Ep. 237: Walter Benjamin Analyzes Violence (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I'm sure, I'm sure.

0:01 Wes: But they will say that to you while they're beating the shit out of you.

0:09 Mark: So I think we've kind of reached a splitting off point here. We've established what Benjamin's view of really, the state is always founded on violence, right? It's certainly on potential violence. Right. Even if it's not explicitly abusing its subjects, it sets limits. And if the subjects move out of those, then they will be punished, and they have to be in order for the state to maintain its monopoly on power. That this is just something essential to the state itself. So in illustrating this, he provides a contrast to, well, what kind of negotiations don't require violence?

Speech. And so this is the thing that Judith Butler runs with and says this is actually the. The solution that the essay provides. This provides a way of talking about nonviolence, the communicative act involved in speech. And then there's the way that he actually concludes the story, which is by talking about this pure form of violence that he calls divine violence. And Butler just says, yeah, that's the flashiest part of this, but it's pretty weird and you should probably just ignore it, like the good stuff happens earlier. So I think we have those two steps left to talk about here.

Do you like my characterization there about how it seems like he's not really admitting that There are some states that are much, much worse than others. Right. Because they're all founded on violence and they all reinforce that. Every time a police officer enforces a law, it's repeating that act of state establishment. And I don't know, it seems like you might want to not just paint all states with the same awful brush there.

1:49 Seth: Well, no.

1:50 Wes: What do you.

1:51 Seth: I'm sorry, we don't want to paint all states with the same awful brush.

1:55 Mark: Am I missing something? Yeah. What do you think?

1:58 Wes: Notallstates. I mean, ultimately. Yeah, right. The abolition of the state is going to be the thing that he's advocating.

2:07 Mark: Well, that's not the way Seth read it. Is this just a critique of all states? As opposed to a critique in the Kantian sense of we just want to understand better what a state is. And a state is a thing that has the monopoly of violence and that's fine.

2:20 Wes: So just to set this up a little bit more on the last page, on the breaking of the cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, mythical forms being these sort of forms that are punitive. And part of this whole means ends analysis. We'll talk about that. More on the breaking of the cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it. Finally, therefore, on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded. If the existence of violence outside the law as pure, immediate violence is assured. This furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man is possible and by what means. So, yeah, give us the Butlerian interpretation of that.

3:12 Seth: Well, I don't know if it's benign or Butlerian. It might be butt headed, but. Okay, so we mentioned in the last episode, we were talking about the threat of violence from outside of the legal system and how that's a threat to the system itself, just by virtue of the fact that an extralegal violence could conceivably instantiate new law or different law. Prior to the section that you mentioned, Wes, he talks about a type of revolutionary violence that then becomes institutional violence. So there's a rebellion against the system, but the people who rebel are the forces that rebel.

That violence becomes law instantiating violence as well. Right. That the revolutionary violence becomes law making violence. And you just start the whole cycle over again because it's a new state, it's a new legal system, but it's the same inherent violence. And what he's trying to do is he's trying to say, is it possible to oppose the state with a force that's not violent in the state sense of it, but is a force which would allow for an overthrow of law without the further instantiation of a new legal system that would be truly revolutionary.

And I think the sort of lightweight reading that I suggested and at the beginning of this conversation was that he sees that what he calls divine violence, he sees that there is another type of violence which is extralegal and is not caught up in this mechanism of ends and means and is not lawmaking or law preserving. We can get into what that is. But for him that's proof that you can escape the legal system of violence. And so he says, by virtue of that, some kind of revolutionary force or revolutionary action that would not just simply replicate the violence of state making and state destroying, but would actually be something different is possible.

And what Butler pointed to in the conversation and in her book is that he has kind of a little section here about nonviolent conflict resolution. He says that's possible. I don't think he's thinking of revolutionary action as nonviolent conflict resolution, but where he's trying to identify a path for some kind of exertion of force that would destroy the state but somehow instantiate something that would not be similar to the state. She looks at his notion of nonviolent conflict resolution and thinks that that's probably the better path out of it.

5:50 Wes: But what is he saying about that? On 289 says, Is any nonviolent resolution of conflict possible? Without a doubt. And then the relationships of private persons are full of examples of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement. So in other words, you don't need a contract. You're not going to say you're going to be punished or sued or whatever if you don't fulfill a contract. It just happens by virtue of sort of a human inherent social trust. And then legal and illegal means of every kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones as unalloyed means, courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, their subjective preconditions.

The objective manifestation, however, is determined by the law. And what does that mean? They never apply directly to the resolution of conflict between man and man, but only to matters concerning objects relating to goods. So I guess it has something to do with resolving conflicts, right?

6:56 Mark: Clearly you don't need this whole. Their objective manifestation is determined by the law. The sphere of nonviolent means opens up in the realm of human conflicts relating to goods, you don't necessarily need that. I'm just not sure why they couldn't relate to people as well. Right. It seems like economic relations. Yeah, yeah. And the relationship between customer and seller. Picture a barter sort of situation where there really is no external. I know, I've heard discussions about capitalism that. Oh, you might think that capitalism is this pure unalloyed enforcement free zone, that it's just people pursuing their private interests.

But no, it actually requires dedication to morality and to law and things all the way up and down. Because what are the alternatives? Like, how would you. I guess it's just saying that if somebody robs you, then you just don't do business with them. Again, that is the only enforcement that you would have. Not that if they rob you, you're gonna club them or you're gonna call the police. There's nothing else.

7:56 Seth: Well, he suggests here, and not that this whole thing isn't somewhat convoluted, but he's talking about nonviolent agreement and he's contrasting it to, say, a legally binding contract. So the suggestion here is that I keep thinking in terms of natural law here, not positive law, because I don't really know that much about positive law, but that the legally binding contract is enforceable with a third party, external state violence. And the terms of the agreement are very clearly defined. And there's no direct relationship between the two parties in the sense that once we make the agreement, it doesn't matter to me what you think.

I don't have to be courteous or sensitive to you about any of the things that you want or you need. I'm not relying on you for anything. It's like we made an agreement. I'm going to get my thing, you're going to do your thing. And if either of us violates the terms of the contract, then the state will intervene. But the suggestion here is that agreement, it's a non violent, binding, non legal, non contractual situation between two individuals or maybe two groups. And there are no punishments that are predefined. There's no justice or sanction for adhering to or not adhering to the agreement.

I don't know if that's 100% true, but it's something like that, right?

9:20 Mark: Well, it seems like if there is a sanction, that it really is post hoc. You know, if you make an agreement to be married to somebody, okay, well, if you violate that, there are things that the law can do to come in. But that is really kind of beside the point.

9:35 Seth: Right.

9:36 Mark: Doesn't it feel like that the point of the agreement was the relationship was peaceable coexistence. And if somebody screws that up, it's not like the law smacking them on the hand is going to repair that relationship. It's just some punitive afterthought.

9:51 Seth: Yes.

9:52 Mark: Is that the same for trade relations? If I violate this contract, then I'm going to have to pay a big fine and so then I'll go back to behaving myself and trade with you in good faith again. It sort of seems like it might be the same thing. Of course, when it's a many to many relationship, as the economy is, and not a one to one relationship, then it complicates things. So we're really punishing someone for their being a bad purchaser in general, we're not really punishing them for violating this particular agreement. We're just punishing them for not being a good capitalist actor. And maybe that is something that after you pay a fine, you'll not want to steal and violate it. I don't know.

10:30 Seth: Well, it definitely seems like he's suggesting there's an alternative here to working within a legal system using contracts. The alternative is that you can have this kind of nonviolent agreement between two people who trust each other and so on and so forth. The question is, why does he drop this in here? He says at the end that violence is just part of the way of being for human beings. He's suggesting that this is a way that individuals, I guess, can interact with each other. But it doesn't seem to be part of the broader structure of what he's putting forth in the essay. To the extent that Butler plays off

11:13 Mark: of this, you don't think this is supposed to be a picture of. Even though he doesn't make this explicit. If you take Wes's interpretation, the interpretation of one of our secondary sources, that his whole conclusion is we need the full on revolution against all states are rotten to the core. They inherently have violence with them. We just need to get rid of states. So what would remain? What would the state of anarchy look like? We still have this mechanism of nonviolent agreement. And I think a lot more work would need to be done. If you want to convince somebody right now, like let's get rid of the state, let's just go with voluntary associations.

It seems like you'd have to do a lot of work to sketch out much more than he has here of what that would involve. And Butler doesn't hope that Butler doesn't want to get rid of the state. So that's not what she takes it. But she still sees so many places for relationality that are on the one hand going to escape state regulation for reasons we've said already. And they could be things between states, they could be actions between a state and migrants who don't have a state. You know, is the kind of thing she has in mind. But also she wants to take this away, that they should actually guide how states write their laws.

That there really are more just and less just ways of writing laws. And you can write them so that they inflict systematic violence on the poor. Or you could write them so they don't do that, that they actually take measures to preserve which would then be inflicting violence on predators who would take advantage of the poor. Right. You've got to inflict violence on somebody if you've got a law. But she evidently thinks that's okay. I think that he's saying no.

12:47 Seth: Well, you raise an interesting point here, Mark, that maybe he conceives of this notion of nonviolent conflict resolution through agreement as being an achievable state after the usurpation of the law. So in other words, where within a legal structure agreement is extralegal, but let's say a sanctioned or permitted by the law. Are you saying that maybe Benjamin thinks that there's a revolutionary violence which gets rid of the existing legal system, does not instantiate another legal system and it's not law making violence and that instead institutes a new regime of, you know, interpersonal agreement without law, a society without laws, but only with trust and courtesy. And it's difficult to know.

13:38 Mark: Apparently this Sorel he read a bunch of anarchists, right? He hadn't read much actual Marx. He had not made this explicit turn toward Marxism. Maybe he's kind of referring to the utopian pictures that they've sketched out. I mean the way he actually describes it in here, just to kind of slightly make a transition to the last point about divine violence is that the full on revolution detaches means from ends. That it's pure means that we're going to just have instead of a strike that is going to say give me more money, give us livable conditions or we're going to inflict harm on society by not doing our jobs here.

But as soon as you give in, then we're back in the game. Like that's a negotiation that's actually usurping some of the force that the society is supposed to have. At his Disposal and you know, you're using extortion against them. But he contrasts that the full on revolutionary strike, which is we don't want anything from your society except to stop existing. We're going to make this a fatal blow. We're not just going to extort you, we're going to murder you, basically through inaction. You being the state, that all the workers are just going to refuse to take it anymore.

And rather than getting their pitchforks, they're all just going to sit down and stay sitting down until the state dissolves because it needs certain things to survive. Is that what you got Wes, out of that?

15:02 Wes: Well put.

15:03 Mark: Now what the hell that has to do with divine violence? That's some of the weirdest part of this essay.

15:09 Wes: Well, I think it's divine in the sense it's meant to transcend these utilitarian considerations, but also transcend a dynamic of retribution. So ultimately has something to do with guilt and with punishment. And divine violence is meant to move beyond that.

15:26 Mark: Can I try to clarify? So I thought that introducing mythical violence with a way of taking a step toward divine violence, that it is detaching means and ends in a certain way because we've said that a state enacts all these laws as a means to support its own power and to further its own aims and, and ideally, you know what the law is, it's really, you know, it's trying to keep you in check, it's trying to keep you within the bounds. Because actually societies don't want to just kill all their subjects. They want everybody to behave as a well formed citizen.

Whereas divine violence is much more brutal, much more arbitrary, much more unannounced that oh hey, did you know you, you've been walking on sacred land and lightning comes out and kills you. That's mythical violence, right? That it's really just about them. It could be they don't like the way that you're talking. That seems like in so many of the myths it's like somebody was proud, was bragging about stuff, blind. Turn him into a statue, turn him into a sheep, whatever. The thing is, it's not completely detaching means and ends because they are committing these acts of retribution on you for violating their laws.

16:42 Wes: Well, I think the point. So in 294, right? So she brags about having more children.

16:47 Seth: Artemis Niobe has more children than the God who gave birth to Apollo.

16:53 Wes: So their violence establishes a law far more than it punishes for the infringement of one already existing. So Niobe's arrogance calls down fate upon itself, not because her arrogance offends against the law, but because it challenges fate. Because it challenges fate to a fight in which fate must triumph and can bring to light a law only in its triumph. So I thought this idea of mythical violence was a way at getting at violence that's not legal violence in the sense of its law enforcement. It's the kind of violence that establishes the law in the first place. It's this more primordial sort of violence. That's the point of using this word mythical.

17:35 Mark: Right. But then when we get rid of that apparent distinction between law preserving and

17:39 Wes: law creating, those are both mythical forms of mythical violence. Right.

17:44 Mark: Law preserving is a form of mythical violence.

17:47 Wes: Yeah. And I have to admit I'm relying heavily on the secondary literature.

17:53 Mark: I thought it was ultimately saying that this was supposed to illustrate that actually the state is unjust, even though it does use this more indirect means. Right. It actually has this means end in passing laws and trying to get you to operate within them. Even though it has the veneer of something more civilized than mythical violence, ultimately its foundations are just as arbitrary and cruel.

18:15 Wes: Yeah, it's all a manifestation of mythical violence. It's ambiguous. Right. So you say, well, what's going on when a law is enforced? We kind of discussed this at the beginning. Is it a punishment? Is the punishment for the sake of reestablishing the balance of things and justice requires it? Or if at least it's a deterrent or any other number of explanations? Or does it go deeper than that? Is it about power? Is it about saying where the power lies and who has the power? Which is what I think mythical violence is all about. So mythical violence, the saying it's all about power, manifests itself always within state violence within state sanctioned violence.

There's always this mythical element of it. And so true justice, on Benjamin's view, requires going to the point of divine violence where you get beyond any idea of means and ends. Right. Justice in this sense, in this divine sense is not about retribution and nor is it about power. Yeah, it's about.

19:17 Mark: It's about nothing.

19:20 Wes: It's about the ends. Right. It's about the actual final ends.

19:26 Mark: Is it? I thought the whole point was it's means without ends.

19:29 Wes: I know it sounds contradictory, but he does say, well, let's get a quote. So justice is the principle of all divine end, making power the principle of all mythical lawmaking. So this is page 295. So mythical lawmaking is about power and divine violence. Justice is about the making of ends. That is mysterious. I mean, don't get me wrong, it seems. And yeah, it's meant to transcend the means end the whole dynamic of figuring out what justice is by relating means to ends. But I still think it has something to do with this end making stuff.

20:10 Mark: Well, does that have something to do with the distinction, very Nietzschean sounding distinction between mere life and living. Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake. Divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. That's on page 297. It is for the sake of whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing which is to be distinguished from mere life. So you might think that if you bow down to every dictator that yeah, you'll stay alive. Yeah, but that's mere life.

20:42 Wes: Right.

20:43 Mark: Whereas what he's saying, maybe this is left not further described because it's supposed to be existentialist, you know, proto existentialist. This is the 20s, not the 30s. This is before Sartre wrote being nothingness. But those ideas were certainly floating around. Or maybe he had a specifically religious idea of this, such that for the sake of the living. What does that mean? Maybe our purpose is to serve God or something and that's distinct from just mere breathing in and out. That would not distinguish us from animals. Seth, did you read the. Either read the article or just have any thoughts about this as that he's asserting obliquely his Judaism here. I mean this is why he's making this strong contrast between myths and the divine. That these are for an atheist like me sort of seem like the same kind of thing, but he has a very distinct idea.

21:36 Wes: Let me read one more quote before Seth chimes in just to get at some of what's going on. So 297. If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law destroying. If the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them. If mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates. If the former threatens, the latter strikes. If the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

22:02 Mark: So is this like turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt? That, that somehow that's fundamentally different than turning Niobe into a statue and killing your kids like those seem very similar to me. But if he's got a particular Judaic take on why those are quite different, that I don't understand. And Benjamin doesn't give us here, so I can't force. I don't want to put you on the spot, Seth.

22:27 Seth: No, no, that's fine. I. I can't help you with that because I definitely felt the Judaic influence there, particularly when it's talking about. He talks about the particularity that I mentioned earlier, the situational aspect of justice, and that it's particular to the situation. That kind of particularity versus a kind of a Christian universality is very Judaic. And the bloodless. What was the word used, Wes, and that he uses in here? Not eradication, but expiation, Divine power.

22:57 Mark: Expiates.

22:58 Seth: Expiation, yes. So in the Old Testament, there's a part where God says I am, that I am. It's this sense in which God isn't saying I am what I am, or I am I am because I am, or I'm justified in being that I am. It's this tautological affirmation of the complete transcendence of God. And so the notion that colloquially we talk about God's justice, but God is extra legal in the Benjamin sense, and that he wrote a law, but his violence does not instantiate laws. When he's clearing a path for the Hebrews to go across the desert by smiting, smiting their opponents, or in burning Sodom and Gomorrah and so on, there's no lawmaking or law preserving in that because it's unrelated to either the existing legal system there or even the Commandments.

In fact, there's no reason for it. It seems senseless to at least a modern reader. So I can't speak meaningfully to the contrast between that and mythical violence, like comparing the lot's wife to Niobe, because to me, they are similar cases. You're still talking about gods when you're talking about the myth. And in fact, Benjamin says explicitly that what the gods do, you don't interpret that as being done for a reason or to ex. It's pure retribution. And now maybe that's the difference is retribution versus expiation.

24:30 Mark: Well, clearly, if you think that the Greek gods have personalities and they get mad, then they might be vindictive. Whereas the Hebrew God, according to this interpretation at least, is above all that. So that it can't be retribution that involves some human emotion that Yahweh does not have.

24:50 Seth: Hmm.

24:51 Wes: It's Exodus, by the way.

24:53 Seth: Yeah, well, I don't think that conception of the monotheistic deity is very Judaic. I mean, if you read the Old Testament, it's hard not to believe that he's petty and demanding and vindictive and all those things, so we should just stop.

25:08 Mark: I'm sure that he's got. Well, in addition to the anarchists he was reading, he was also reading Jewish scholarship and I'm sure had a very distilled philosopher God kind of take on Yahweh. That is going to reinterpret God being jealous and God being pissed off and things that seem described pretty literally like that in the Old Testament in a much more abstract, non mythological way.

25:32 Seth: Yeah, that's probably true. That distinction did not come through very clearly. Maybe I should have read some secondary literature, but.

25:39 Mark: Well, so how do we. What are we supposed to get out of that? I. Right on. At least the. Sorry, is it the Larson that interprets him as saying that it's for sure he's calling for abolition? Yes, that he's a messianic Marxist. He argues that divine violence signals the coming of the Messiah in the form of the revolutionary general strike, which will bring about a new historical epoch. I mean, if you want to actually interpret this as being a direct political call to action, which is what this article by Larson does, then you have to interpret this as when you are acting in a revolutionary manner, you at least think there's at least a possibility that Benjamin is giving you sort of a logical extreme, that there could be revolutionary violence.

That is violence. It is stabbing people in the heart, it is shooting them in the head. But that is somehow pure because it is not means end directed. It's not even saying once we kill these people then we're going to have paradise. It's not even doing that. It's merely striking down, just like God is striking down these people without warning. Yahweh is. It's trying to get rid of the state, sort of without future thought of what would come after that. And somehow this essay could justify that. I mean, that seems completely bizarre to me, but I think that's what Larson's interpretation was.

Wes, did you buy that from. I think you pointed us at this article.

27:05 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't know how else to interpret it. I think it's an obscure piece that Benjamin has written and it's hard to the talk of pure means and all that. I mean, how do you make sense of it?

27:17 Mark: Yeah, I tried earlier on. I alluded to this connection to Kant, that you could be in appreciating the beautiful. You're playing in your sensibility with the existence of means, end analysis. But there's no actual end. Right. You're not appreciating the beautiful apple because you want to eat it. It's just the play of faculties is an end in itself. And so likewise, this divine violence is playing with violence in itself with no point. That seems horrible, but I'm not sure how that can't be a correct interpretation.

27:57 Wes: Yeah, I think you're thinking of the Khatib here, the other secondary source I sent you.

28:02 Mark: Okay.

28:03 Wes: And then he gets into relating it to language as well. But yeah, I don't know.

28:10 Mark: Well, let's look at that Khatib in that. So it's Section 8 in there on Divine Violence, Towards a Politics of Pure Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence by Sami Khatib. So we will link to both those.

28:24 Wes: It's in the mythic violence section. But yeah, he's talking about what you were just talking about with the purposiveness without a purpose from the Critique of Judgment. And yeah, I don't know how you get to something non instrumental in this case.

28:40 Mark: Let's read a quote from there. So that's section four in there. The application of mythic violence to life produces a very peculiar form of life that Benjamin calls naked or bare life. Bare life is not simply natural or biological life, but a product of legal violence. Bare life is rendered as the natural bearer of guilt, a culpable life which is at the same time the subject matter of the modern humanist doctrine of the sanctity of life, which the humanists either apply to all animal or even vegetable life or limit human life. Benjamin, however, dares to ask what is sanctioned in such a doctrine, a doctrine which is also the foundation of the modern idea of inalienable human rights.

For Benjamin, the abstract subject matter of human rights is bare life, a life deprived of its suprabiological properties. The sanctification, we might even say, fetishization of life as such, leads to a life without freedom, truth or justice. From this he concludes that the idea of man's sacredness gives grounds for reflection that what is here pronounced sacred was, according to ancient mythic thought, the marked bearer of guilt. Life itself, the invention of life and its culpability share the same origin, which is also the mythic ground of modern state violence, sanctioned and justified by the law.

So that's at least connecting a few of the dots there. Right. We haven't actually gotten divine violence, but we got another reason why he brought up mythic violence and how that relates to modern state violence, and that we are merely alive, but not actually living our potential beings under its yoke. And then the next section is all about this pure means. Then another section contrasting law versus what actual justice would be. And so divine violence, I guess, is going to have something to do with real justice. I guess this is cheating. We're going to the secondary source for the final answer because I don't want to just stop here with no conclusion.

Did you have any notes, Wes, from Section 8 here on Divine violence? Or we could actually go back to the text itself to get something positive out of this.

30:35 Seth: No judgment of the dead can be derived from the commandment, the divine judgment, nor the grounds therefore can be known in advance.

30:44 Mark: Right. That was to say that divine commandments like thou shalt not kill are. He actually says there are guidelines. Right. Because you always have to make a decision. Right. There are always going to be exceptions and there's nothing that's actually going to take the. Again, sounds very existentialist that the burden is always going to be on you as an individual, or perhaps us as a group to decide how to apply that guideline. But it is not. You're given the guideline as a tool, but if you violate it, you don't just then persist in guilt for having violated it.

That's not the way divine commands according to Benjamin are supposed to work. That's the way laws would work, that they make you feel guilt and they sanction you. Whereas God's less personal about it, I guess. So back to that article there. I suggest to understand divine violence as the theological name for an inaccessible site within the order of the profane. That is to say, divine violence is not some exterior transcendent power intervening into human appearance from the outside, but corresponds to a certain domain at the very heart of profane life.

As a paradoxical violent non violent violence. It refers to an extimate kernel, an excess of profane life, not reducible to mythic violence. From the perspective of mythic violence, law and the state, divine violence thus remains an empty blind spot, introducing a minimal cut into the quasi organic cycle of becoming decaying of bare life, rendering it impossible to finally close the biopolitical web of mythic violence. This is the secondary source that's supposed to clear up. It's still freaking hard.

32:21 Wes: Yeah, well at this point most of it's useful. And then it's. Yeah, now it's getting into post structuralist tropes. The cut.

32:29 Mark: And it was useful that. Yes, that it said that Benjamin in his later work said that divine violence was not. He did not keep going on about this. This is a doctrine he abandoned that he was saying, look, it's an ideal limit. It's not actually that useful. He's not saying look at divine violence. You should have a revolution that's just like that. Like, he definitely was not saying that. Even if he was saying that here, he was not saying that in his later, more considered work. So should we just take Butler's word for it? And this section is more trouble than it's worth.

Let's just use the stuff he said earlier and talk about how that can ground a practice of nonviolence by talking. You can't just establish a law. It's not like Hobbes. We get in society and we give up our rights. And then the Leviathan establishes something and maybe he passes power to another Leviathan later. And so it just becomes out of our hands. It's in the elites that a truly egalitarian approach to society cannot work like that. It has to be. Even if it's in the context of actual, actual society. We're not going to be anarchists. Even Benjamin refers to a childish anarchism somewhere in this essay or call.

So he's not certainly saying that all kinds of anarchism are best. There's going to be. On Butler's final takeaway from this, that's what peace is. It's an ongoing negotiation that there's always going to be the threat of violence in every human interaction. And in fact, realizing that and not denying that, not pretending that we're just all smiling at each other all the time, realizing that fundamental ambivalence is what makes it possible and meaningful to choose nonviolence. That's the best I can do. Does anybody have any other closing thoughts or last topics?

34:22 Wes: Nope.

34:23 Seth: No, I think this one wore us out.

34:27 Mark: All right, we welcome listeners to read the essay themselves and we'll send you these two secondary sources. And between those things, see if you can make sense of this. We certainly could go on and read Derrida writing about this, or there were several other people that wrote about this. But I just feel probably like the secondary resources we did look like it would be just piling more difficulty on top of difficulty. So. So if that's fun for you, I don't know, I wouldn't mind, but I don't think that's what we're doing next. In fact, we've already picked out something that is.

Well, in a sense, in the spirit of this. It's Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. What we're doing next episode, going back in time a bit, but still, maybe. Maybe there'll be some overlap. But first, before Montesquieu, we're inserting a Reflections episode where all four of us will respond to some questions that we and our listeners have come up with about the recent string of episodes. So you get to hear us, for instance, not just presenting the thought of Judith Butler that we've done for the last several episodes, but weighing in with our opinions given what we understand to this point, and also contemplating whether we should do more of those kinds of episodes or fewer of them, how we should balance the more contemporary work with the Great Books approach.

Today's closing song is Jericho, illustrating some of that peculiar divine violence from the Old Testament. It is by Hacke de Picciotto, Alexander Hacke being a member of the German group Einstürzende Neubauten. So I thought it was fitting to have some weird German music. After discussing a weird German author, you can hear me interviewing Alexander as well as his wife and musical partner Danielle de Picciotto on the just released Nakedly examined music episode 116. Find that@neckly examinedmusic.com all right, good night, everybody.

36:08 Wes: Good night.

36:08 Seth: Good night,

38:37 Mark: Sam.

39:02 Wes: Sa.