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.