do something, means to an end, to understand this potentiality for impotentiality, as pure means. To sum up, I will end up suggesting that art, politics and divine violence are embroiled in a rhizomatic connection, which can only be understood by unveiling the real as is, abandoning any point of reference with the other, through our own existential non-violent destituent potential which transcends any legal and political violence.

At the beginning of the text, Walter Benjamin realises that the complexity to develop a Critique of violence relies in its relationship with law and justice. For him, ‘a cause becomes violent […] only when it bears on moral issues’, issues which are ‘defined by the concepts of law and justice’. Further on, as he mentions ‘the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means’, on which he argues ‘violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends.’ This allows us to understand that violence is never the end or objective of any project, it can only be employed as a means towards an end. That being said, for Benjamin,

If violence is a means, a criterion for criticizing it might seem immediately available. It imposes itself in the question whether violence, in a given case, is a means to a just or an unjust end. A critique of it would then be implied in a system of just ends. This, however, is not so. For what such a system, assuming it to be secure against all doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a principle, but, rather, the criterion for cases of its use.

This argument sets Benjamin in a quest to find for critique of violence ‘which would discriminate within the spheres of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve’, and in this respect, find a violence, as Giorgio Agamben argues, ‘that carries the right to exist within itself’. But before he enquires any further, he stops and analyses the problems that arise by criticising violence through the ends it serves. Benjamin identifies two modes of law which focus on the relationship between means and ends, natural and positive law. From this, he continues with his analysis through the positive theory of law, as he argues it ‘is acceptable as a hypothetical basis at the outset of this study, because it undertakes a fundamental distinction between kinds of violence independently of cases of their application.’ The issue that he acknowledges with the criterion of positive law is that, in the context of a critique of violence, ‘it cannot concern its uses but only its evaluation’, i.e. it can only approach violence through its conception as a means towards an end. This relationship, as stated by Benjamin, relies on a process of determining violence either legal, acknowledging the historical condition of violence hence legal ends, or illegal, which, aims to set up a new law by disregarding any previous law, natural ends. From this, although an opposition is on sight between the legal and illegal, the fundamental relationship is the inclusion of both modes of violence into the logic of the law, which ultimately unveils an ambiguity on said distinction. For all violence used for natural ends, Benjamin will argue that ‘there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character’ lawmaking violence; and for the violence used for legal ends he will assign the term law-preserving violence. And even though Benjamin describes a nuanced difference between this two modes of violence, lawmaking – law-preserving violence, both will find feeding each other into a non-stop cycle of violence under the term of mythical violence.

Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythical manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory […] If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

Here we reach what would be Benjamin’s most important contribution on Critique of violence, the dialectical notion of mythical violence – divine violence. This divine violence is derived from the pursuit for ‘other kinds of violence than all those envisaged by legal theory’; a ‘pure immediate violence’ that ‘halts mythical violence’, invisible to men, which existence, if assured, furnishes ‘…the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible…’. Thus far, even when the theoretical description of divine violence that Benjamin provides for us, the concept is far from being precise. However, we can provide an answer to the question of this essay. Is it possible to transcend political and legal violence? Yes, it is possible. What would remain on hold would be the assurance of the existence of a pure immediate violence that halts mythical violence i.e. divine violence.

For Benjamin, the possibility of assurance of a divine violence would be proof that a ‘revolutionary violence’ is possible. This is something on which Agamben builds upon in his essay On the Limits of Violence. Taking as a starting point Benjamin’s reflection on the sphere of non-violence i.e. language, he realises this association no longer holds up in his contemporary context where the relation of violence to politics is increasingly ambiguous. For him, there has been a shift from language’s persuasive power to the possibility of it to ‘influence the body’s instincts, overpowering the will and reducing humans to nature. Language can do what violence does: language can arouse. In short, the appeal of pornography is its ability to introduce violence into the realm of nonviolence: language.’ In this perspective, Agamben will assimilate this modern development of ‘linguistic violence’ with poetry, as for him, ‘poetry introduces a form of persuasion that does not rely on truth, but rather on the peculiar emotional effects of rhythm and music, acting both violently and bodily – Plato was thus bound to cast the poets out of the city.’ Before enquiring further on this relationship between poetry and violence (poetic language - linguistic violence), it is necessary to mention how Agamben conceived ‘revolutionary violence’ on his essay. For him,

revolutionary violence is not a violence of means, aimed at the just end of negating the existing system. Rather, it is a violence that negates the self as it negates the other; it awakens a consciousness of the death of the self, even as it visits death on the other […] revolutionary violence can be described as passion, in its etymological sense: self-negation and self-sacrifice.

And, as he argues further on, ‘only those who consciously confront their own negation through violence may shake off “all the muck of ages” and begin the world anew. Only they may aspire, as revolutionaries always have, to call a messianic halt capable of opening a new chronology (a novus ordo saeclorum) and a new experience of temporality—a new History’ This notions of self-negation, self-sacrifice and the a world anew, will prove crucial to understand the rhizomatic relationship between art, politics and violence. But for now, I will expand on the connection between violence and poetry that Agamben developed.

Franco Berardi, on The uprising, develops a relevant critique on the abandonment of referentiality and the automatization of language, situation that fosters the subjugation of society to money and finance through debt and math:

‘Goldman Sachs consultants, or the European Central Bank director, or the chancellor of Germany […] they want to peacefully submit the European population to mathematical slavery, which is clean, smooth, perfect. In this way they are simultaneously establishing a cold form of totalitarianism, and preparing a hot form of massive fascist reaction. The abstract, cold violence of deterritorialized financial dictatorship is preparing the violent reterritorialization of the reactive body of European society…’

For him ‘money and language have something in common: they are nothing and they move everything […] they have the power of persuading human beings to act, to work, to transform physical things.’ Here, as we can see, Bifo takes for granted the existence of a violent component inherent to language which, at the same time, can be extended into the notion of money. That being said, here we will follow the path on language and violence that Bifo opens for us. As he argues, we must be cautious not to be misled by this analogy between economy and language, ‘although money and language have something in common, their destinies do not coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange.’ Here, it becomes clear that the problem that he visualises is the exercise of language, grammar, logic and ethics, rather than with language itself, as he considers it has an infinite potency, which reactivation can only come through poetry. For Bifo,

Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.

Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Poetry is a singular vibration of the voice.

Here we can see similarities between Agamben’s notion of revolutionary violence and Bifo’s conception of poetry. Poetry is the overflow of language which transcends the limits of grammar. It is a ‘revolutionary violence’ which unveils the object. For Agamben, language could never cross the threshold of what cannot be known through itself, thus allowing him to point at the frontier between violence and culture. In contrast, Bifo argues that poetry, poetic language, by the complete dérèglement de tous les sens, is actually capable of doing this, rendering a new world, striking a quite similar idea to the condition of revolutionary violence to set a new experience of temporality. This connection proves ultimately that Agamben was ‘right’ when he suspected that Benjamin’s association of language with nonviolence does not holds up. That being said, although Agamben’s conception of revolutionary violence and Berardi’s conception of poetic language seem to share the same conceptual pursuit of the creation of a new world, there is something missing on Bifo’s conception of poetry which Agamben found essential on revolutionary violence: self-negation, self-sacrifice. Following Berardi’s claim: ‘Nevertheless, while social communication is a limited process, language is boundless: its potentiality is not limited to the limits of the signified. Poetry is language's excess, the signifier disentangled from the limits of the signified.’ it could be argued that he sets a possibility of poetry as immanent and nonteleological, hence being open to a self-negation. But, as we will see next, it is actually this condition of boundlessness of language to the ‘limited institutions’ what defines our contemporary way of experiencing the world, a truly poetical-grammarless world, where poetic language has been turned to a project, hence reaffirming it as a means towards an end.

Boris Groys, in the context of Documenta 13, wrote an essay titled Google: Words beyond grammar. In this essay, he explores how in our contemporary context, where the dialogues between humans are mainly done via Internet, Google has become the ‘first known philosophical machine’ regulating our dialogue with the world, ‘replacing, “vague” metaphysical and ideological presuppositions with strictly formalized and universally applicable rules of access.’ Although it is a stretch to single out one corporation as some sort of ‘digital hegemonic institution,’ it definitely illustrates how in the digital realm words have been liberated from their subjection to grammar, thus revealing its proximity with Bifo’s concept of poetry. As he argues, ‘Google dissolves all discourses by turning them into the word clouds that function as collections of words beyond grammar. […] As a philosophical machine, Google is based upon a belief in extragrammatical freedom and the equality of all words and their right to migrate freely in any possible direction – from one local, particular word cloud to another.’ This project for the liberation of words, and language, from grammar can be traced back to several moments in art history as Groys mentions, the issue, however, is that not only Google ‘betrays the utopian world of liberation’ that avant-garde poetry and modern art dreamt of but, in fact Google, by stablishing itself as the last big poet, proves that the apparent potentiality of infinity of poetry is finite, thus unveiling poetry’s true violence, mythical violence.

Without a utopian vision of the fully liberated world, Google would be impossible – and a critique of Google would also be impossible. […] ‘Really existing’ Google can only be criticized from the poetic perspective of what can be called a utopian Google – a Google that embodies the concept of all words’ equality and freedom. The utopian, avant-garde ideal of the liberated word has produced a ‘difficulty poetry’ that for many readers seems inaccessible. However, it is precisely this utopian ideal that defines our contemporary, everyday struggle for universal access to the free flows of information.

Bifo’s intention on The uprising, is to find a way to subvert ‘the subjugation of the biopolitical sphere of affection and language to financial capitalism […] from the unusual perspectives of poetry and sensibility.’ The issue with this argument then relies on turning poetry and sensibility a means towards an end, hence assigning a telos. Assigning an end to sensibility results in what has been known, since Alexander Baumgarten, as aesthetics. In the case of poetry, understanding it as Bifo considered it on his book, from the modern conception of the word, is already a derived notion from poiesis. But this transition from poiesis into poetry has to be understood on the context in which art was included in the logic of aesthetics; all of this through the reduction of the Greek’s division of man’s doing under one term: praxis, end without means.

Groys’ introduction to Going Public, Poetics vs. Aesthetics, gives us a great analysis on the issues that the inclusion of art to the logic of aesthetics has brought to its poiesis potentiality. As he mentions ‘the aesthetic attitude is the spectator’s attitude. As a philosophical tradition and university discipline, aesthetics relates to art and reflects on art from the perspective of the spectator, of the consumer of art–who demands from art the so-scalled aesthetic experience.’ Here, I must mention that said aesthetic experience is meant to be understood in terms of hermeneutics, without relying on morals or content. Therefore, as Groys argues, ‘all things can be seen from an aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgement. From this perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world.’ The question that here arises then is the use of aesthetic discourses to approach and, in various times, legitimise art. For Groys, this tradition to use aesthetic discourses answers to an unbalanced number of spectators against producers during the development of aesthetic thought on the 18th and 19th century, something that, in fact, opposes a much older tradition of approaching art, from the point of view of the producer i.e. poiesis. Following this analysis, he argues that now a days, where a much larger number of people is interested in producing rather than contemplating, the aesthetic attitude loses its relevance, and a different way of approaching art production must be set in place. Reflecting on art from the perspective of the producer could bring what Groys calls the production of one’s own self, autopoiesis; which is different from praxis (and work). Aesthetics close relationship to modern praxis, brings a crisis to art by defusing and neglecting its pro-ductive character, and, if we follow Agamben’s suggestion, we must understand that ‘the crisis of art in our time is, in reality, a crisis of poetry, of ποίησις’ i.e. the turn from artistic pro-duction to aesthetic creation. As Agamben argues, the ‘man has on earth a poetic, that is, a pro-ductive status. […] the status of his dwelling on earth is a practical one.’ The ‘misunderstanding’ in our contemporary context is the obfuscation of the distinction of the man’s doing under one term, praxis, reducing it to an ends without means, work (through praxis), as it finds its immediate expression in an act, as a will and vital impulse. The consequence that this brings to poiesis in art, understood as unveiling, as a means with an end other than itself, is the transformation from pro-duction (unveiling) to production (the ‘how’), a demonstration of the will and creative force of the genius.

In terms of the work of art, this means that the emphasis shifts away from what the Greeks considered the essence of the work––the fact that in it something passed from nonbeing into being, thus opening the space of truth (ἐ-λήθεια) and building a world for man's dwelling on earth––and to the operari of the artist, that is, to the creative genius and the particular characteristics of the artistic process in which it finds expression.

This analysis on the obfuscation of the means in benefit of the ends is, in a way, what Benjamin left off his critique of violence. The crisis on art must be understood as a crisis on the agency and singularity of the subject. A similar stance we can see in Bifo, when on a later book claims that ‘Google has created the most flexible machine of de-singularisation ever conceived’. Since modernity, art has been based on a constant attempt of breaking the cycle of art discourses, via antagonising the art institution, academy, public, market or other artists; a constant exclusion/inclusion of ‘radical discourses and practices’ into the ‘Art world.’ Even today, when art is expected to either be ‘critical’ or ‘mobilise the audience’, any attempt to ‘creatively infiltrate the system’ renders a new possibility for commodifying said practices and ideas. The use of aesthetics is critical for the perpetuation of this hegemony. Let me be clear here, aesthetic discourses are not meant to legitimise practices as art or not-art, rather works as an apparatus which strips from the subject its singularity; sensibility has been paired with identity politics. The call for ‘creative’ and ‘radical’ representations is a mere exercise to increase the veil of the real. If art is capable of setting a world anew, of opening the way for the singular to face their truly status on earth, aesthetics throws the subject back into the circle of violence.

Thus far, the parallel line that has been drawn in this essay has not been able to conciliate this disjunction between the possibility and the assurance of the existence of transcending political and legal violence, rather it has deepened the analysis to the notion of means and ends. Through this, we have seen the issues that aesthetics arises on art’s potentiality, rendering it to an eternal wandering on the terra aesthetica which at its extreme has become a self-annihilating nothing. In this context, the interest to draw a parallel line to violence from art is that, under the name of the latter, diverse ‘revolutionary discourses and practices’ have been put to test throughout history, backfiring (almost) every single time, with the plus side that less blood has been spilled than on ‘political revolutions’. This backfiring must be understood on the constant experimentation of ‘radical artists’ to ‘criticise or revolutionise’ either ‘art’ or the ‘Art world’, just to end up being included ‘on the system’, feeding aesthetic discourses that perpetuate this cycle. This does not suggest that censorship is non-existent. All the contrary, it is the existence of censorship (and a whole lot of other issues, such as precarity) that pushes people to do something about it, to ‘find a way out’, without acknowledging their contribution to the inherent problem of aesthetics (and the cycle of violence), as Žižek mentions ‘the threat today is not passivity, but pseudo­activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the nothingness of what goes on.’ Groys’ suggestion that Kazimir Malevich can be seen as the ‘revolutionary artist’ (insurrectionary artist I argue), through situating his art theory as an answer to Benjamin’s divine violence can give us a hint of what the latter could look like, but this hint cannot be grasped from an aesthetical approach but an artistic one, i.e. which would discriminate within the spheres of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve.

Years after Malevich’s Black Square, Mladen Stilinović suggestion on laziness might be the answer that ‘artists’ have not being able to grasp since said painting. He situates work as the reason for the impossibility for art to be art, inadvertently situating the issue back to the relation between means and ends. Here, I argue that it is this instrumentality, which has been carried onto the totality of human existence, the last frontier to be ‘transcended’. On art, the shift is a quite simple one: if we aim to unveil the real, to open to man his authentic temporal dimension, the space of his belonging to the world, what is needed is the rejection of any ‘production’ which alienates their existence i.e. the becoming of its singularity against the production of identities. This is why art, without turning into aesthetics, is a non-violent violence, a divine violence. It breaks with any point of referentiality that belongs to the other, renders language inoperative unveiling the real as is. Therefore, art is something that cannot be displayed, shown, taught, it is something that one ‘has’ and must be deactivated. As Agamben argues, ‘a poet is not someone who possesses a potential to make and, at a certain point, decides to put into action. Having a potential in reality means: being at the mercy of one’s own impotential. In this poetic experience, potential and act are no longer in relation but immediately in contact.’ Here, the similarity to Agamben’s (and Invisible Committee’s) notion of ‘destituent potential’, Felix Guattari and Suley Rolnik’s conception of ‘becoming’, Consejo Nocturno’s theorisation of ‘inhabiting’ (habitar), makes us reflect on art’s non-potential potential to render a world anew through one own’s singularity, constituting one own’s form-of-life. Agamben writes at the end of The Use of Bodies: ‘Politics and art are not tasks nor simply “works”: rather they name the dimension in which works–linguistic and bodily, material and immaterial, biological and social–are deactivated and contemplated as such in order to liberate the inoperativity that has remained imprisoned in them.’ On this gesture that might go overlooked, the frontier between politics, art (and life) dissolves. We have been educated and trained to look at frontiers and limits that never were there on the first place, now it is time to look at ourselves and see our own’s potential for a non-violent violent destituent existence, which transcends any legal and political framework and violence, jumping outside of the circle of killers.

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