On violence by Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's essay For a Critique of Violence was written at an early stage in the author's life, he was 29 years old. Its context is that of the first postwar period, the triumph of the Russian revolution, the defeat of the German revolution in 1919 and the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the publication of the Georg Sorel´s text with the title of Reflections on violence, (Sorel, 1978), this means, a chaotic social and political situation. It was a time of transition from bourgeois to socialist revolutions with the possibility of the realization of utopia. Violence was then an everyday-topic. Violence of war, but also revolutionary violence, apart from daily violence, was persistent and permanent among human beings. Unlike Sorel's text, there was no precedent for a critical discourse on the subject of violence. Revolutionary violence had been prevalent topic, but in an instrumental perspective of overthrowing the bourgeois state by the forces of the proletariat.