ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ makes the point more famously: at the heart of law is a violence that authorises itself. The initially peaceful protests, on several occasions numbering according to the organisers at least a million people, frequently deteriorated into violent clashes between protesters and the Police, creating a cycle of violence that proved beyond the capability of the government to break. That is, a different affective order wherein violence has a different ethics. The lessons of fascism in the early twentieth century would suggest that social violence and mythic sacrifice provide a potent cocktail, which overcomes weak democratic institutionality. Violence names the act of protest and revolt. For Sorel, myths were an assemblage of images, narratives and ideas that resonate with people in particular situations. In short, myth is an irruption of the affective life of (a part of) the populace.
