

































57Issue V F Spring 2018

δι
αν

οι
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REVOLUTION, REVELATION, 
RESPONSIBILITY:

Emancipatory Futures in Benjamin and Habermas

MAX FINEMAN

In order to clarify the functions of violence within the legal order of the modern 
state, Walter Benjamin does not claim that the state’s application of violence is 

unjust. Rather, he interprets and critiques the very existence of a criterion of just 
violence whereby only some violence is legitimized. Benjamin concludes that this 
criterion is in place to justify only those uses of violence that serve as a means to 
the establishment and preservation of the current rule of law. Based on a critique of 
the instrumental use of legal violence, Benjamin argues that this violence inevitably 
will serve the interests of state power, and he concludes that the only remedy to this 
situation is the total annihilation of the legal order. In the final pages of the essay, the 
“Critique of Violence,” Benjamin thus sets out to find a new conception of violence, 
which is opposed to the legal violence he critiques (296-300). This violence, which 
he bases on the divine violence of the Judeo-Christian God, is meant to found a new 
emancipatory order. In his text, Benjamin implicitly alludes to a robust vision for 
a revolutionary future in which individuals and communities operate according to 
self-regulated normative principles. Such a view towards an emancipated society is 
founded initially on a revolutionary destruction of the present state-governed order, 
and on the generation of communities oriented towards responsible collective action 
based on shared commitments to autonomy. 



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Benjamin conceives of divine violence as, first and foremost, an absolute destruction 
of the legal situation. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a brief review of law 
as Benjamin understands it, and of the role that violence plays within any legal 
framework. For Benjamin, the primary characteristic of legal violence is its use, as 
a means, within the legal system. The law is based on a promise that establishing a 
stable legal framework and solidifying the rule of law over society will produce a 
peaceful, nonviolent social order. All legal justifications of violence presuppose that 
the rule of law will establish, in the end, a community of citizens who are able to 
relate to each other without recourse to violence. They are supposedly able to do so 
specifically because the legal order carves out a social sphere in which such nonviolent 
interaction is possible.1 Such an order is instrumental in the law’s establishment 
of a nonviolent sphere, which it accordingly views as just and worth pursuing, by 
whatever means necessary. Violence is such a means. Legal discourse always makes 
recourse to these two poles—means and ends—in order to justify the application 
of violence in specific cases. Either the justness of the end towards which violence 
is applied as a means is used as a justification for the means, or the justness of the 
means itself is used as a justification for the end which that means brings about.2 In 
either case, the law provides justification for the application of violence as a means to 
the ends that the law—or the state—has set for itself. Benjamin’s first critical move is 
to point out that such justification (for the application of violence as a means) must 
be made according to some criterion that would distinguish between just and unjust 
forms of instrumental violence. Instead of evaluating the criterion itself, which would 
simply critique the application of specific instances of violence, Benjamin wants 
to critique the very existence of a criterion of instrumental violence itself.3 Such a 
criterion, Benjamin argues, will always provide a justification for violence as a means 
to so-called ‘legal’ ends (namely, those ends that the law, or the state, acknowledges 
as legitimate). 

The existence of a criterion by which to justify certain forms of violence is a problem 
for Benjamin because of his belief that any legal system (or at least any contemporary 
European legal system)4 will justify violence, which serves the ends that are 
established and maintained in the legal order. Therefore, within any legal system that 
justifies violence as a means whatsoever, the law will suppress the ‘natural’, extralegal 
ends of individuals insofar as these natural ends might be pursued by violence.5 In 
other words, the law—or the legal state—will always seek to maintain a monopoly 
on violence. The state seeks to maintain complete control over the application of 
violence—an effort partially effected by the mechanisms of legal justification 
discussed above—because it views any kind of extralegal violence as a direct threat 
1 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter 

Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 278.
2 Ibid., 278.
3 Ibid., 279.
4 Cf. Ibid., 280.
5 Ibid.



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to the existence of the law itself.6 This threat that extralegal violence poses to the 
legal order prefigures the place that Benjamin reserves for his conception of utterly 
destructive divine violence.

Benjamin seeks to provide a critique of violence that does away with the means-ends 
framework of the legal order all together and thereby rejects the usage of violence 
as a means under any circumstance. The philosopher argues that a critique of all 
legal violence (i.e., all violence which is given approval and facilitated by the law) 
is necessary in order to address adequately the application of violence within any 
particular sphere.7 Benjamin therefore understands that all legal violence is either 
law-making or law-preserving.8 In other words, all violence, which is enacted from 
within the means-ends legal scheme, and which is employed therein as a means, 
is always used either to establish or to maintain some legal situation. Benjamin’s 
thesis here implies that even those forms of violence that are aimed at challenging 
the law’s power and at threatening the enforcement of the law cannot succeed as 
long as they still employ violence as a means.9 However just its ends may be, a 
revolutionary class that separates the violent means it uses from the ends it pursues 
will necessarily reestablish the same structure of legal ends that it seeks to dismantle. 
The instrumental use of even insurgent violence will necessarily fall back on this 
structure of legality because whenever a rebellious means is used to achieve some 
political end, it necessarily seeks to achieve that end within the realm of legal ends. 
In other words, insurgent use of violence as a means aims to establish its ends within 
the fundamentally problematic system of the law. Such violence is thus revealed 
by Benjamin as law-making violence, and, as such, participates in the same legal 
discourse that justifies violence as a means.10

Benjamin substitutes the means-ends scheme that characterizes the social order under 
the rule of law with his conception of a violence that will liberate society altogether 
from the oppressive condition of a law-governed society. Because the fundamental 
feature of the violence employed by the legal order was as a means to some end 
external to the act itself, Benjamin founds his liberatory violence on a conception 
of non-instrumental action that binds the goals of the action, and the action itself, 
more tightly together.11 This form of action, which is not mediated by the external 
relations between means and ends, is the direct expression of will.12 Benjamin wants 
to suggest a type of violence wherein the violent act emerges organically from the 
will, and which manifests the will itself. In the legal schema, instrumental violence 
was viewed as external to the ends that it sought to achieve in the sense that it could 

6 Ibid., 281.
7 Ibid., 284.
8 Ibid., 283-4.
9 Ibid., 285; cf. 282.
10 Cf. Ibid., 287.
11 Ibid., 293.
12 Ibid., 294.



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be distinguished clearly from those ends. When a union strikes, for instance, it is 
clear that its goal for better working conditions is distinct from the strike that it uses 
as a way of achieving its goal.13 In this schema, means and ends only relate to each 
other in their separateness—one is used to bring the other about. The immediately 
willed action to which Benjamin now looks is different from the mediated action of 
a means because it cannot be separated from the will of which it is an expression. 
Immediate violence is the realization of a will that seeks, for some reason, to exert its 
force upon the world. It is not meant to bring something else about, but to manifest 
a will which has no agenda but to see itself enacted in the world through violence.

Before Benjamin explains how revolutionary violence transforms into divine 
violence, the philosopher offers an account of the mythical violence of the Greek 
gods. Mythical violence is indeed an immediate action in the sense described above: 
it does not seek some end further than the simple employment of violence itself.14 
When the gods wreak havoc on the human world, provoking warfare, killing 
children, and spilling blood in the most extravagant acts of violence, their actions are 
not a direct a punishment of anyone, but rather are direct assertions of their existence 
in the face of a challenge to their authority or power. Mythical violence cannot be 
anticipated in the same way that many forms of legal violence, and especially punitive 
law-preserving violence, can be expected, as part of a highly structured, calculative 
social system that regulates actions with predetermined responses. It is thus in a more 
immediate proximity to the gods’ existence that instrumental violence is first used 
purely as a means to the establishment and stability of the gods’ authority.

Despite the immediacy of this form of violence, mythical violence has a lawmaking 
character, which, is crucial to the originary establishment of the rule of law. Although 
the gods’ enactment of violence serves no further purpose other than to direct the 
expression of their existence, this violence does establish a law-constituting control 
over the world.15 Indeed, this violence is not a response to the violation of an already 
existing law. Rather, it is a response to a direct threat to the gods. Insofar as this 
response reinforces the authority of the gods over the world, it constitutes some kind 
of law that restricts action for those who experience the violence. This violence does 
not annihilate its victim completely. It stops short of complete destruction; instead it 
produces guilt in its victim for the challenge that he made to the established mythical 
order. It is not that the gods necessarily sought to manipulate their victim, but that 
the enactment of guilt expands their control and authority.

Benjamin finds that mythical violence is paradigmatically opposed to the kind of 
violence which he wants to found revolutionary action. Mythical violence, rather than 
contradicting the law and the means-ends schema it establishes, mythical violence is 

13 Ibid., 291.
14 Ibid., 294.
15 Ibid., 295.



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foundational to the rule of law.16 Benjamin’s several nods to mythical violence suggest 
that guilt, as a regulatory force on individuals’ actions, is an originary source for the 
structure of law itself. One should identify mythical violence as a non-instrumental 
precursor to the violence of the legal order. Moreover, this parallel between mythical 
and legal violence also reveals that even when the legal order of the state employs 
violence as a means to the establishment of the rule of law, it does not actually 
exclude violence from its sphere of legal ends.17 Mythical violence’s connection to 
lawmaking reveals that violence is related to legal ends not only as a means, but also 
as an immediate property of the law that does not do away with violence in its realm 
of ends. In some cases, the law has violence simply as its own end, as an expression 
of the existence of the law itself in a way that resembles mythical violence. When the 
law enacts violence simply for its own sake, it manifests violence as an immediate 
expression of its power.

Benjamin thus ultimately renders his conception of divine violence as both a 
destruction of mythical violence and as a parallel revolutionary destruction of the 
law.18 Divine violence must be an act that, in addition to having the form of an 
immediate expression of will, brings utter annihilation to the normative world 
through the mythical-legal violence. Divine violence, employing no psychological 
mechanism, is interested only in complete annihilation of whatever it finds wrong 
in the world and is destructive without limit19. This pure immediate violence sets 
up no law and, similarly, introduces no guilt into its victim for the simple reason 
that it does not spare its victim in any respect. Instead of manifesting divine existence 
through violence, the divine will is expressed in violence. It seeks to annihilate 
transgression not because transgression threatens divine power, but, rather, because 
the divine despises transgression.19

Benjamin contrasts divine violence’s purely “expiatory” character with the “guilt and 
retribution” associated with mythical violence. Mythical violence engenders guilt in 
its victims by acting in response, as it were, to the transgression. In its enactment of 
violence, it holds the arrogance of the transgressive act up to the transgressor and 
clearly communicates that it is because of the transgressor’s actions against the mythical 
gods that this violence is inflicted upon them. This utilization of the transgression 
instills in the transgressor a guilty attitude towards his own act, and, in some sense, is 
itself perpetuated in this guilt. Mythical violence thus utilizes the transgressive act as 
a method of control that sets boundaries for future action in the form of law. On the 
other hand, divine violence seeks to do nothing but annihilate this transgressiveness 
altogether.20 It despises the wrong that is committed, and it therefore acts directly 
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 296; 300.
19 I intend here transgression not in the legal sense of the breaking of a law but rather in the sense it has in the 

Jewish tradition, namely the failure to act in accordance with the commandment.
20 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 297.



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to purge its sphere of all transgression. It does not employ mechanisms of guilt, 
punishment, and control because its violence is not meant to regulate future action or 
solidify its control over the world. Divine violence has nothing to gain in manifesting 
itself; it purges the world of transgressive wrong precisely so that the world will not be 
stained by the abhorrence of this transgression. This attitude implies that, in purging 
the transgressor from the world, divine violence rids the world of wrong not for its 
own sake, but, rather, for the sake of a better world. Divine violence, then, is the 
manifestation of a will for a world free of wrong (and control)—a world it realizes by 
utterly annihilating and atoning for the remnants of wrong. 

If divine violence atones for wrong done in the world through boundless destruction, 
in what sense does Benjamin intend for divine violence to be destructive of law? Is 
the legal order simply a state of injustice that must be destroyed in order for a more 
just social life to be established? Perhaps the most tempting interpretation would 
read divine violence as offering a solution to the problematic social situation created 
by the rule of law. After all, Benjamin has given a robust critique of the rule of law 
by exposing the way in which law deploys violence in order to bolster its power and 
stability. This operation of violence and the consequent harm it causes to its society 
might be reason enough to label law as an injustice deserving of divine violence. If so, 
then divine violence would “expiate” simply by directly attacking the unjust, violent 
operation of law. Such a condemnation of law presumes a far more robust ethical 
framework than Benjamin is willing to grant. Benjamin needs to conduct a critique 
of the criterion by which violence is justified and enacted because this criterion lacks 
general insight into the nature of law. The criterion of justified violence presupposes 
the means-end structure of law and only then proceeds to derive theories of what 
constitutes justice and injustice. It makes no sense, therefore, to speak of the injustice 
of the law because the law is a precondition for the establishment of a framework 
that determines justice. In other words, divine violence enacts justice or destroys 
injustice. Its destruction does not have a ‘just’ character because it does not presume 
any general criterion for justice or for the just application of violence.

Rather than viewing the law as an injustice, I suggest that Benjamin views divine 
violence as “law-destroying” insofar as it frees the living from the selfish controlling 
mechanisms of the legal order, which it does in two ways. Divine violence takes an 
immediate form that rejects the law’s instrumental use of violence. It does not make 
use of violence in order to incur guilt or to exact punishment, and it, therefore, 
does not threaten, or make demands upon, the living. As will be shown later, even 
within the scheme of divine violence and the world that it establishes, individuals 
have responsibility (though that responsibility is not accountable for divine violence 
itself ). Thus, divine violence destroys law, firstly, in the sense that it replaces the 
methods of control used by legal violence with direct annihilation wherever it finds 
something it regards as a transgression. Secondly, through this annihilation, divine 



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Revolution, Revelation, Responsibility

violence atones for the transgressor who has been made guilty by the punitive violence 
of the law. Legal violence establishes guilt in its victim, which generates the subjective 
means for the law to assert itself over its subjects. Divine violence gets rid of such 
guilt because it completely destroys. It leaves no trace of the transgression at all, and 
guilt is thus atoned for in the process. This utter annihilation is non-instrumental. It 
has no further goals, and guilt and punishment have no place in a will that does not 
seek control. Since law made use of guilt as the basis for its control, divine violence 
undermines the law in this second way by expiating the guilt on which the law relies.

One of Benjamin’s larger goals in the essay is to provide, through an exposition of 
his understanding of divine violence, an argument for the possibility of revolutionary 
violence and a suggestion for what proper revolutionary violence might look like.21 
As discussed earlier, any violence that is still instrumentalized as a means cannot be 
truly revolutionary because it leaves the legal order of instrumental action intact. No 
matter how just the goals of a revolutionary class might be, the same oppressive and 
coercive legal power will be reproduced as long as the violence it employs is only a 
means to those goals. Instead, true revolutionary violence must seek to destroy the 
rule of law itself and the order through which the rule of law is perpetuated, (i.e., the 
state). Revolutionary violence, in taking after, or even realizing divine violence, must 
not set itself the goal of establishing a new order. Such a new order cannot be known 
to the agents of the revolution. Revolutionary violence is the expression of a will to rid 
the world of legal state power and of the coercive violence it deploys. This will cannot 
conceive of a future that will lie beyond the revolution, for such a conception would 
necessarily instrumentalize the violence it enacts. Instead, like divine violence, proper 
revolutionary violence will seek to annihilate what it despises, namely the legal state 
apparatus. Benjamin thus takes a firm position against utopian revolution, because 
it sets ends beyond the revolution itself. For Benjamin, the revolutionary future lies 
beyond the horizon of all political imagination, and can only emerge immanently out 
of the ruins of an already dismantled law-governed state. 

Benjamin’s view on violence certainly raises concerns. If revolutionary violence is 
to have no mechanism to justify its use, and no systematic way of regulating, or 
limiting, its application, then can there be any limit to this violence? Providing an 
ideal concept of immediate violence seems to be dangerous if the violence is enacted 
by a will that takes up the wrong kinds of ends. When violence no longer is a means 
for the establishment of a peaceful society, but, rather, is an expression of the will 
to destroy, the effect of that violence becomes totally contingent on the will, which 
enacts this violence. If the revolution cannot conceive of higher social goals beyond 
the revolution itself, how can there be any guarantee of emancipation? Furthermore, 
Benjamin recognizes that we do not have historical examples of this kind of violence 
on which to base our inquiry. Because divine violence leaves no trace of guilt in the 

21 Ibid., 300.



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victim it annihilates, its “expiatory power [... ] is not visible to men”.22 For Benjamin’s 
vision of revolutionary violence to be at all feasible, then, we need to specify some 
sphere outside of the cycle of legal forces that will be able to provide some guiding 
norms for revolutionary action.

Benjamin provides a brief suggestion of such a sphere in his notion of commandment. 
The commandment, for Benjamin, is the articulation of a principle for guiding action 
delivered through the medium of language.23 It is an imperative for action directed 
at individuals, which they are meant to adopt as their own when they encounter 
other people as agentive persons. The commandment is thus always known before the 
opportunity for action. Unlike legal norms, which regulate people’s actions whether 
or not these persons are individually aware of specific laws,24 the commandment 
operates through its communication to persons who must consider their own action. 
Individuals are bound in obligation only at the moment in which the commandment 
has been communicated to them. As an internalized guiding principle for individuals 
and communities, the commandment does not operate through a punitive threat, 
as the law does. The commandment always precedes the deed, and it remains for 
the persons who have received the commandment to consider the conditions and 
exceptions of its application. The commandment cannot be used as a criterion for 
the judgement of an action after it has been executed and it certainly cannot stand 
as an ex post facto judgement. This notion of commandment accords with Benjamin’s 
rejection of the instrumental logic of legal discourse. In legal frameworks, adherence 
to legal norms is guaranteed by the threat of punishment. Legal violence, and law-
preserving violence in particular, is used as a means to ensure the rule of the legal order 
by externally subjecting individuals to the law through punishment. Mechanisms of 
punishment and the fear of punishment ensure adherence to the law through the 
instrumentalization of violence. The commandment does not ensure adherence to the 
law, because it is not at all concerned with punishment or judgement, and, therefore, 
does not instrumentalize violence in pursuit of obedience. Rather, individuals act 
in accordance with the commandment based on a shared affirmation that it is a 
principle worthy of adherence. I will argue now that such a collective commitment 
to commandment-like norms can be grounded in the responsibility that is generated 
from the commandment’s linguistic character.

This notion of non-punitive commandment provides a possible source for a 
revolutionary normativity that does not rely on the logic of legal discourse. If the 
central concern regarding Benjamin’s vision for revolutionary violence is that it has 
no principle to guide revolutionary action, then the commandment is a potential 
source for action-orienting principles, because it does not impose itself externally and 
instrumentally upon normative actors. If its end is for individuals and communities 

22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 298.
24 Cf. Ibid., 296.



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to act in ways that it regards as normatively valuable, then it does not force them 
to do so; it tells them to do so. The commandment mobilizes shared language to 
give the norm, from the one who commands, to those who are commanded. This 
notion of normative action, based on a communicated principle, is advantageous 
because it cultivates autonomy, which the law could not establish, in the acting 
individual. Because the law generates obedience only externally in the individual 
through punishment, the individual is always subject to the law. The law always acts 
upon him. The commandment, on the other hand, is a principle of action that is 
not enforced, but, rather, is given to the individual. Individuals must grapple on 
their own with its application in the real circumstances of their lives.25 Unlike the 
law, the commandment does not make decisions for the individual. This autonomy 
is advantageous because it allows individuals to make crucial pragmatic judgements 
about the norm’s applicability and its inevitable exceptions. It is additionally 
advantageous because it does not require the external force of a regulative system 
through which normative action must be guaranteed. Rather, individuals (and 
communities) who follow the commandment determine their own adherence to the 
project of collective normative action. 

This commandment model for revolutionary normative action raises another 
difficulty: we have not yet explained how individuals are guaranteed to commit to 
norms without coercion, or by the threat of punishment. If normative action is not 
centralized by a legal-punitive system of action regulation, we are going to need to 
specify some ground for believing that individuals and communities would adhere to 
these norms. Additionally, while the model of the non-punitive commandment might 
be attractive to a Benjaminian sensibility, Benjamin fails to provide any explanation 
of the source of these norms. We therefore must specify how the content of such 
commandment-style norms are generated. As we will see, Habermas’s notions of 
responsibility and language, and the emancipatory potential that lies in their relation, 
provide a possible grounding for our Benjaminian vision of normative action. 

In his essay, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective,” Habermas 
sets out a critique of all knowledge-producing sciences by revealing the “knowledge-
constitutive interests” that determine the methodological framework in which 
scientists pursue each form of knowledge. Habermas’s core argument is that all 
epistemic practices are oriented by interests that humans have in gaining particular 
kinds of knowledge. Therefore, the methodological tools that we use for inquiring 
about, and for investigating the world, are not determined by a disinterested strategic 
concern with the best manner of getting at an objective truth. Rather, the fundamental 
practical human interests that we seek to satisfy by pursuing knowledge determine 
these tools. These interests therefore provide the frame for our inquiries. According to 
Habermas, despite science’s aspiration to disinterested theoretical inquiry, we cannot 

25 Ibid., 298.



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rid our epistemic practices of these human interests.26 Instead, the task of critical 
theory is to make these interests visible so that the sciences can proceed with a ‘critical 
eye’ towards the influence that particular interests have on knowledge-production. 
This ‘critical eye’ is meant to give the theorist a certain autonomy within the interest-
constraints placed on our attainable knowledge. 

One of these knowledge-constitutive interests is an “emancipatory” interest in 
autonomy and responsibility. Habermas argues that this fundamental human 
drive towards emancipation leads us to engage in reflection about our own 
social conditions, which will ultimately identify the ways in which we have been 
subjected to “hypostatized powers”, and consequently, the ways in which we can 
free ourselves from the oppressive social conditions in which we are stuck.27 The 
project that Habermas suggests for critical theory is to develop sciences, which are 
aware of the social and cultural conditions of their knowledge-production, through 
engaging in this kind of self-reflection.28 They will therefore be able to identify more 
“emancipatory” ways of satisfying their respective human interests. 

This suggested project of self-reflection of the sciences leads Habermas to consider 
what grounds the human interest in autonomy and responsibility (i.e., language). 
Habermas’s idea is that implicit in the intersubjective communication, whereby 
language links people together, is a will towards “universal and unconstrained 
consensus.”29 In using language, humans recognize, at some level, the will to be 
understood by, and to be in agreement with, others. Language is thus premised on 
an assumption of mutual understanding; language must be shared language. This 
mutuality of language evinces a certain will towards universal dialogue: anyone who 
has access to the language can understand and be understood. No matter how simple 
its use of language is, every utterance aspires to an intersubjective communication, 
which is based wholly on shared, agreed-upon linguistic rules. In the ideal structure 
of language, no external constraints are imposed on linguistic usage, and any attempt 
to do so only inhibits language users’ ability to communicate clearly and to create 
consensus-based dialogue. 

The structure of language as unconstrained universal communication among 
language users is generative of responsibility because it allows for individuals to gain 
mutual understanding of the importance of their autonomy and of the autonomy of 
others. We can use language with each other to come to agreements about what kinds 
of action are worthy of our collective pursuit. Language allows for individuals to 
assent freely to consensus-based actions, and their responsibility towards each other, 
and towards the agreed-upon norms, is based upon their unconstrained practice 

26 Jürgen Habermas, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective,” in Knowledge and Human Interests, 
trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 311.

27 Ibid., 310.
28 Ibid., 311.
29 Ibid., 314.



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of consensus-building in language. When individuals and communities engage in 
“non-authoritarian and universally practiced dialogue,” they can come to normative 
agreements based on communication unencumbered by the interests of power, 
selfishness, and greed.30 Rather, because every individual knows that his personal 
interests can be understood in this kind of communication, strategic and selfish 
linguistic maneuvers are replaced by collective commitment to agreed-upon norms. 

Habermas’ notion of collective responsibility and commitment to such norms, 
which are grounded in language, provides the necessary basis that was lacking for 
Benjamin’s notion of the commandment. Using this understanding of unconstrained 
communication about norms, we can give a complete account of a possible non-legal, 
non-punitive vision of normative action. The structure of the commandment can be 
seen as an ideal example of consensus-based normative principles. As aforementioned, 
the commandment only binds those who have understood the content of the 
commandment and who have agreed to follow it. It is not an expression of a force, 
power, or threat according to whose will individuals must act. The commandment is 
delivered through language, and its binding nature is dependent on the understanding 
and assent of all parties. The commandment is thus an example of a universally agreed-
upon norm grounded in language. This requirement of universal understanding of 
the norm before it becomes binding provides a level of assurance that norms will be 
followed based on a collective responsibility for the norms’ realization. Those who 
“wrestle in solitude”31 with the commandment have the responsibility to faithfully 
apply the agreed-upon normative principles, and it is up to them—and only them—
to ensure that these forms of action are realized. 

One final indication that Habermas’ notion of communication-based responsibility 
is deeply compatible with Benjamin’s revolutionary vision is found in Habermas’ 
suggestion that the kind of unconstrained communication upon which all 
understanding is built is only possible in a fully emancipated society.32 In an 
unfree society, external conditions impose constraints upon language-use. The law 
mobilizes language instrumentally to control legal subjects, and the state deploys 
language in the construction of ideologies that deceive people into thinking that 
their social conditions are natural. Such uses of language are not based on mutual 
understanding or a will towards universal consensus. Rather, they are based in the 
instrumentalization of language as a quasi-violent means towards the ends of state 
power and the perpetuation of the rule of law. These uses thus play into the means-
end schema of the legal order repeatedly mentioned by Benjamin in his critique. 
Therefore, only in a society that is free of the power-accumulating forces of the 
instrumental legal order, is an unconstrained normative consensus actually possible. 
These legal forces, which instrumentalize violence and mobilize guilt as a means of 

30 Ibid.
31 Benjamin, 298.
32 Habermas, 314.



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control, must be destroyed by Benjaminian divine-like revolutionary violence. Only 
then, in an emancipated, revolutionary society, can the kind of language-use and 
communication required for the generation of responsibility be truly enacted. With 
the destruction of the legal forces that place fetters on the progressive realization 
of the fundamental human interest in autonomy and responsibility, the historical 
horizon opens up towards an ethical future in which normative action is based on 
autonomous collective commitments and responsibilities, rather than on coercion 
and the suppression of cooperative initiative. F

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, 
Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund 
Jephcott, 277-300. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.” In 
Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, 301-317. Boston: 
Beacon Press, 1971.


