KANT'S TWO COMMONWEALTHS

Benjamin's critique of politics has two interrelated components. First, he contests Kant's view of the normative status of politics and its relation to ethics. Whereas Kant regards the coercive force of juridical authority as not only congruent with, but indeed necessary for, ethical practice, Benjamin, entirely rejects this compromise, regarding political order of any kind as morally suspect. Second, Benjamin refashions Kant's moral-eschatological vision. Kant all but rejects the perfect ethical community as a practicable program, seeing it instead as a kind of regulative moral ideal. This rejection, in turn, allows him to argue for the temporal permanence of politics. For Benjamin, however, such a community is a genuine—if difficult—historical possibility, one whose realization becomes practicable through the prism of an alternative, specifically Jewish, eschatology. I begin here with his treatment of Kant.

As Kant continued to develop his critical philosophy during the 1790s, he theorized an essential compatibility, even symbiosis, between coercive political order and autonomous moral development. In his 1793 work Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, he illustrated this idea through the image of two “commonwealths” (Kant [1793] Reference Kant, Greene and Hudson1960, 86). The first of these, a “political commonwealth” serves as the basis for secular order. As citizens of a “juridico-civil society,” people obey external, coercively enforced laws designed to keep the peace, protect property, and safeguard external liberties. As members of the “ethico-civil society” or “ethical commonwealth,” by contrast, individuals deepen their moral virtue while motivated by nothing other than the internal force of duty itself. While Kant regarded ethico-civil society as universal, in principle accessible to all rational beings and thus unconstrained by state boundaries, he nonetheless saw life in the political commonwealth as an absolutely necessary condition for the ethical commonwealth's actualization (86). Kant, in short, thought political order—and the violence it entails—was a prerequisite for ethical life.

Consequently, Kant emphasizes that submission to the laws of the state is itself not only a juridical but moral duty, as “obedience to it, as to all injunctions of duty, can be drawn into religion” (7, emphasis added). He clarifies this further on in a lengthy footnote discussing the duty of individuals when confronted by conflicting legal and moral demands. In such a case, the task to obey any law of the state, even if imposed by “arbitrary will,” is automatically not only an obligation, but a “divine command” (90). The only situation in which one is free to disobey the laws of the state is when they are “directly opposed to the law of morality.” What this means is that, for Kant, the juridical structure must be shown to have some kind of moral-metaphysical foundation. At the very least, it must be shown to not conflict directly with morality. Demonstrating this is a task Kant took up directly in his Metaphysics of Morals, which appeared four years after his Religion essay in 1797.

Benjamin's critique centers around Kant's answer to the fundamental question of political violence: Under what circumstances, if any, may the use of force be legally authorized (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996)? Kant's answer takes on new urgency in the context of property rights. An important concern, for Kant, is whether it is possible to establish a metaphysical justification of possession, one that does more than simply equate superior force with justified authority. Kant's question, in other words, is: Is a genuine right to a thing possible (39)? His answer is that it is, and, consequently, that it is compatible with right (Recht) to authorize legal force, backed by violence, to secure their protection. Further, and critically, it is entirely appropriate to use the term “justice” (Gerechtigkeit) to refer to a state of affairs in which Recht is correctly applied. One consequence of this is that a world saturated with violence may also be a world of perfect justice; indeed, in Kant's formulation, bloodshed may often be demanded by justice (105–6). The linchpin in his system is the concept of Gewalt, often translated, at different points, as “control,” “violence,” “force,” and “authority.” It is through Gewalt that Kant is able to do the seemingly impossible: to make the leap from the physical to the metaphysical, from raw might to justified right, brute possession to legitimate control.

Benjamin finds Kant's reasoning deeply problematic, and his argument unfolds in two parts. First, in “Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice,” he rejects Kant's justification of lawful possession:

Similar reasoning also appears, in a slightly different form, in “Theses on the Concept of Justice”:

Later in the first essay, Benjamin signals that in rendering “justice” he is deliberately not following Kant's usage. In this area, at least, he is offering not an immanent critique, not arguing against Kant on his own terms, but innovating, establishing a “new ethical category” (“Notes,” 166). Whereas for Kant the concept of justice gives rise to duties, demanding enforcement by a public, juridical, and ultimately coercive authority (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 21), Benjamin, in the second part of his critique, wants to entirely detach the concept of justice from all logic of means-ends. Justice, he insists, is a state of being, and, more, one whose essence entirely resists producing demands of any kind:

Finally, Benjamin emphasizes that it is impossible to equate justice merely with a particular set of material conditions, no matter how equitable. “There is no system of possession,” he asserts, “that leads to justice” (166).

The precise meaning of Benjamin's argument, as well as his new category of justice, are obscure, and my task here and in the sections that follow will be to elucidate both. I turn first to his critique of Kant's reconciliation of ethics and politics. Benjamin, I contend, follows Kant into the teeth of an antinomy on the metaphysical justification for political violence. But whereas Benjamin will choose to face this antinomy head on and embrace its radical consequences, Kant withdraws and turns his back, hiding his philosophy behind a new myth: Gewalt.

In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces the concept of Gewalt as part of a longer discussion concerning the justifiability of possession prior to the advent of the civil state:

At the same time, a study of Kant's usage of the term throughout the work reveals a more troubling lineage. As noted by John Ladd in his translator's introduction, Gewalt is deployed to refer to both illegitimate and legitimate uses of coercion (1999, xxxv). Thus we are told that each force in the state of nature contains a “degree of Gewalt” [bloßen Maße seiner Gewalt], locked in brutal struggle with the others (90); that it is humanity's “maxim of Gewalt,” its “malevolent tendency,” that necessitates the coercion of public law (89); and that men who break their word of honor—who trick their opponents or butcher defenseless prisoners—are characterized by “wilden Gewalt,” a savage violence (86, note). In spite of this, Kant finds little trouble in converting the Gewalt of illegitimate bloodshed to the Gewalt of justified right. He defines a “civil condition” as one “under an authority [Gewalt] giving laws publicly” (44). It is Gewalt, as in the example above, that he repeatedly uses to describe how “control,” in the sense of lawful possession, is rightfully taken over objects (42, 43, 47, 52). And his term for describing the different sources of authority within the state (sovereign-legislative, executive, and judicial) is Gewalten: powers, each inviolable in its sphere and irresistible in its force (90–1).

It would seem, therefore, that what we now need is a means to distinguish a violence we would want to claim as unlawful and that to which we would want to accord sanction. What we need, in other words, is precisely what Benjamin will himself provide: a critique of Gewalt, an investigation into the circumstances of legitimate coercive authority. But Kant instead opts for a shortcut. He attempts to demonstrate a means by which we can get directly from power to authority. In the process Gewalt persists, its savage violence reborn—or sublimated—as right.

At this point it is worth recalling Kant's aim in the work. The function of the civil state vis-à-vis property is not, in Kant's view, primarily to legitimate the “laws concerning what is mine or yours,” but rather to “provide the conditions under which these laws are put into effect” (90, emphasis mine). It is therefore essential that there be some form of justifiable possession already extant in the state of nature, prior to the advent of the state. Lacking this autochthonous legitimacy of possession, the civil state itself would be in danger of lacking legitimacy: There would be little to separate its use of coercive authority from groundless violence, its claim to uphold “distributive justice” [distributiven Gerechtigkeit], from the raw Gewalt of the natural state (90). In short, it would have no moral basis for using violence to protect private property.

Given the stakes involved, one puzzle is why Kant did not simply adopt Locke's “labor theory of appropriation” and say, with his predecessor, that property can be legitimately acquired through industry (Locke [1689] Reference Locke and Laslett1988, chap. 32, p. 291). His reason for rejecting this path is revealing: The labor theory errs, he asserts, in suggesting that rights involve “a direct relation to things rather than to persons” (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 49). A right to an object, for Kant, can only be conceived of in terms of a person's use of that object as against another's, not to the object itself: “Speaking strictly and literally,” he writes, “there is no (direct) right to a thing (50).” In other words, as Mary Gregor has noted, the labor theory, though championed by empiricists, actually requires a flight into metaphysics (1988, 783). A person, having worked on an object, can be said to continue to possess that object at a distance only if it is somehow established that she has left a trace of herself—what Kant derisively calls a “guardian spirit” (49)—in that object. For Kant, such a step is both theoretically necessary and clearly indefensible.

In place of the labor theory, Kant offers a drastic alternative: Prior to the civil state, all objects are potential possessions. He frames his argument as a requirement internal to the logic of possession itself. “A maxim,” he writes, “by which, if it were to become a law, an object of choice would in itself (objectively) have to belong to no one (res nullius) is contrary to rights” (40–41). In other words, it would be impossible to place “useable objects beyond any possibility of being used,” for this would “annihilate them in a practical respect” (41 cf. Gregor 775). This “postulate of practical reason with regard to rights” (42) in hand, Kant further clarifies the distinction between having something in one's power versus under one's control:

Every object thus contains a latent possessive character, the potential of being treated as “mine or yours.” This eliminates the problem of res nullius. However it raises a further difficulty: Why should any particular object be considered a single individual's exclusive possession? Gregor has argued that Kant's expansion of rightful possession beyond the body takes the form of a “concept of reason,” a “pure concept of ‘having'” (1988, 777). The result is a paradox: If we are to follow Kant's reasoning, it would seem that every person now has, in principle, a claim to every object. As Susan Shell has observed, this would make Kant's position much closer to that of Hobbes, where in the state of nature there is a natural right of every individual to all things (1978, 81). This is Benjamin's pithy formulation: “The possessive character trait of all goods is objective, meaning that there is an absolute right of each individual to every good” (“Theses,” 174). Kant has given us possession, to be sure—but of a kind that is universal, infinite, and, most critical of all, lacking interpersonal distinction.

Here Kant might appeal to an argument that resurfaces throughout the text: That land may be rightfully acquired based on humanity's “innate possession in common [Gemeinbesitze] of the surface of the earth” (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 40 note i, 41, cf. 51). As members of such a communio fundi originaria, persons may assert their right, not to the object itself, but against other persons as “first takers,” provisionally acquiring a tract and rightfully defending it against others with a view to the eventual conclusive acquisition that will take place in the civil state (40 note i, 54). In this way, the universality of original possession, in the charge of a nascent human community, guarantees the establishment of provisional right.

Yet the problem persists. For even with such a common possession, the puzzle of how to rightfully divide tracts between individuals remains unsolved. As human beings have “by nature the will to use [the earth] (lex iusti),” Kant writes, they would find its effective exploitation impossible “if this will did not also contain the principle for choice by which a particular possession for each on the common land could be determined” (54).

It is thus on the concept of Gewalt itself that the validity of Kant's theory of possession now depends. “It is possible,” he writes, “for an external object of my choice to be reckoned as rightfully mine if I have control [Gewalt] over it (and only in so far as I have control over it) without being in possession of it” (42, emphasis mine).Footnote ⁸ While enlarging the domain of right cannot be grouped straightforwardly with Recht, it can be considered part of the “permissive law (lex permissiva),” functioning to provide “an authorization that could not be got from mere concepts of right as such” (41, cf. Kant [1795] Reference Kant and Reiss2003, 97–8 and Gregor 776). In other words, right cannot proceed directly from might, but can do so by passing through an intermediate stage; it is not, in the long run, barred from right altogether.

In practice, however, the results are identical: If a person can claim—“choose”—a thing and effectively defend it, that thing thereby becomes hers—not only de facto, but de jure. In violation of his own principle, deployed against the labor theory of property, rightful title is again obtained by entering into a direct relationship with an object. Kant blithely quotes the saying “Happy are those who are in possession” to encapsulate the first principle of natural right: The very fact of one's initial control over an object—however arbitrary—provides nothing short of “a rightful basis for acquisition on which every first possessor can rely” (41, note i). But the legitimacy of such possession is dubious from the start, birthed in a tenebrous zone between legitimate control and groundless power. Or, in Benjamin's language, “Every good, limited by structures of time and space, has a possessive character trait that is an expression of its ability to pass away. Possession that is trapped by the same finitude, however, is unjust” (“Notes,” 166).

In a telling passage from his Religion essay, Kant had deployed the metaphor of communing with an “evil spirit [bösen Geist]” to warn against acting according to any maxim other than the moral law ([1793] Reference Kant, Greene and Hudson1960, 52). Foremost among such “spirits,” Kant tells us through a deliberate misquotation of Christian scripture, are “powers”—“Gewaltigen.” Yet in the Metaphysics of Morals' new formula, ownership is secured precisely through partnership with such nonmoral maxims, that is, with power [Gewalt] itself. Kant's emphases on the divide between legitimate and illegitimate uses of coercion not withstanding, then, it is by no means clear whether Gewalt can sustain its dual significations, its paradiastolic refashioning from unjustifiable violence to rightful authority. The Metaphysics of Morals violates Kant's own principle from Religion: Not only the state's laws, but its very moral-metaphysical foundation, stand directly opposed to the law of morality.

It is at this point that Benjamin steps in, facing the antinomy head-on and refusing Kant's new mystification based on Gewalt. For Kant, the existence of worldly justice is a condition of human worth: “For if justice [Gerechtigkeit] goes, there is no longer any value in human beings’ living on the earth” (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 105). For Benjamin, if there is no genuine foundation to the state's legitimacy, there is nothing to separate the blood of Gerechtigkeit from the blood of Gewalt: Right is made compatible with might, justice with violence. The two “commonwealths” cannot coexist, for such a reconciliation is built not on sound metaphysics but on a novel mythology. “For this reason,” Benjamin concludes, “there is no system of possession, regardless of its type, that leads to justice [Gerechtigkeit]” (“Notes,” 166).

BENJAMIN'S CATEGORY OF JUSTICE

Yet Benjamin's immanent critique is only half the story. Having undermined Kant's logic on its own terms, the meaning of the new standard he sets against his predecessor, “the Category of Justice,” remains undefined. What is clear is that it reflects Benjamin's utter refusal to accept the path of reconciliation. “Law and justice,” he argues, cannot be reconciled by any “system of possession.” They remain separated by a “great impasse [ungeheure Kluft],” one beyond the reach of any human attempt at social and political engineering, any mechanism of coercion (“Notes,” 167). It is “for this reason,” he continues, that “every socialist or communist theory falls short of its goal” (166). But if justice cannot be encapsulated by a just system of redistribution but “lies in the conditions of a good that cannot be possessed” (166), what does it look like? If “the responsibility for the world that we share is shielded from the instance of justice” (167), what is our responsibility? And if justice is an ontological category—a “state of the world” or “state of God” (166)—set beyond the reach of humanity's instrumental rationality, how is it attained? What bridges the impasse?

For an answer I turn now to the second component of Benjamin's “Justice” essays: his innovative understanding of justice itself, drawn from Judaism's messianic and iconological traditions. In them, he finds alternatives to politics with regard to both ends and means. On the one hand, accounts of the divine image furnish a concept of utopia which, while the subject of speculation and longing, contains a concept of justice wholly beyond human apprehension. On the other hand, Jewish eschatology, rather than taking the path of Kant's “ethical commonwealth” and renouncing the utopian society as a practical possibility, identifies the mechanism for its realization in noninstrumental, and especially righteous, behavior. The resulting worldview retains a utopian outlook while minimizing the temptation to make a particular vision of human flourishing the goal of worldly political activity.

At the conclusion to his “Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice,” Benjamin suggests that the “great impasse” between law and justice has been “captured by other languages.” By means of example, he offers three sets of paired concepts: “ius/fas,” “themis/dikē,” and, lastly, in Hebrew script, “mishpat/tzedek” (167).Footnote ⁹ Scholem's diary entry from a discussion around this period helps to clarify Benjamin's meaning:

What differentiates “idolatrous” right from true justice, then, is the role played by myth. Any actually existing system of right, in order to defend its Gewalt—its authority vis-à-vis property rights—must conceal itself behind a veil of unreal concepts and categories. It must, in other words, claim that it acts justly. True justice, by contrast, requires no such mystifications, for its authority, untied to possession, is not rooted in violence. It is something else entirely—a “divine category” set beyond the domain of the secular. “Justice is not a virtue,” Benjamin writes, “where virtue defines the ethical category of the demanded.” Instead, it is the category of the “ethically existing,” and for this reason “All virtue takes on the form of justice in God” (Benjamin “Theses,” 175).

The problem with extant theories of justice for Benjamin is twofold. First, if we refuse to ground legitimate possession in the concept of Gewalt, we are still stuck with the consequences of Kant's previous move: Namely, a world in which all people have the right to all objects, “the entirely abstract right of the subject to every good on principle, a right that is not based on needs” (166). Various socialist and communist attempts have been made to rectify this situation, to “eliminate the possessive character of goods,” either “through the fictitious anonymity of its possessor” or by positing a “foundationless theory of the ‘justified needs’ of the individual” (“Theses,” 174–5). Yet both of these attempts fail to bring about justice for a shared reason: their reliance on myth, and, by extension, violence. To repudiate notions of “justified needs,” Benjamin culls from Marx: “Theoretically no measure of justification can be proposed which would not be incidental (one which would not be arbitrarily linked to a particular level of consciousness)” (175). Needs, historically constructed, cannot be a priori determined. Against collective ownership, in which possession is dissolved by inventing a kind of totalizing Leviathan state, Benjamin's argument is more original. Such an entity will, under these conditions, assume an obligation to actualize justice by means of redistribution, accomplished, once more, through coercion. This is Benjamin's concise formulation: “Justice as a demand is the virtue of violence” (175). But in elaborating, he makes a revealing move:

Justice, according to Benjamin, cannot be conceived of as a “virtue” in the Kantian sense because it lacks a Kantian subject. It cannot, in other words, be translated into an obligation, as no duties issue from it. However—and critically—this does not spell the end of individual virtues. That is to say, the fact that the ontological state of the world we call “justice” cannot in itself issue demands for its realization through politics does not thereby imply that we live in a world bereft of individual responsibilities—or ethics.

This leads to Benjamin's second critique: That justice cannot be conceived of merely through a materialist theory of goods (Güterlehre). He communicates this through an inventive play on words. German grants some flexibility in rendering the term “good,” applicable to “goods” in the material sense and “good” in the ethical sense. For the former, both the singular das Gut and the plural die Güter are possible, while for the latter, we have at our disposal das Gute and die Guten.Footnote ¹¹ This in mind, we suddenly see the possibility of reading his essay's opening quite differently:

Whereas previously Benjamin appeared to be doing little more than reproducing Kant's move in The Metaphysics of Morals, now it becomes clear that he is speaking of goods in an ethical sense (das Gute). Hasty readers, eyeing the middle part of the essay which concerns das Gut, are liable to miss the change.

This is not to say that Benjamin is contradicting his earlier meaning—far from it. In fact, his cleverness has an ancient exegetical precedent: Pardes, the foundation of Jewish scriptural hermeneutics.Footnote ¹² Benjamin, having offered us his peshat—his “simple” meaning—invites us to formulate a remez, a “hinted” meaning. In so far as ethical goods remain bound to possessions, they retain a trace of their Besitzcharakter, their “possessive character trait” (Benjamin “Notes,” 166). And insofar as possession itself cannot be justified, ethics, in this form, must also be considered unjust. For such an ethics will remain tainted by the mystification of Gewalt, the coercive force behind possession. It will be implicated in violence. This reasoning, in turn, helps to lift the fog from the statement that comes after: “This [justice] lies in the conditions of a good [eines Gutes] that cannot be possessed—a good [das Gute] through which all goods [die Güter] become propertyless” (166). And so Benjamin now also spurs a derash, a search for comparative meaning. Its finding is revealing: The good that reflects the conditions of a just world is not of a material but an ethical nature. “Justice,” he declares later on in the essay, “is the ethical side of the struggle” (167).

But the paradox remains. If ethics establishes the conditions for justice, how can it not realize a just world? What does it mean that ethics both does and does not bridge the “great impasse” between law and justice, tzedek and mishpat? The answer lies in Benjamin's appropriation of ideas from Jewish messianic thought. Scholem himself hints at how he does this in a diary entry dated November 3, 1917:

Benjamin gleans two crucial resources from messianic thought for his evaluation of politics: The contrast between the secular and divine as arenas of human thought and action; and an ability to deploy the category or concept of the kingdom of God without expressing a will toward its establishment—the ability, in other words, to have an end that is at the same time not a goal.

By 1921, five years after the appearance of his “Justice” essays, Benjamin's interest in Jewish eschatology had crystallized to the point of his penning a short commentary on the subject. The so-called “Theological-Political Fragment” offers the clearest expression of the conceptual resources he found in messianic thought:

The critical political question here is the role of human agency: Does the messiah accomplish the messianic process himself, entirely apart from human activity? Or does he initiate the divine state, the leader of a human race that is itself busily working toward this end? As Eric Jacobson has suggested, Benjamin here sets himself between two traditions in Jewish eschatology. The first and older of these saw no particular task for humanity in the redemptive process. By the 16th century, however, the tenor of eschatological thought had radically changed, emphasizing, under the influence of the mystic Isaac Luria, the active part the species could play in hastening the messianic event (Jacobson Reference Jacobson2001, cf. Scholem Reference Scholem1961, 255–86).

At first glance, it would appear that Benjamin is siding straightforwardly with the older view. “The Kingdom of God,” he claims, “cannot be established as a goal,” and “nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic” (“Fragment,” 305). In part, what is at stake is humanity's ability to visualize God, to imagine utopia. Jewish theology strictly proscribes facsimiles of God, linked to concerns over idolatry and the diminution of the deity (Halbertal and Margalit Reference Halbertal, Margalit and Goldblum1992). The Bilderverbot (“image ban”), then, would seem to find a direct parallel in Benjamin's thought, tracking his strict separation of the divine and profane in the sphere of political action. Yet closer attention to his language yields a different conclusion. It is true that for Benjamin “the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom.” That is to say, we are barred from transforming utopian dreams directly into political ends and means: “Theocracy,” he insists, “has no political but only a religious meaning” (“Fragment,” 305).

What this means, however, is not that the idea of the theocratic is incapable of motivating human behavior, but rather that the form of behavior it motivates lies outside of the realm of politics—beyond the domain of law, coercion, and instrumental rationality. As he writes in his “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his dissertation project, even a fragment of thought, like the tile of a mosaic, retains some residue of the “transcendent force of the sacred image” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Osborne2003, 28–9). It preserves a power, in other words, to unsettle us, to disrupt our condition of apathetic reconciliation. Though arriving in a form that is fractured it contains within itself a force to wipe away the “mystical conception of history” that masks the coercive institutions of the profane world (“Fragment,” 305). What the idea of the divine reveals, then, is the possibility of an “end” that is not a goal, one that is not set within a Hegelian horizon but immanent, hidden somewhere in the world but beyond our immediate perception (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Bullock and Jennings2004, “On Language,” 71–2). To repeat Benjamin's words to Scholem: “The messianic kingdom is always present” (Scholem Reference Scholem and Skinner2008, 192).

We are now in a position to better understand Benjamin's thoughts on ethics, justice, and their interconnection. As a “state of the world” or “state of God,” justice is an ontological category that, like the divine image (tzelem), resists any attempt to be apprehended immediately, and, like the divine kingdom (ha-‘olam ha-ba), refuses any effort to be realized directly. It cannot be actualized though the force of law, equitable redistribution, or any Hegelian “world spirit on horseback.” Yet, far from diminishing our responsibility to the world, these facts serve instead to emphasize the depth of our obligation—not to an instrumental logic of politics, but toward an ethical community set within a nimbus of religious experience. Even as justice is disbarred from the stratagem of means-ends, it does remain in some sense an object of desire. And this leaves us with a paradox. “Justice,” Benjamin writes, “is the striving to turn the world into the highest good”; yet “the responsibility for the world that we share is shielded from the instance of justice” (Benjamin “Notes,” 167). I now offer a way we might resolve this puzzle. Benjamin's meaning materializes when his thoughts on justice are read alongside a particular Jewish theological concept, one that was the subject of much attention by Scholem and Benjamin but so far has attracted scant interest from Benjamin scholars: Shekhinah.

THE POSSIBILITY OF ETHICS

What links the “category of justice” to the “kingdom of God”? In this section, I begin by offering an answer to this question, illustrating Benjamin's second major departure from Kant—on the question of eschatology—before turning to Benjamin's “Critique of Gewalt” and full assessment of politics.

Scholem, who received a copy of his friend's essay in November, 1916, quotes Benjamin in his diary before offering a helpful suggestion:

Shekhinah is a name for the divine with origins in the ancient Israelite temple cultus, where it signified the divinity's immanence in the Kodesh Hakodashim, the inner sanctum.Footnote ¹⁴ More important for understanding Benjamin's thought, the concept of Shekhinah came during the early Rabbinic period to be associated with the connection between Jewish ethics and the arrival of the messianic age—that is, the age of perfect justice. Recalling Benjamin's use of the Hebrew tzedek, a Talmudic discussion connected to eschatology employs a play on words to suggest that one who gives tz'dakah [charity]—a tzadik, or “righteous person”—is worthy of “kabbalat pnei ha-Shekhinah,” of “receiving the face of the divine presence [Shekhinah]” (Talmud Bavli, Tractate Bava Batra, 10a). Scholem, continuing his entry on Benjamin, explains what he is getting at:

As Scholem surmised, the concept of Shekhinah occupies a critical, if subterranean, place in Benjamin's thinking.Footnote ¹⁵ For with it he is able, at last, to heal the antinomy that opened with his critique of Kant, the “great impasse” separating right and justice, secular and sacred, collective Gewalt and individual responsibility (“Notes,” 167). As Hirsch writes, “The tzadikim (righteous) will cause the Shekhinah to reside on earth” (Hirsch Reference Hirsch and Haberman2006, 1:510, translation modified). Thus we come to see how justice itself—the “head of the Shekhinah,” “the state of the world or the state of God”—can be attained: Not through the instrumental violence of Gewalt, but in tz'dakah, an ethics of the everyday, a moral program evacuated entirely of Gewalt. Shekhinah, as the manifestation of the divine in the world and within the human being, is also the manifestation of justice. Through it, Benjamin is able to articulate a new ethical program for humanity, directed toward an idealized community, but set apart from politics. The concept of Shekhinah, in other words, expresses our mediated relationship to utopia.

Benjamin thus appropriates the central tenet of Lurianic messianism while staying true to the Bilderverbot (“image ban”). Humanity cannot make the kingdom of God a goal, cannot picture or work toward the utopian society: “The responsibility for the world we share is shielded from the instance of justice” (Benjamin “Notes,” 167); “theocracy has no political meaning” (“Fragment,” 305). To think otherwise would bring the “catastrophe of violence” that attends revolutionary politics (“Theses,” 175). The community of the righteous on earth is consequently barred from striving directly for the messianic age—it cannot, in other words, work instrumentally to bring about the “state of justice.” But even if “truth is not a mover,” “justice,” he insists, “is the ethical side of the struggle” (“Notes,” 167). As Scholem writes, humanity can draw the divine presence downward—move the world closer, if in a roundabout way, to justice—through the practice of righteousness.

The concept of Shekhinah also helps Benjamin accomplish his second major departure from Kant: on the relationship between politics, morality, and eschatology. In his Religion essay, Kant notes that Christian scripture distinguishes between good and evil not through the imagery of heaven and earth but rather heaven and hell (Kant [1793] Reference Kant, Greene and Hudson1960, 73). This metaphor, he suggests, is indicative of the “immeasurable impasse [unermeßliche Kluft]” separating good from evil, of the fact that the two domains never pass over into one another. The philosophical product of this metaphor is drastic: a total rupture of the divine and secular realms, an end to the possibility for a fully purified vision of justice in this world. “The distance separating the good which we ought to effect in ourselves from the evil whence we advance,” Kant writes, “is infinite, and the act itself, of conforming our course of life to the holiness of the law, is impossible of execution in any given time” (60). For Kant, the truly good society lies beyond the world. Politics, therefore, is permanent, a necessary palliative for a species beyond the reach of redemption.

For Benjamin, by contrast, a bridge does exist linking our activity in this world to a state of true justice. He demonstrates this through a subtle modification of Kant's language. Benjamin, too, speaks of an ethical “impasse,” but in his writings it ceases to be “immeasurable [unermeßliche]” and becomes merely “great [ungeheure]” (Benjamin, “Notes,” 168). Here again we find Benjamin's debt to Jewish thought. The Torah's vision of a just world, however difficult to actualize, is nonetheless “not in the heavens. . .not beyond the sea” (Deuteronomy 30:12). Instead it is always potentially present on earth, its accessibility dependent on the deepening of ethical experience. What was for Kant an insurmountable division between heaven and hell becomes, for Benjamin, a traversable one between heaven and earth. And so we see that Benjamin's invitation to Jewish hermeneutics (pardes) also contains—in his eyes, at least—the highest level of exegetical procedure, a sod, or “mystical meaning” that bridges our world with that of perfect justice: Shekhinah.

At the same time, the content of Benjamin's ethics remains undefined to say the least. To propose “righteousness” as a social program is uncontroversial, even banal, but does little in the way of grounding a “new ethical category.” But he does, I think, have his sights set on a more ambitious end, one that becomes clear in the most overtly political, and controversial, of his works: Zur Kritik der Gewalt, “Toward a Critique of Gewalt.”

“Critique of Gewalt,” which like the “Theological-Political Fragment” appeared in 1921, begins with a clarity of purpose that is unusual for Benjamin. “The task of a critique of Gewalt,” he writes, “can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice [Recht und Gerechtigkeit]” for “the meaning of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate Gewalt is not immediately obvious” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Bullock and Jennings2004, “Critique of Gewalt,” 236, 238). Needless to say, the essay is presented in the same straightforwardly Kantian terms as his “Justice” pieces, building on what can be made of the “great impasse” between justice and right. Recall that for Kant, Gewalt, mere might becomes rightful title through the act of “choice” authorized by the permissive law. In “Critique of Gewalt,” Benjamin refers to this process as “military Gewalt” [Kriegsgewalt], linking it to a foundational violence occurring before the advent of the civil state (240). There is “inherent in all such Gewalt,” he notes, a “law-making character,” a likely allusion—as his passing reference to Kant's Perpetual Peace reveals—to the permissive law (240, cf. Kant [1795] Reference Kant and Gregor2003, 97–8). Benjamin, as we have seen, wholly rejects the legitimacy of this move, and in this work, he extends his critique of Kant to include not only conditions of original title but also the reverse condition, one in which all objects have juridical owners. In such a situation, a legal and ideological system has been created to legitimate the extant order of possession, which is almost always to the asymmetrical benefit of the very few. As Benjamin reminds us through the words of Anatole France: “Poor and rich alike are equally forbidden to spend the night under the bridges” (“Critique,” 249).

Perhaps fearing that future readers would reach precisely this conclusion, Kant had not only discouraged but expressly forbidden citizens from investigating their polity's foundations. “A people,” he wrote, “should not inquire with any practical aim in view into the origin of the supreme authority [obersten Gewalt] to which it is subject” (Kant [1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 95). If this were not enough evidence of how tenuous Kant saw the link between possession and right, his next argument leaves no doubt: All disagreements about acquisition should be set aside, for citizens of the present day should in no way be concerned whether “power came first and law arrived only afterward.” It is a “principle of practical reason” that “the presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin” (95). Laws are “holy” and “inviolable”—to call them into doubt with any thought toward their dismemberment is tantamount to sacrilege. “This,” Kant concluded, “is what the saying ‘All authority is from God’ means” (95).

Benjamin affirms this statement but reverses its conclusion. All authority is indeed from God; but in his view this serves not to sanctify but to demystify state power. Benjamin's term for such authority is “divine” or “pure Gewalt”—another Kantian echo, this time to the postulate of “pure practical reason” (“Critique,” 249). Practical reason is pure, for Kant, when human beings choose actions because they are good in themselves; it is impure when its inner form is overtaken by an external purpose (Kant [1788] Reference Kant and Reiss2003). By the same token, Gewalt is pure, for Benjamin, only when it remains in the province of the divine; it is impure when it is put in the service of any end other than itself, when it professes to function in service of Recht. Benjamin's tone here is thick with anti-Kantian irony: The heterogeneity of Gewalt is precisely its intersection with the category of justice, precisely its alleged ethical quality. And secular Gewalt knows no power greater—more naked, more brutal—than the “highest violence” of the legal system: the power over life and death: “In the exercise of violence over life and death, more than in any other legal act, right [Recht] reaffirms itself” (242). Yet Benjamin, in introducing this power, hints at the same time of a countervailing force, “a pure immediate Gewalt that might “be able to call a halt to mythic Gewalt.” “Just as in all spheres God opposes myth,” he writes, “mythic Gewalt is confronted by the divine” (249).

In one sense, Benjamin returns to the theological motif to emphasize a claim made earlier: the stark divide between right and justice. Recalling his previous conceptual-linguistic pairings—“ius/fas,” “themis/dikē,” “mishpat/tzedek—he connects the futile efforts of “evolving languages” to authentically conceptualize ethics to the “stubborn prevailing habit” of confusing legal means with just ends (247). Yet as he makes clear in “Right to use Force [Gewaltanwendung],” an essay from the same period, he intends more than this:

In their discussions on Judaism a few years earlier, Scholem reported that Benjamin was drawn to one idea in particular: the application of the death penalty in Rabbinic law (Scholem Reference Scholem and Skinner2008, 302, cf. 1995–2000, 2:337 and Jacobson 189–90). In Jewish law (Halakhah), capital punishment, while technically on the books, is never used in practice; a Talmudic opinion calls a high court (Sanhedrin) that exercised the power only once in 70 years extremely bloody (Talmud Bavli, Tractate Makkot, 7a). What this apparent paradox demonstrates for Benjamin, then, is a transformation in the ambitions of politics. Whereas Israelite theocracy understood itself as a mere viceroy to a higher power, the modern state attempts to monopolize Gewalt, to neutralize completely the impact of divine authority on worldly affairs (“Critique,” 239). If Gewalt was once understood to lie in the sphere of the supernal, it is now plainly in the hands of humanity's imitatio dei, the “mortal god” of the state.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet mythology's victory is not total, and in the providence of divine power Benjamin discerns a glimmer of hope, a force that can confront mythic violence. In the sphere of “pure Gewalt,” we see the possibility of a new kind of politics—“the politics of pure means”:

Here we find a second Kantian echo. Kant, in his second formulation of the categorical imperative, introduces an important nuance to his doctrine of “means”: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means” (Kant [1785] 1993, 36, emphasis mine). For Kant, the “mere” is an absolutely necessary addition to his theory. For without it, he will soon find his system entirely incompatible with the existent world of politics, power, and possession. Ethics must therefore be detached, given a separate category of activity that somehow permits these deviations: the “mere.” For Benjamin this is an unacceptable giving of ground. “One might doubt,” he writes, “whether this famous demand does not contain too little—that is, whether it is permissible to use, or allow to be used, oneself or another as a means in any respect whatsoever” (“Critique,” 252 note 2).

If Kant has already sullied the sphere of justice with the pollution of Gewalt, here he is sullying the sphere of morality with the contamination of instrumental reasoning. Kant, in his fervent desire to construct a theory capable of reconciling the ethical and the political—the two “commonwealths”—has instead created a world in which each annihilates the other. Politics, Benjamin insists, is in its “true” form nothing but violence, baseless authority cloaked by the myth of metaphysical possession. Kant in fact uncovered this essential mythology through his philosophical inquiries, but instead of accepting its consequences, opted to give politics a modicum of moral authority. He permitted might to become right. But most importantly, he committed great heresy, crowning his system with a designation that was not rightfully his to use: “justice.” In doing so, Benjamin contends, Kant not only distorted politics, but also forced himself to accept a corrupted vision of ethics, the only vision that could make an orderly society, as he conceived of it, possible.

Benjamin's response is nothing short of his own version of the categorical imperative, a “new ethical category,” a kingdom of ends more Kantian than Kant: Act in such a way that you employ humanity always as an end, never as a means. Here we have the clearest expression of his “higher order of freedom”: A restoration of the concept of justice to its rightful position, and a new ethics, one cleansed entirely of Gewalt. Whereas Kant legitimates a form of intersubjectivity stained by violence, Benjamin seeks an arena of human activity set entirely against the barbarity of means-ends. Borrowing from the Jewish writer Ahad Ha'am, his is a “culture of the heart” [Kultur des Herzens], a community of freely acting individuals in which the human being itself is elevated, raised out of the dust of the “mere.”Footnote ¹⁷

And, unlike for Kant, such a community represents a genuine historical possibility: Scholem, commenting on Benjamin, cites Maimonides’ rejection of the claim that the world to come “is not yet here, that it will come only after the decline of this world.” “This is not the meaning,” he insists, but rather that “the world to come is continuously becoming” (“Theses,” 176, cf. Jacobson Reference Jacobson2003, 222). Benjamin, who would later reference Maimonides in his article for Encyclopedia Judaica, emphasizes that justice cannot be achieved through revolutionary violence (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Gödde and Lonitz1995, 2:807). If “Mythical Gewalt is bloody Gewalt over mere life for its own sake,” he writes, then “divine Gewalt is pure Gewalt over all life for the sake of the living” (“Critique,” 250). The state cannot be anything but a reservoir of power and interest; it is to the individual and the ethical community that any hope for metamorphosis may be sought. The change will come in the institution of a new way of acting, a new form of being—in the possibility, in other words, of a genuine ethics. What will be different is the availability of a sphere of life in which we might treat one another always as ends, never as means.

Pace Habermas, then, Benjamin plainly does not seek the “violent destruction of the normative as such” (Habermas Reference Habermas1992, 137). His end is not the perfection of the Schmittean project, not a species-being saturated by politics, but precisely the opposite: A complete diminution of the political, a liquidation of all Gewalt as the ethical swells in scale and scope. Pace Agamben, this end cannot be achieved through political means—not through a revolutionary vanguard, not through social democracy—not, in other words, in the world of the secular (Agamben [2003] Reference Agamben and Attell2005, 53). Benjamin quotes Kurt Hiller's “Anti-Cain” to represent the position of those who would justify killing in the divine name: “If I do not kill, I shall never establish the world dominion of justice. . .that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist” (“Critique,” 252 note 8). For Benjamin such reasoning is an abnegation of humanity itself, a reduction of the circumstances of human existence to base material possession—to profane violence—and a rejection of a true striving toward justice in the form of ethics. “Man,” he insists, “cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him” (“Critique,” 251). Politics must set fully apart of all its moral conceits, revealed for its mystifications and stripped of all of its utopian pretensions. The “revolution” Benjamin seeks through pure divine Gewalt is not political but ethical: Through righteousness—the ethical “good” (das Gute)—questions of possession are diminished, as “all [material] goods [die Güter] become propertyless” in a domain of experience purified of myth. Justice—that “not-yet-attained condition of the just human being”—is drawn down to earth. And humanity, retaining itself as humanity, inches a few steps closer to bringing back that which has been exiled.

AFTER THE SHEKHINAH

This article has offered a new interpretation of Walter Benjamin's early political thought. Drawing upon recently discovered early essays, as well as diaries and correspondence, I have argued that his ideas represent an innovative synthesis of Kantian moral philosophy and elements of Jewish theology. I began by locating his work in the philosophical tradition of immanent critique. Benjamin was a close reader of Kant, and he uncovered a logical flaw in the Metaphysics of Morals: the integration of violence into juridical authority, facilitated by the concept of Gewalt, is based on a groundless theory of possession and justice. The result is that Kant's synthesis of ethical and political life as presented in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason is without moral-metaphysical foundation. I then reconstructed Benjamin's own theory of justice, locating its intellectual origins in Jewish messianic and iconological traditions. Benjamin radically disjoins the achievement of a just world from the coercive methods of politics. At the same time, he hints at other means for attaining justice. This apparent paradox, I suggested, has a solution that is also rooted in Jewish theology, specifically the idea of the Shekhinah or “divine presence.” Through the concept of Shekhinah, he can retain an absolute and inviolable category of justice, one to be achieved noninstrumentally through ethics. In the last part of the article, I filled in the contours of Benjamin's moral theory by offering a new reading of his “Toward a Critique of Gewalt.” Contrary to past interpreters, I argued that the work does not advocate for violent, totalizing revolution but just the opposite: a new ethical ideal, one utterly divorced from violence, power, and politics.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel introduces a figure whose unbending faithfulness to the Kantian system makes any meaningful activity in the world impossible, for fear that he would fail at conducting himself with absolute moral purity. This is the quietist self par excellence, the “beautiful soul,” and in light of the above, it would be tempting to call Benjamin the most beautiful of all souls (Hegel [1807] Reference Hegel and Miller1977, 383–4). Yet this would be a mistake, and not only because he speaks approvingly of the tactics of nonviolent resistance and the proletarian general strike (“Critique,” 245–6). Richard Wolin has suggested that Benjamin, despite his “innate distrust of politics as a solution to the failings of humanity,” was nonetheless “political in a roundabout way” (1982, 12). It might be more accurate to describe Benjamin as a theorist not of politics as such, but instead of the capital-p Political, especially in relation to its permanent foil, the Ethical. Rather than a fully systemized theory, what he offers us in his thoughts on justice is a new way of conceiving of these two categories themselves. His most urgent question is, How must politics be conceived, and how must the self be oriented toward politics, in order for a genuine ethics to be possible? In answering, he furnishes an image of an ethical sphere evacuated entirely of the brutal logic of politics, and of a politics “purified” of its pretensions to genuine ethics. The result is radical, nothing less than a re-imaging of the concepts of justice, utopia, and the ethical itself.

Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, writing on everyday life in late Soviet Russia, identifies a lived orientation of this kind that he calls “being vnye” (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006, 126–157). Those practicing vnye eluded binary categorization: Neither nihilistic nor apolitical, neither quiescent nor partisan, they sought to cultivate forms of moral life away from the demands of politics. Confronted with the brutality of the Soviet state and a culturally impoverished public sphere, vnye individuals formed for themselves a “whole universe of meaning,” not against but apart from politics. As they gently pushed away both dissidents and collaborators, they read books, recited poetry, produced music, and discussed physics. Faced with a world drained of all human personality they carefully rebuilt their humanity. Affirmation of their society meant slavery and self-abnegation. But, in a different way, so too did resistance. And so they refused a reconciliation of ethics and politics, fleeing the political so that they might live once again as full persons.

At the same time, in spite of Benjamin's critical attitude toward politics, there is a case to be made that his own writing contains agonistic elements.Footnote ¹⁸ Never arranged in systematic form, it represents an uneasy melding of Jewish, Kantian, Marxist, and many other modes of thought. His pointed refusal to invent his own philosophical vocabulary guaranteed that each of his carefully chosen words—drawn from a remarkable range of literary, aesthetic, theological, and philosophical sources—arrived on the page charged with history, depth, and, more often than not, ambiguity. And there is no question that his philosophy remained in flux throughout his life, to the bafflement of colleagues and friends.

Yet on another level, Benjamin's thought is not agonistic, and certainly never haphazard. It is purposeful, suffused with a radical moral hope, a loftier vision of humanity. It is set, in short, in the service of a category of justice: One that is demanding and absolute—what he would call divine. As Benjamin reminds us, the saturation of the political is not innocent, and among its victims may be the spheres of existence and forms of experience necessary for ethical life. Politics has a certain viscosity: it seeps into our relationships and leaves behind a residue. If its essence is the use of law, backed by power, for the ordering of society, then any realm of experience caught up in the political must also be implicated in structures of rule. It will be complicit in the mastery of one human being over another. To emphasize the ineluctability of power is also to renounce the quest for a different, higher form of social relations, one purified of violence. It should be no surprise, then, that among Benjamin's favorite metaphors is the constellation: an eidetic reflection of inspired tension, a moment of awareness that arrives in the form of an impression, however fragile, of a radically transformed reality. And yet like a constellation itself, such a reality was, in some sense, always there.

As I have tried to show here, it would be a mistake to press Benjamin into any procrustean category. He was no more a “Kantian-Marxist” than a “Marxist-Rabbi.” Even so, it is an argument of this article that to ignore the impact of Judaism on his thought would be to miss something important. To see only the “mere life” of the human being is to enter the Holy of Holies in the manner of Pompey—and find nothing within but an empty room. Benjamin's community of the righteous thus lives with its back turned toward the state, disengaged from politics, committed fully to its moral project. Yet we need not turn with them in order to learn from their example. The so-called “Oldest System Program of German Idealism” begins with a cryptic statement of purpose: “Eine Ethik,” “An Ethics” (“Oldest Systematic Programme,” [1797] 1996). To secure a space for the possibility of genuine ethics—as Benjamin reminds us, this too can be a project, if not for politics, then perhaps for political theory. In a world apparently empty of God, fought over by mortal gods, saturated by violence, we might still set ourselves after the Shekhinah.