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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".