Afformative, Strike
![handle is hein.journals/cdozo13 and id is 1155 raw text is: AFFORMATIVE, STRIKE
Werner Hamacher*
Translated by Dana Hollander
For Jean-Luc Nancy
Walter Benjamin's essay, On the Critique of Violence, (Zur Kritik
der Gewalt) provides an outline for a politics of pure mediacy.I For
Benjamin the means for such a politics may be termed pure because
they do not serve as means to ends situated outside the sphere of me-
diacy. Such ends could only be ambiguous-they would claim to be
removed from or even superior to the sphere of means, but would in
fact be merely historical positings whose mediacy is masked by isola-
tion. Means which may be termed pure, on the other hand, are not on
the order of posited norms-and certainly not on the order of legal
norms or of models for binding interactions to be followed by the
members of a society. Politics and violence can be termed pure only if
they manifest a form of justice untainted by the interests of preserving
or mandating certain ways of life, untainted by positive forms of law.2
* Professor, German Department and Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.
The following reflections draw on W. Hamacher, Stonehand, This Sovereign, Strike (Oct. 18,
1989) (essay presented at the Hannah Arendt Memorial Colloquium, at The New School for
Social Research, in New York City). For the paper at the October 1, 1990 Cardozo Law
School conference On the Necessity of Violence for Any Possibility of Justice, these sections
were partly expanded and partly condensed. Since then, the text has been reworked for publi-
cation. As it appears here, this essay is still a fragment in progress.
I W. BENJAMIN, Zur Kritik der Gewalt, in 2 GESAMMELTE SCHRIFrEN 179 (R.
Tiedemann & H. SchweppenhAuser ed. 1977). Translations of some passages from Benjamin's
Gesammelte Schriften are based on W. BENJAMIN, REFLECTIONS (P. Demetz ed., E. Jephcott
trans. 1986) [hereinafter REFLECTIONS] and W. BENJAMIN, ILLUMINATIONS (H. Arendt ed.,
H. Zohn trans. 1968).
2 Two sets of terms that appear frequently in my text are difficult to translate from Ger-
man into English: 1) setzend, rechtsetzend, Gesetz; and 2) Gewalt. In general, setzend, recht-
setzend, and Gesetz are rendered as positing, law-positing, and law-imposing. Gewalt in
German may have any of the meanings of the English wordsforce power, might, and violence,
depending on the context. It seems to me, however, that in the context of Benjamin's text,
there is no doubt that any translation other than violence runs the risk of euphemizing the
problems in question here. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that where Gewalt appears
in a standard expression such as Staatsgewalt (state power) or a formula such as Alle Gewalt
geht vom Volke aus (All power rests with the people), it can be translated only aspower, or
sometimes force. This is due to socio-historical, political, and ideological differences between
the English and German linguistic cultures that I cannot go into here. This cursory reference
to certain linguistic-as well as nonlinguistic-shadings lost in the transition from German to
English, says nothing about the particular logic Benjamin adheres to in his Kantian formula-
tion pure violence. However, it should be clear from the outset that what is at issue here is
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