ABSTRACT
The inauguration of a law is an act of violence and its origin is the pre-discursive domain of sovereignty. Violence is the "kernel of the Real" of all and any law. In his Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin repeatedly affirms and demonstrates that all violence is either law-making or law-preserving. Pure violence is an instance of the Real – as it is also its "substance", it's what the Real as sheer Trauma is "made of" – and as such it precedes the Law and all forms of the "political making sense". Pure violence – or the violence in-the-Real – is indeed a "divine" instance, one that is certainly not accessible as such to the finite beings that humans are. Hence, it is the Real of any political system and of all political life, since the political is but a derivative of the more radical concept of the Law.
