Bare Life and Divine Violence: Benjamin, Levinas, and Ethics of Interruption

This article rereads Walter Benjamin’s Toward the Critique of Violence through the category of “bare life,” placing Benjamin in conversation with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of responsibility for the Other. It argues that bare life is the site at which mythic and divine violence confront one another: mythic-legal violence founds law, produces guilt, and reduces persons to lives administered under threat, while divine violence interrupts this reduction without founding a new legal order that operates through violence. The issue, therefore, is not only the structure of law or political violence, but the production of subjectivity itself: whether the human person is reduced to bare survival or opened toward a fuller life beyond guilt, administration, and mere preservation.

This article first reconstructs Benjamin’s distinction between law-making, law-preserving, mythic, and divine violence. It then examines the major interpretive divide between nonviolent readings, represented by Simon Critchley and Judith Butler, and more ruptural readings, represented by Slavoj Žižek and Alison Ross. Against both a pacifying domestication of divine violence and a romantic authorization of counterviolence, the article proposes Levinas’s face, the commandment “thou shall not kill,” and the third as an ethical optic for political judgement. Levinas does not remove the ambiguity of Benjamin’s divine violence, nor does he provide a formula for action; he keeps interruption answerable to the concrete Other whose life is at stake.

The conclusion turns to the Iranian situation to show how Benjamin’s suspicion of law and Levinas’s ethics of responsibility together sharpen the question of how to resist tyranny without turning the oppressed into instruments of another power.