The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler;

Author:Judith Butler;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

Law’s Violence: Benjamin, Cover, Balibar

We may conclude that a stronger and more just sense of law should be brought to bear on such instances. The notion, however, that conflicts should be handled through law rather than through violence presumes that law does not wield its own violence and that it does not redouble the violence of the crime. We cannot readily accept the idea that violence is overcome once we make the transition from an extra-legal violent conflict to the rule of law. As we know, there are fascist and racist legal regimes that immediately discount that view, since they have their own rule of law—one that we would, on extra-legal grounds, call “unjust.” We could say that those are instances of bad law, or we could say that what those regimes offer is not really law, and then stipulate what law should be; but that route does not address whether the legally binding character of law requires and institutes coercion, or whether coercion is distinguishable from violence. If it is not, then the move from an extra-legal conflictual field to a legal field is a shift from one kind of violence to another.

Over and against the view that law establishes civil relations based on freedom and that war establishes coercive conditions for conduct, Walter Benjamin clearly identifies the coercion at the heart of legal regimes as violence (Gewalt), not only in their punitive and carceral power, but also in the very making and imposing of laws themselves. Not surprisingly, his essay “Critique of Violence” is often regarded as ending with the figure of divine power, understood as purely destructive anarchism. And yet, the text begins with a consideration of both the natural law of tradition and positive law, showing the limits of each. At the outset, the kind of critique he undertakes is described as “philosophic-historical,” which means that he is trying to understand how certain modes of justification have become part of legal reasoning and its power. In particular, he focuses on the fact that when violence is debated within the terms of the legal tradition he is considering, it is almost always considered as a “means.” A natural law theorist will ask whether violence serves a “just end,” calling upon an idea of justice that is already decided. A positivist will claim that it is not possible to justify an end outside of a legal system’s own terms, since the law is what furnishes our ideas of justice. In either case, violence is approached first through the question: What justifies violence, or in light of what end is violence justified? This leaves open the question of whether we can know violence outside of the justificatory schemes by which it is approached. That approach figures the object in advance, so how might we then know violence, apart from those schemes? And if those schemes furnish justifications for the violence of a legal system and regime as distinct from any counter-violence (which would be unjustified), then to what extent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.