Law is a Form of Violence

...No Law, No Caesars

There’s a very particular kind of madness that sets in when reading New Testament rhetoric against the law. When the Christian religious imagination tries to make something sensible out of the enigma, while keeping itself intact, things sometimes go from strange to ridiculous.

The two most illuminating guides I have stumbled across whispered to me from other realms entirely. The first of them was the Jewish writer and critic Walter Benjamin. In 1922 he wrote an essay entitled Critique of Violence. It maps strikingly well onto those First Century messianic texts. Indeed his friend Gershom Scholem was perplexed and irritated to find him reading tomes of Protestant theology at that time, though Benjamin showed no apparent religious interest. 

What I learned from Benjamin's essay seemed obvious once I'd learned it. It was that all law is intrinsically violent, because every law is guaranteed by the threat of violence over the embodied lives of its subjects. The offender may be fined, or accosted, or imprisoned, or even killed. Law hums with violence, sometimes dormant and sometimes live. Violence is part of the logic of law. 

To begin with, at least, we can state this truth without moralising about it. After all, we have laws for good reason. The world itself is full of violence. The state of nature, says Hobbes, is the war of every man against every man. The noble purpose of any law, and the hierarchy that maintains it, is to keep us safe. And so we find ourselves in a sort of ongoing agreement, though none of us recall agreeing to it. We can’t be free of violence, but we can hand it over to the safe keeping of the powers that be, who will use it as a means to the best possible ends. The state holds a monopoly on violence. It bears that terrible burden in concentration and holds it steady in a secure world of walls and wire and arms and endless documentation.

Benjamin goes on to make a further distinction between two kinds of violence. There is, firstly, law-preserving violence: this is the violence that polices and enforces the law. But then there is also law-making violence. This is the kind of violence that establishes a new law in the first place. For example: a coup, a conquest, a revolution, an annexation, or whichever grisly act tells everyone there’s a new boss in town.

Now we can say two things. We can say that law is violence, because it is maintained by violence. And we can also say that violence is law, because it leaves after itself a new law. It establishes a new reality in which someone is now in charge.

The mythic image of law tends to be of something rigorously secure and boundaried. It is, in my imagination at least, the most concrete of abstractions. Through its scribal arts of endless documentation and hair-splitting distinctions it has the power to make absolute pronouncements between what is sanctioned and what is not. It’s as though the law fell down from the gods to its booted and impartial custodians. It appears as righteousness itself, incarnate in the form of this complicated human system. On the other hand, what Benjamin sees is quite different. He sees law as cyclical and meandering, passing from one group to another, between noble intentions and the lust for power. The script is constantly being rewritten. There's no difference between the pen and the sword, all is power and might.

It’s no wonder any contemplation of law so easily sinks into madness. How can the problem possibly be the solution? And yet how can we hope to be safe without this sordid paradox of violent peace-keeping? To be sure, I doubt my fortunes in this world without it.

We'll return to this problem later. For now, I only want to place Benjamin's description of law alongside those New Testament texts where it says that, “the law came in, and the trespass multiplied…” and that “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse…” and that, quite self-evidently, “the law brings wrath.” I think Benjamin might help us come to a better understanding of this archaic Messianic critique. Is law a problem simply because God arbitrarily changed the rules about how one is “saved,” as they say, migrating from a religion of “law” called Judaism to a religion of “grace” called Christianity? Or is the problem with law something paradigmatic, social, political and ethical? Violence produces law and law is a kind of violence. Ultimately law doesn’t make anything right, as such; it only mirrors the violence of what it says is wrong, and yet we’re trapped in this cycle for fear of the chaos it keeps at bay.