Idea Paper on Benjamin and Freud 10.12.2014

In the Critique of Violence, Benjamin has a lot of notions to enrich his argument that emphasize violence as a structural problem and the monopolization of the definition of it by the system and its law. The system, the positive law “can concern not its uses but only its evaluation” (237). So the positive law and the dominant power, the system produce and practice violence and become blind to consequences of it and its means, but only try to focus on the ends even partially by a pragmatist perspective. During this process to keep the power in the same hand stable by commanding the law keepers to produce violence. The system ignores the means of the violence and tries to rationalize and even moralize it with the benefits of ends. This “practical” process has been imposed to the public as a natural and necessary process by many ways including education and mass media. In the next several paragraphs, I will try to link this mentality with Freud’s some arguments about crisis, progress and the system’s tricks to label these differently to manipulate the bad side effects of the system.

Benjamin argues that “Since the acknowledge of legal violence is most tangibly evident in a deliberate submission to its ends, a hypothetical distinction between kinds of violence must be based on the presence or absence of a general historical acknowledgement of its ends” (238). He continued his argument by saying “the legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by legal power” (238). This is the monopolization of the violence and it is similar with Freud’s some arguments such as progress. The system label some conditions as progress and as far as the end of the practices, the cruel conditions of the workers, the veterans’ psych traumatic symptoms do not matter. The system can label them with some fancy names and exclude the responsibility from itself. If the economic benefits match with the definition of the progress, the reputation of the cruelty in the society does not matter. At the end, we can rationalize the meaning of this violent cycle and melt it in the label of progress. Two folded structure of the time; progress and repetition is very similar with two folded process of law: means and ends. For both of these, the dominant power use language to manipulate the means by using the end as a cover.

In the class, while we were discussing Freud and crisis, it made me think about midlife crisis. The notion itself is very problematic. The system creates a common notion label for individual crisis to rationalize the bed side effects of the “progress.” Normally, each “midlife crisis” has individual meanings and we all need to deal it uniquely. In addition, all of these crises also might have some common triggers because of our society’s structure and its repetitive failure. But by labeling these “symptoms” as expected, common crisis as a result of being at the middle age, we skip questioning the reasons behind it. This makes us ignore the responsibility of the system and only miss our ontological questions. The system converts some of the ontological problems to a simple, common, midlife crisis. I think we can link this with Benjamin’s Critique of Violence a lot, especially about riots. The system labels all kinds of civil riots as violent by the same mentality. The public internalize this label and do not question why these riots started, who was the first producer of the violence. For instance, about the death penalty, Benjamin also argues that its purpose is not to punish the infringement of law but to establish new law. For in the exercise of violence over life and death, more than in any other legal act, the law reaffirms itself” (242). This was very interesting to read. Why? Because, it made me think what type of function the death penalty does by law. What is the establishment of new law? I think one of them is renewing and reminding the system’s legitimation in the eyes of the public, the refreshing the perspective about the monopolization of the right to produce violence by law. In addition, this death penalty creates an image of moralistic identity for the government. If it punished the criminals, it cannot be a criminal, especially the factory of all types of violence. If the positive economic system has power to label the symptoms of the working environments side effects, cruelty, how can we assume that they produce them at all!


Meryem R. Tasbilek

Contemporary Philosophy