...Eli Friedlander The task of the present commentary on “Critique of Violence” is to bring to light a progression in Walter Benjamin's essay that has important implications for the assessment of the essay's content. One should not take violence as a generic term and view the essay as enumerating...

...Ronald AT. Judy Ronald AT. Judy 2006 Provisional Note on Formations of Planetary Violence At some point in the last decade of the twentieth century, a term of art began to circulate first in Argentina then Latin America in general to describe the nearly absolute political-economic...

... political vision with a commitment to the interpersonal intimacies of language in the human mouth, speaking across ethnic and racial lines. Duke University Press 2009 Violence and the Human Voice: Critique and Hope in Native Speaker Jonathan...

...Adam Lowenstein In his two most recent films, Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), the director David Cronenberg turns his attention more specifically than ever before to the conjuncture of violence and globalized geopolitics. The resulting illumination of how violence...

... of “mutual understanding” and wrote instead of revolution, adapting the ghazal tradition to include horrifying details of state-sponsored violence. How do we assess such efforts today in translation as the violence cycles on? Historically translations have been judged solely by their faithfulness to a prior...

...Daniel T. O'Hara A review of Michael Wood's Yeats and Violence (2010) and Alain Badiou's Five Lessons on Wagner (2010), this article argues that Wood, by not taking the occult seriously in Yeats, mistakes his general imaginative project, which, as Badiou argues concerning Wagner, is to discover...

...Howard Eiland This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence...

...Adam Gussow Duke University Press 2003 ‘‘Fingering the Jagged Grain Ellison’s Wright and the Southern Blues Violences Adam Gussow ‘‘Brutal Experience’’ and Lyric Flight If we are still capable of valuing our writers...

...Samuel Weber Militarization is effective generally through its ability to mobilize not just thinking but also feelings. But any investigation of militarization, whether focused on thinking or feeling, will remain abstract if it does not also consider the forms in which violence occurs...

... for legitimizing violence against religious groups, especially Muslims, has opened up fundamental questions regarding the future of queer emancipatory politics. While supportive of the urgency of critiquing the complicities of Western queer politics in neoliberal, imperial discourses, I am troubled by the silences...

...James Martel In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin writes that the “educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of [divine violence’s] manifestations.” To recognize the connection Benjamin makes between a messianic power and acts of pedagogy allows us to revisit...

...Zahid R. Chaudhary Through a psychoanalytic reading of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing , this essay considers the role of fantasy in genocidal Cold War violence. Considering both Oppenheimer’s film and also Frantz Fanon’s clinical case studies as investigations into impunity...

... of the Muslim woman (for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil): object of imperial rescue, justification for imperial warfare, Orientalist cipher, target of jihadist violence, and increasingly the discursive site upon which is worked out the central preoccupation of our time: How do you free yourself from...

...Rajeswari Sunder Rajan That the escalating Hindu violence against minorities has produced a crisis for secularism in present-day India—but not for Hinduism—is an intriguing fact that calls for further analysis. This essay attempts a reexamination of the split between Hinduism and Hindutva...

...Jeanette McVicker The classroom is arguably the space where all of William V. Spanos’s work intersects. Delivered always with a sense of urgency, his pedagogy seeks to disclose the violence of “disinterestedness” inhering in liberal humanism. By offering his undergraduate and graduate students...

...Mina Karavanta This essay discusses William V. Spanos’s work as the legacy of what can be called “ontopolitical criticism.” Spanos’s affiliation between texts and the world discloses the overlapping of the history of imperialistic and colonial violence with the politics of ontology, which...

...William Marotti Late 1967 witnessed a conjunctural moment in Japan, in which a shift in activist tactics inaugurated a public debate ultimately addressing the legitimacy of force and state violence in support of strategic US objectives, and triggering mass politicization, inaugurating Japan's “1968...

... posit” associated with late twentieth-century musicology and sociology that valorizes music's social utility. Recognizing serious limitations in both, we turn to Étienne Balibar's notion of “civility” as an experimental practice that regulates extremes in order to reduce violence. Drawing...

...Julian Bourg Beginning in the 1970s, terrorism became an object of contested expert knowledge. Fears over this moralized and loosely defined phenomenon emerged at the very moment that Western states achieved a certain monopoly over legitimate political violence. This politico-epistemological...

... toward violence; an emphasis on constitutions; an attraction to trade, commerce, and technological innovation; and a long attachment to the institution of slavery. This review concludes by exploring the relationship between the “core” and the “periphery” of the West, which is to say the place of Turkey...