Biopower: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' at Its Centenary, Part IV
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy Emerson each elaborate on how Benjamin’s classic illuminates contemporary understandings of the politics of life and (violent) death globally. skaidra takes the Sanctuary City movement in Europe and North America as a focus. Arguing that Sanctuary politics is limited in its capacity to challenge borders in-of-themselves because the movement is caught in a false antinomy between natural and positive law that Benjamin critiques, skaidra’s contribution proposes a critique of borders that emulates Benjamin’s method which isolates violence from the mystification of legal theory. Whereas migrant justice movements threaten the state order by challenging Westphalian notions of time, Sanctuary operates like a purgatory wherein a potential messianic migrant figure could herald the end of state borders. skaidra proposes the idea of utopic purgatory as a means to isolate how Sanctuary Cities contribute to and limit a critique of borders. In the second sole-authored contribution to this section of the forum, Emerson rereads Benjamin in relation to Foucault by thinking biopower through criteria irreducible to official qualifications on life or the efficient management of populations. As a pure means without ends, violence for Benjamin cannot confirm anything external to it, be it the protection of life that comes after its elimination elsewhere or the regulation of life that follows the suppression of alterity. Instead, for Emerson, violent biopower, as pure, manifests a deadly order that immediately strikes life in a manner too abrupt to confirm rule or regulate populations. The result is a criterion for understanding both violence and life in biopower that maintains its distance from official intentions.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".