Yann Martel's 'Critique Of Violence'

At the beginning of his analysis of Benjamin, Martel correctly suggests that 'when we leave out his [Benjamin's - D.L.] theology, we leave out the core of his philosophy as well.' Thus, Martel shows that he is interested precisely in the politico-theological debate which was led and partly initiated by both Schmitt and Benjamin. He turns to Origin of German Tragic Drama, the text in which Benjamin explicitly refers to Schmitt's Political Theology and to which Schmitt himself will later refer in Hamlet or Hecuba. According to Martel, Benjamin is very critical of contemporary commodity fetishism which is still here with us. For him, this is the fetishism which can be projected onto a political life where it is manifested in the form of idolatrous

As Martel reminds us, for Derrida it is also the distinction between "Greek' and 'Jewish' violence. According to Martel, mythical violence is a violence of sovereignty and as such it is idolatrous, while divine 'Jewish' violence which comes as a direct God's intervention is actually 'anti-fetishist'. In other words, this violence is capable of destroying the idolatrous political representations. Divine violence 'removes the untruths that we ascribe to God (that is, it removes myths).' As Martel explains a couple of paragraphs later, 'this act of divine violence thus cleanses away our sin of idolatry. Once again, it leaves behind not truth, but rather only the possibility of non-fetishism.' This is exactly what Martel means by non-idolatrous representation, namely, representation that comes into being after divine violence destroys our political idols and leaves us with a bare reality in which we are and always were immersed. At the same time, Martel notes that, for Benjamin, this divine violence actually refers to a 'slight adjustment' to the world. He obviously thinks that this 'slight' point secures his anti-transcendent position, that is, the absence of transcendent force in his thinking. Nonetheless, I do not think that this is as certain as Martel would like to have it. After all, Benjamin's work definitely has its religious moments, and reference only to one phrase does not really help to get

The political, for Martel, is a variety of human communal practices that actually do not need a sovereign gaze in order to be carried out. As he asserts, 'when representative terms like state and sovereignty cease to be idols, they have no function except as a holding place for some kind of collective enterprise.' This is how Martel's "non-representational representation" looks like. But, in my opinion, he betrays one of the most crucial insights of Benjamin. Benjamin's divine violence is essentially law-destroying while the picture that Martel depicts seems to presume some set of already established laws to be operative. Otherwise, there would be no representation and the political as such. I suggest that this is the portrait of a purely administrative state which emerges after the Marxist 'withering away of the state' occurs. It is the anarchic equivalent of the Weberian 'iron cage', so to speak.

When I noted that Martel goes around Schmitt's critique of liberalism in order to justify the anarchic politics, I had in mind precisely this aspect of his thinking: Martel's representation without representation too evidently reminds of a mere administration. As Schmitt claims with regard to liberalism, in it 'there must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological