Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Violence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Walter Benjamin’s 1921 text, “Critique of Violence” in light of its multiple readings. Specifically, different readings and interpretations of this text have become vital to contemporary discussions of police violence, sovereignty, life in the state of exception, revolution, political theology, and most importantly the question of ethical violence. More specifically, if the context of Benjamin’s own writing was the refusal to kill that marked the end of the First World War and the bloody wake that was left after the failure of the German revolution, a current debate between Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek concerning an “ethics of non-violence,” considers (among other things) the current situation in Israel/Palestine, and their debate turns on competing readings of Benjamin’s text. As I will show, there are different approaches to politics, to the question of what is to be done, that can be teased out by way of different readings of this small, influential text written almost 90 years ago and it is precisely the contradictory nature of this text, its messianism, its relation to the question of historical fulfillment, its invocation of the biblical injunction against killing (one that places this text in the Jewish philosophical tradition), its understanding of the notion of “mere” guilty life, as well as its use of Georges Sorel’s celebration of the mass proletarian strike, that makes it a lightning rod for different readings of politics, faith and law, and gives it its continued importance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it