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# In 1921 Walter Benjamin wrote a short text, "Critique of Violence", which is now counted among the most uncomfortable philosophical texts of the twentieth century
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/valter-beniamin-napisal-v-1921-godu-nebolshoi-tekst-k-kritike-nasiliia-kotoryi-v-itoge-schitaetsia-odnim-iz-samykh-neudobnykh-filosofskikh-tekstov-xx-veka/
- Published: 2026-03-17T08:03:47.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:35.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Books, Science, Society

Because it describes a mechanism we have grown accustomed not to notice.

Benjamin distinguishes two kinds of violence. The first is law-making violence, by which power establishes itself. The second is law-preserving violence, by which power guards itself every day. The police, according to Benjamin, are an especially disquieting institution, because they combine both kinds at once. They do not merely execute the law, they also establish it on the spot, at their own discretion. Where a policeman decides, law ceases to be law and becomes discretion.

The sharpest notion in Benjamin is that of the "state of emergency". Power always keeps it in reserve. It is the moment when the ordinary rules are suspended for the sake of some supposedly higher necessity, sanitary, military, economic, any will do. At that moment the state acts outside the law, while sheltering behind the law. And the more often the state of emergency is invoked, Benjamin wrote, the clearer it becomes that it long ago ceased to be the exception and became the norm.

Benjamin wrote this about the Weimar Republic. But the mechanism he described is universal, and that is precisely why the text has not grown stale by a single day.

Illustration: plate 39 from Goya's "The Disasters of War", "Great deeds! Against the dead!"