“Divine Violence,” “Radical Violence”

The same year that Franz Rosenzweig published The Star of Redemption, 1921, Walter Benjamin published his famous text Critique of Violence. And although there is little to suggest that the two men considered each other’s work in detail, I would like to claim that there is nevertheless a harmony between these texts. Indeed, the reason for the rich history of reconstruction of Benjamin’s text – from Scholem and Löwenthal, all the way to Honneth, Žižek, and Butler – might not only stem from the exceptional deconstructive power of the striking montage. It also emerges from a fantastic misunderstanding concealed by Benjamin’s surprising analogy: divine violence and Korah.