Month: November 2022

Divine violence is grounded in the antagonism between the two dimensions of the commodity form: its surface form of appearance, which, under capitalism, enjoys no substantive value; and its abstract value form, which has no body, but is the force driving the reproduction and expansion of the commodity. Among Pietists this tension between surface form and underlying value form expresses itself in self- and other-violence directed against bodies; or, in the alternative, a faith that is abstract and immaterial. As a reflection of his deep piety, Immanuel Kant formalized this experience of divine violence first in his radical isolation of phenomena from the transcendental subject, and second in his analyses of the sublime. The sublime, both for Kant and for Edmund Burke, captures the consequences of infinite magnitude entering time and space. But these are all at best attempts to come to terms with living in a society structured around the production and exchange of commodities. Since the violence the value form executes against its own body establishes and validates the priority of abstract value over its body, it is deemed good.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was no Pietist. He roundly faulted Kant for depriving bodies of substantive value. “We must grasp [the sublime] as grounded in the one absolute substance qua the content which is to be represented,” wrote Hegel in his Aesthetics. Hegel was no Pietist. But nor was he a materialist. For Hegel it is vital to account for the directionally dynamic logic of history. He did so by crediting the Spirit with a longing to differentiate and objectify itself in such a manner that the object itself became a subject. The Spirit longed for creation. Initially, according to Hegel, creation is composed of benign particularities. Gradually over time however these particularities become conscious of their relationship with each other. They become aware of their mutual interdependence. The violence implicit in their knowing and coming to know arises from their being shaped by the other as they progress toward their full realization. This process is what we call natural and cultural history. Kant had argued that divine violence was purposive because it makes us aware of a world that is superior to embodiment. Hegel by contrast argued that divine violence is purposive because it is the process through which the divine comes to be embodied.

In our view these are but two different ways of talking about the two-fold form of the commodity. Here is how Marx put it:

[Value] is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement;  it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific  forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming  the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off  surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. . . . But  now,  in  the  circulation  M-C-M´,  value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a  process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there  is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were.

Capital, I.iv.

What many readers of Marx do not know is that this is very nearly a word for word reproduction of Hegel’s description of the “Self-moving Substance that is Subject,” i.e., the world-creating Spirit:

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring Same-ness, or this reflection in otherness within itself — not an original or immediate unity as such — is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative

Phenomenology §§18-19

Even Hegel’s coda, his description of God’s self-pleasuring, works its way into Marx’s description of the commodity. “[Value] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form.” Yes. But, no.

The implications of this homology are irresistible. Insofar as Benjamin’s divine violence arises out of the tension within the value form of the commodity, there is more than a mere formal similarity between it and the violence Jonathan Edwards provoked in Abigail Hutchinson. Neither Edwards nor Benjamin bear responsibility for the appearance and spread of commodity production and exchange. Neither bears responsibility for the two-fold form of the commodity.

At the same time, so easy is it to mistake this social form for a divine being — it is a god, not the God — that both a devout Puritan and a Jewish mystic can credit their respective gods with acts and capacities that in fact should be credited to the two-fold form of the commodity. Any modern critique of violence must begin with this quasi-transcendental, quasi-personal, social substance, the commodity.

Over two and a half centuries have passed since Immanuel Kant formalized our experience of freedom. Freedom is the absence of constraint.

Should . . . freedom be a property of certain causes of appearances, then that freedom must, in relation to the appearances as events, be a faculty of starting those events from itself (sponte), i.e., without the causality of the cause itself having to begin, and hence without need for any other ground to determine its beginning.

Prolegomena 4:344

From this vantage point, any action that is not spontaneous — is not its own cause — is compelled by force or power (der Kraft) of another. Is it therefore the subject of violence (die Gewalt), under the power (die Macht) of another?

In Zur der Gewalt Benjamin presents us with two alternatives. One is Georges Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalism. Only if and as political violence is self-caused is it free from the bad faith implicit in means and ends. Only if and as political violence has freedom as both its source and its goal can it be said to be, in the truest sense, divine. This is because only in this case does political violence aim not at imposing — forcing, compelling, enforcing — a new law. Rather does it aim at eliminating force, power, and compulsion; not by force or threat, but by the supremely violent act of renouncing violence (power, force, causation). The other alternative is the pernicious law-making and law-enforcing of men.

As Benjamin put it at the conclusion of his critique:

Only mythical violence (Gewalt), not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power (entsühnende Kraft) of violence (Gewalt) is not visible to men. Once again all the eternal forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law. It may manifest itself in a true war exactly as in the divine judgment of the multitude on a criminal. But all mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence.

“Critique of Violence,” Reflections, p. 300.

Here it becomes clear that “divine violence” for Benjamin occupies Kant’s transcendental sphere, which means it is “not visible to men.” Or, put differently, divine violence has itself as its beginning and its end, sponte, as Kant put it; which means that it cannot achieve and is qualitatively different than the “pernicious” means and ends of legal violence.

There is a direct line from the Christian experience of conversion to Benjamin’s “divine violence.” The Christian compulsion to violate the law for no other reason except that it is the “law of men,” not the law of God — to break the speed limit, to oppose public institutions, to intervene in and attempt to overturn due process — exemplifies “divine violence” in Benjamin’s sense insofar as it is its own cause and its own end.

For Benjamin as for Kant, this sponte is by definition unmediated. As we will see, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel strenuously disagrees with this characterization of divine violence. The object of divine violence is the constrained world of time and space. But, contrary to Kant, Hegel claims that the constrained world of time and space is not not God. It is God differentiated.

Notwithstanding Benjamin and Kant’s mischaracterization of divine violence, they nevertheless accurately capture the anarcho-syndicalism, the fury and anger, Christians bear for a world that is, by its very nature, not transcendental.

In his study of fundamentalism and American power (The Family), Jeff Sharlet examines the ministry of Jonathan Edwards as a case in point. Edwards is interesting because he uses empiricism as a means of grasping the mechanics of the divine spirit in the process of conversion. In his study of conversion, published in 1737, Edwards’ scientifically proves conversion to be an exceedingly violent process. The association of violence with divine action is far from unusual. Both Edmund Burke (1757) and Immanuel Kant (1803) credited the experience of the sublime to the entrance of infinite magnitude into time and space. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is endangered and often is destroyed.

Among Edwards’ most touching accounts of conversion is that of Abigail Hutchinson. In the course of her conversion, Hutchinson comes to the realization that it is her body as such that presents the greatest obstacle to her conversion. Her conversion parallels the decimation and eventually the death of her body. It is taken, both by Edwards and by others, as an especially compelling instance of divine violence. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is destroyed. There is to Hutchinson’s conversion-death something of the spectacle. The community watches her convert-die and cannot help but be attracted to her conversion-death.

Edwards detailed description of Hutchinson’s conversion-death, the Christian attraction to it, begs a question that Sharlet did not examine. To what do we owe this fascination? Burke and, later, Kant attributed it to the sublime. As Kant put it:

[While] the beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest; the sublime [prepares us] for esteeming it even against the interest of our senses.

Kant illustrated human attraction to what can destroy them by asking his readers which is more sublime, the statesman or the military general:

Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrate all the virtues of peace – gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person – precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. Hence, no matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general. Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. A prolonged peace, on the other hand, tends to make prevalent a merely commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of that people.

From this vantage point, Christian attraction to conversion-death stories, much like Christian attraction to the gallows, should be credited to its divine origin: to the sublime.

In his critique of violence, Walter Benjamin makes a similar observation.

consider the suprising possibility that the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law. The same may be more drastically suggested if one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.

Under capitalism, Christians are notoriously attracted not only to military leaders, but also, more generally, to criminality. Whether it is flaunting speed limits, gerrymandering voting districts, violating the rights of other citizens, or opposing public control over public institutions for public ends, Christians everywhere praise the violation of the law. They celebrate violence.

Whether human beings are or are not naturally attracted to violence I cannot say. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Hegel, in his critique of the Kantian sublime, faults him for ascribing human attraction to violence to their being human as such, rather than, as Hegel felt, to the divine formation of the condition for such attraction. In Hegel’s view, the divine is not only in the absolutely large, but also in the finite. When the infinite enters the finite, it enters a domain that is not at odds with, but is instead a dimension of the divine.

As we will see later, this was what Benjamin referred to as “divine violence.” Karl Marx, by contrast, referred to it as the two-fold form of the commodity. If Marx’s analysis holds, this could suggest that Christian attraction to conversion-death accounts is compelling evidence that their form of spirituality in the modern epoch is structured around that same social form: the commodity.