THEORIES ON VIOLENCE: BENJAMIN, FREUD, SCHMITT, DERRIDA, ADORNO

Peter Weibel's conception of violence is based on the intellectual canon of the 20th century that absorbed both Freud's psychoanalysis as well as the critical philosophy of The Frankfurt School. However, the historical context for his critique of violence is rooted in the contemporary era of terrorism. Weibel's distinctive critique of the positive definition of violence as a pure tool offered by Walter Benjamin in his Critique of Violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt, 1921) (and interpreted numerous times by, for example, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, etc.) is focused on the connections between violence and language, its reflection and conceptions of freedom, fair play, and law. He argues that Freud-who was not familiar with Benjamin's texts-had similar ideas during the pre-war years, particularly in conceiving law as the consequence of acts of violence. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis cannot resolve the contradiction between culture and violence. Analyzing the thought of Carl Schmitt, the author formulates the principles of inclusion-exclusion dialectics, to which state-monopolized violence is subordinated: violence survives in any state and culture, turning into law. It is not directed against members of its own group, but against strangers. Yet it is equally capable, in extreme cases, of targeting the so-called "enemy within." In conclusion, the author polemically contrasts the central conceptual figure of Adorno's non-identity to Agamben's subject understood as biomass. Weibel sees in such a dramatic approach traces of psychologisms and psychoanalysis, proposing to define the subject as a legal construct independent of instincts or desires, needs and other limitations characteristic of a person's biological existence. Considering the subject as an object of law rather than anthropological knowledge, Weibel hopes to make it the basis of a new constitutional law which can only be disputed on lawful grounds. The law itself thus constructs a subject that is able to rewrite the laws of the death camps, to overcome them.