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.