"Affinities with the Worst": Divine Violence, Nature's Teleology, and Benjamin's Relationship to Radical Conservatism

This paper takes up Jacques Derrida’s worry that Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence too closely mirrors the forms of mythic violence that it is supposed to undo. It places Derrida’s concerns in the wider context of Benjamin’s relationship of “intimate enmity” with radical conservative thinkers. The “Critique of Violence” was intended by Benjamin as one part of a larger political project, in which he sought to respond to the variety of forms of vitalist politics popular among both left- and right-wing figures in the early twentieth century. By setting “Critique of Violence” within this wider perspective, the paper underscore two important features of Benjamin’s politics: first, his assumption that emancipatory practices stand in an uncomfortable proximity to that which they seek to overcome and, second, his insistence that the realms of politics and of divine justice are not coextensive, with the result that their relation always remains troubled.