Abstract
The current era of environmental crises and their seeming intractability, particularly in the context of an entrenched capitalist order, has given rise to a deep-felt pessimism about the possibility of meaningful change. Despite this pessimism, a utopian impulse can still be imagined within the very terms of that pessimism. Drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, an analysis of the iterated violence that constitutes the political status quo points to an always available opening in which the utopian impulse for an environmental democracy can be imagined and problematized. That utopian moment points toward the substantive content of such an environmental democracy even as it enjoins an ongoing critique of such a utopian aspiration, underwriting a reflexive, critical ethos premised on a noninstrumental relationship to both the human and nonhuman others diminished by the progress-centric spirit of our time.
Critical thought, whether in its Hegelian-Marxist or Nietzschean-postmodern idioms, is famously wary of describing the utopian content of its aspirations. Marx and Engels’s own efforts to define a scientific rather than a utopian socialism, and their own reticence about describing the contours of a communist sociopolitics, are amplified both in negative dialectics and in certain postmodernist strategies of difference and deferral. Nonetheless, the very coherence of any critical project at least implies the utopian as an affirmative referent that orients its activity. In fact, the tension between a wariness of a settled identity and an enactment of an affirmative content that characterizes these variants of critical theory is precisely figured, or spaced, by the idea of utopia, a no-place that is nonetheless very real in informing the rationales, the motivating goals, and the potentials that would characterize aspirations for a more admirable future.
This essay explores how utopia might function as a necessary conceptual resource for contemporary critical theory, particularly in the context of environmental catastrophe in general and climate change in particular. It does so in the spirit of the critical theoretical tradition. On the one hand, utopia, as treated in this essay, offers an emerging specificity of content that helps articulate the affirmative characteristics of what the world should become. On the other hand, this essay is alert to how the concept of utopia is nonidentical to itself. The concept of nonidentity is central to the work of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s critical refusal to accept any object of analysis at face value. In their hands, the identity of any object is mediated by its emplacement in its historical, socioeconomic, and actual and potential normative contexts (Buck-Morss 1979; Eiland and Jennings 2014). Thus, one could say that this essay aims to present a notion of utopia in the context of our global environmental circumstances that remains critically reflexive about its own utopian substance. Understood dialectically or deconstructively, this reflexivity functions descriptively but also has clear normative implications, informing an affirmative ethos built on the cultivation of autonomy and a respect for the alterity of the other.1
This essay seeks to develop that notion of utopia obliquely, thinking through what might be called the space of utopia, or the utopian moment, by tracing the idea of divine or messianic interruption as it develops in a lineage of thinking inaugurated by Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and “On the Concept of History.” For this essay, divine violence or the messianic needs to be understood not in religious terms but rather as that which figures the not-yet-here world that might be different and as existing in the opportunity afforded each generation to redeem the past in working toward creating a more just world. Benjamin’s work on that interruption has been taken up by a wide range of thinkers, including Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, and this essay seeks to put Derrida and Butler into conversation with Benjamin. Derrida and Butler link Benjamin’s analysis of a politically constitutive violence and its possible interruption to what Derrida calls iterability, a “law” of repetition that provides a language for representing the reproduction of the sociopolitical totality, but which is also the very basis of that which might be different. That development of Benjamin’s thinking suggests that his figurations of a divine violence or a messianic interruption inheres in the structure of the repetition through which order and meaning are reproduced.
In this conversation, the space of interruption valorized by Benjamin, Derrida, and Butler allows for a consideration and ultimately a rejection of authoritarian forms of violence. This essay envisions an alternative, nonviolent vocabulary for resisting a violently entrenched status quo. Derrida plays an important role here, problematizing Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence” and its inability to escape the worst consequences of the oppressive, dominating violence that it seeks to escape. He also introduces a notion of democracy—democracy to come—that recognizes the aporetic nature of democracy, where an ethos of openness toward others and the future is always in tension with the law-founding and law-preserving violences that he suggests are constitutive of any political regime. Butler is also important in this story, offering a way of reading Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” that repositions his divine violence as the force of nonviolence. In doing so they further flesh out the nonviolative ethos that underwrites Benjamin’s appeal in his “Theses on History” to those oppressed as the basis for the “weak” messianic power through which victims of a violence-driven status quo might be redeemed. This essay, then, provides a way of reading Benjamin that points toward the utopian moment that inheres in this critical theoretical enterprise, holding in tension an environmental, democratic, and progressive desire for a concrete notion of utopia with a wariness of the tendency for any realized sociopolitical configuration to reconvene the violence that seems central to the constitution of the political. The focus on iterability, on the iteration of the violence that produces and sustains the status quo but also opens the possibilities of difference, is not meant to displace the negative dialectical tradition to which Benjamin contributed. Rather, it is meant to offer an interruption that might augment the negative dialectical approach articulated in its fullest form by Adorno, accounting for the stubborn entrenchment of the way things are, how that status quo might open beyond itself, and how the critical theorist remains responsible for problematizing how even the most fully realized environmental-democratic future necessarily threatens its democratic-utopian content.
This essay is not about imagining a blueprint for a utopia. Rather, it seeks to articulate how utopia might be imagined in the context of our current circumstances. The affirmative contours of utopia touched on in this essay are rather thin, revolving around Benjamin’s invocation of the redemption of the historically oppressed as an organizing principle of revolutionary activity implying a nonviolative ethos toward nonhuman nature and the human other. That ethos reflects a commitment to valorizing autonomy, augmented with qualities such as confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude (Benjamin 2006a: 390). A notion of utopian that is built on these general principles is most useful when it is held in relation to the dominating violence that characterizes the political, the violence that is constitutive of the political, and the violence that produces and reproduces our current status quo. Utopia, as it is articulated critically-theoretically in this essay, needs to be understood dialectically in relationship to the political realities in which environmentalists fight to realize their utopian aspirations and in relationship to the political realities that would continue to impinge on any realized utopian achievement. Thus, the utopian essayed here is never merely utopian.
The Utopian in Pessimistic Times
In our current circumstances, the motivational energies that a figuration of the utopian might entail seem particularly germane. Even if one sidesteps the full range of contemporary environmental crises and just focuses on climate change, there are good reasons to be profoundly pessimistic about our circumstances. In fact, to begin an essay about environmental circumstances by describing, however briefly, the basis for such a pessimism might seem clichéd, but those repeated gestures might also indicate something about a present whose violence seems inescapable (Erdenesanaa 2024; Gelles 2024). The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report holds out a modicum of hope that concerted human action at a global scale could prevent the worst of outcomes (Plumer and Fountain 2021), but that kind of coordinated effort too often seems implausible. The entwinement of the global capitalist economy with the fossil-fuel regime through which production and consumption are powered has created a web of incentives and punishments that make the prospect of an effective response to this and other environmental crises difficult to imagine. Marx famously compared capitalists to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Engels and Marx 1978: 478), an image that points to a current and inevitable disaster spinning beyond our control, and the seemingly ineluctable imperatives of capitalism and the catastrophes that it produces remain a central fact shaping our environmental political self-understandings. Perhaps it is easier “to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2009).
Against this pessimistic backdrop, an engagement with the Frankfurt school, and Adorno in particular, would seem to make sense. Adorno is famous for his pessimistic diagnosis of a modernity driven by the hypertrophy of instrumental reason, so much so that critics have argued that his thinking cannot offer a way forward beyond the dystopia in the making that characterizes his sense of the present. Others, though, have embraced Adorno’s rejection of a glib optimism as a way of thinking through and beyond the blanketing pessimism of our times. Recently, Mary Witlacil (2022: 264) has convincingly described “an Adornoian critical pessimism” that “is dynamic, antiauthoritarian, and well-disposed for addressing governmental inaction to climate change, income inequality, and the toxic positivity endemic to late capitalism in the West.”
More generally, though, Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt school have continued to inspire contemporary efforts to articulate an environmentally concerned critique of the political economy in which our experience of environmental disaster unfolds (Biro 2011), paying particular attention to the ethos-shaping force of capital in its interactions with qualitatively new forms of informational technologies. Their identification of instrumental reason as the epoch-defining force of modernity, colonizing the moral-practical and aesthetic-affective orientations of rationality’s fullest potential, continues to provide environmental and political theorists resources for addressing issues of democratic will formation in the current configurations of the late-capitalist Anthropocene. Tracking Adorno’s thought can, for example, remind us of how we are (re)produced within the prevailing versions of capitalism as actors who degrade the environment and are fitted into stories about reaching fulfillment through consumption or professional commitment (Lipscomb 2011).
Benjamin and the Constitutive Violence of Politics
Rather than working to draw out the utopian moments that appear throughout Adorno’s negative dialectical form of critical thinking (for example, Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: xi), this essay moves forward by enjoining a selective reading of Benjamin, whose work importantly influenced Adorno. Benjamin turns Adorno’s pessimistic tendencies on their head, locating the fundamental source of how one might respond to pessimism, the flash of a messianic optimism, within the structure of an iterated violence, or perhaps the threat of violence, through which any political figuration is produced and sustained. Benjamin (2006b: 404) insightfully quotes his own essay “Surrealism” in notes made during the composition of the “On the Concept of History”: “‘For to organize pessimism means . . . to discover in the space of political action . . . image space. This image space, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation. . . . The long-sought image space . . . , the world of universal and integral actuality’ (Surrealism)” (ellipses in original). Immediately after quoting this potential of surrealism for a practice-oriented analysis of the way things are, Benjamin also connects it to a redemptive, messianic moment that inheres at the limit of history understood as progress.
In one sense, Benjamin’s work is worth introducing into conversations about contemporary environmental pessimism because he helps sharpen our thinking about how pessimism and utopian optimism occurs within a regime of violence or overlapping violences that itself is a founding and sustaining moment of any political regime. Benjamin angles in on violence in a way that better wrestles with the depth of our pessimism and with how a utopian hope might emerge in the very context of the violent reproduction of the status quo.
In his difficult but influential essay “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin (2004) explores the related logics of law-founding and law-preserving violences and emphasizes the ways in which the political is sustained through the repetition of a dominating, constitutive violence.2 Benjamin suggests that the sociopolitical status quo can only sustain its authority through ongoing enactments, or repetitions, of its founding acts of authority. Even a new founding, it would seem, is only destined to return to the oscillations between its moments of law-founding and law-preserving violences. Furthermore, any sociopolitical form’s seeming coherence and continuity entail an accompanying mythic violence that authorizes the law-founding and law-preserving violences that maintain the status quo. As James Martel puts it,
Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life, projecting a form of authority out into the world that then becomes accepted as reality itself. It is mythic because there is no true or ontological basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism; its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality. (Martel 2020)
As such, it will make sense to understand violence in broader terms as a dominating violence or dominator violence that deploys a wide range of practices across a wide range of sites reproducing the sociopolitical whole. At least initially, there seems to be no definable or imaginable outside to an iterative politics of violence regardless of how it might be temporarily sublimated, which could open onto a differently calibrated kind of world. But, despite providing a way of seeing the stubborn hold of violence over our imagination and our pessimism about our capacity to act for change, it is just this staging of historical-material repetition in which Benjamin articulates his suggestion of a “divine violence” capable of breaking through the circularity through which the political is constituted, a violence that can be linked to his later articulation of a “weak messianic force.” Though Benjamin invokes theological imagery to articulate these notions of interruption, his suggestions here, particularly as they travel into the work of other thinkers, are best understood as inhering in the structure and logic of iteration. His understanding of dominating violence as constitutive of the political, enmeshed in a logic of constituting/conserving repetition, also preserves a moment of messianic interruption. This is precisely important to the ways in which other theorists, such as Derrida and Butler, have tried to think the possibility of an interruption against the obdurate realities of injustice and unjust violence. Thus, Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” in establishing an understanding of political sovereignty ongoingly constituted by a repetition of dominating violence, provides a staging that thinkers like Derrida and Butler will link to the notion of iteration, or iterability, preserving a rhetorical and conceptual opening in which a more rational and liberated future remains possible.
The Utopian Possibilities of an Environmental Democracy to Come
Paying some attention to how Derrida and Butler explore that possible difference in their engagements with Benjamin’s work may help efforts to imagine an environmental-democratic future. But why a democratic notion of utopia? After all, if extractive, consumerist capitalism is what drives environmental catastrophe, why not talk about an environmental socialism? The point of this utopian imaginary is not to disavow a socialist critique of the capitalist (re)production of environmental disaster or to reject a socialist organization of society; without such a critique of the role of an extractive, consumerist capitalism in these crises, it is hard to imagine a way beyond our present impasse. However, this utopian interruption seeks to preserve the promise of democratic autonomy threatened by the potential for an authoritarian environmental politics by seeing in it the possibility of a reflexive autonomy central to the kinds of life at the normative center of the critical-political theoretical tradition. Calling the utopian space essayed here an environmental-socialist democracy can be helpful as long as it is remembered that the very need to restrict unconstrained market behaviors at the heart of an environmental socialism returns to the violence that challenges the capacity for autonomy. The trick here is to articulate a notion of critical autonomy capable of endorsing the parameters that could admirably conserve the environment and thus preserve a relationship to nature necessary for the very realization of autonomy. That is a crucial dimension of the utopian moment essayed here.
After all, an environmentally oriented response to our circumstances might imply a necessary authoritarianism out of step with the critically mediated notion of utopia essayed here. The work of some survivalists, such as William Ophuls (1973), has long recognized the possible necessity of an environmental Leviathan (see also Wainwright and Mann 2020). If Benjamin and thinkers like Carl Schmitt are right about the role a dominating violence plays as a constitutive fact of democratic politics, then an environmental politics and environmental political theorists can only imagine utopian in relation to a perhaps impossible-to-escape reach of a dominating violence. Any instantiation of that kind of utopia, even one premised on a nonviolent relation to the other, would find itself confronted with the nonutopian reality of violence. The utopian considered in the nonidentitarian terms developed in both the negative dialectical and deconstructive traditions would thus find itself having to reckon with how violence impinges on its potentially imperfect realization of how that “no place” is given a place in the world. If nothing else, even an environmental democracy to come would entail a violence in the drawing and enforcing of parameters that would ensure environmentally admirable practices. As an enterprise, the theorization of the utopian finds itself having to account for the repetition of violence to sustain any status quo that degrades the environment and thrusts environmental burdens onto marginalized populations.
Problematizing the Appeal to Divine Violence
In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin suggests the figure of a “divine violence” that seems to suggest an escape from the oscillating dialectic of a law-founding and a law-preserving violence, a figuration that cannot be reduced to the terms of that oscillation or dialectic. However, the exact nature of that divine violence remains ambiguous, and what it might portend, solely in terms of the text of a “Critique of Violence,” is difficult to determine. Perhaps, as it has often been interpreted, a divine violence figures an anarchic violence that escapes the seemingly hopeless repetition of a statist law, but any such version of that violence does little to reassure the reader that what emerges in that caesura will be normatively admirable, or that the moment of this violence will not settle back into the statist configurations from which it has tried to escape.
Derrida raises another worry. He cannot avoid the problematic political and moral trajectories potentially encoded in Benjamin’s text. He worries about the “temptation to think of the Holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time nihilating, expiatory and bloodless . . . a divine violence that would destroy current law through a bloodless process that strikes and causes to expiate” (Derrida 1992: 62). And, he adds, “when one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause one to shudder. One is terrified at the idea of an interpretation that would make of the holocaust an expiation and indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God” (62).
In terms of his fuller body of work, Derrida inflects the thread of Benjamin’s analysis of violence as a constituting/preserving force that underwrites all political regimes. Derrida (1992) recognizes that Benjamin’s argument in “Critique of Violence” is caught up in the logic of iterability. For Derrida (1988), iterability is the very basis for knowledge and communication. Derrida’s recognition of an economy of iterability in Benjamin’s work emphasizes the violence that founds and sustains any political-ideational system, but, as I have argued elsewhere, iterability for Derrida also always suggests that
in the temporal and spatial movement of a repetition, there is always . . . the recurring possibility of the new and the unforeseen, the possibility that any text might be grafted into new contexts that would begin to reshape its meaning. For Derrida, this iterative inevitability suggests a certain continuity and stability, but it also points to the inherently open-ended status of any text, phenomenon, or representation. (Lipscomb 2017)
Derrida deploys an analysis of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” in ways that develop his own interests in messianic opening toward the future but in ways that skirt the mystifying, nondeconstructable closure that might signal the disaster of a divine violence.
Working within this line of messianic thinking, Derrida develops the themes of difference in terms of an always autoimmunizing democracy to come that emerges as an existing potential in every iterated moment of political founding/conserving (Derrida 1997, 2005, 2010). This notion of democracy to come can be appropriated for our purposes when thinking about an environmental democracy to come. On the one hand, such a notion of an environmental democracy to come recognizes the ineluctable connection between sovereignty (as the capacity to decide through the imposition or threat of violence) and any kind of functioning democracy, particularly one that is organized through a commitment to preserving the environment and pursuing environmental health. On the other hand, Derrida’s notion of iterability, his rendering of a democracy to come, founded on the violent reality of what constitutes the political, gives rise to a critical attitude in which the ongoing iterations through which the reality of the political is coded and enacted reveal a space of deferral and thus the possibility of difference. That difference might emerge from the outside, but it is also a potential space from which a chastened form of agency might participate in positing and imagining that different world.
The Limits of Derrida’s Language of Difference and the Substance of Messianic Interruption
Derrida’s emphasis on difference and deferral draws our attention to a danger in Benjamin’s rendering of the iterative structure of violence, but this emphasis also points to the limit of Derrida’s deconstructive orientation. Something more than a prophylactic space of deferral is necessary to imagine the aims of an environmental-democratic practice.
Benjamin (2006b: 401–2), in fact, worries about how such an “infinite task” might paralyze the capacity for political action:
In the idea of a classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time, and that was a good thing. It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an “ideal” that the trouble began. The ideal was defined in Neo-Kantian doctrine as an “infinite [unendlich] task.” And this doctrine was the school philosophy of the Social Democratic Party. . . . Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogenous time was transformed into an ante-room, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.
Returning to Benjamin’s further development of his hopes for a messianic arrival within the context of a deeply felt historical pessimism, particularly as they find their crystallization in his “On the Concept of History,” might give a fuller sense of a normative orientation that could more concretely guide our work for a democratic-environmental future. In that late work, Benjamin recasts the language of “A Critique of Violence” in the iterative violence that is constitutive of the political reimagined as an “empty, homogenous time” and “divine violence” as a “weak messianic power.” In working through the new vocabulary for imagining the sociopolitical status quo, he appeals to a sense of justice that might organize the revolutionary solidarity necessary for overturning the triumph of barbarism and realizing a utopian future founded on a noninstrumental relationship with the other that one might encounter. Organizing itself in terms of the redemption of those exploited, annihilated, and cast to the side by the violence that consolidates the power of the ignoble (Benjamin 2006a: 391–92), Benjamin’s elaboration of the messianic can provide important clues to a substantive basis for imagining the contours of the struggle for and realization of an environmental democracy to come in maintaining the difficult tension between an affirmative envisioning of the utopian and its negative dialectical problematization.
In thesis 7, Benjamin (2006a: 391–92) writes in opposition to a misguided way of writing history in order to recover a concrete commitment to the possibility of justice effaced by the violence of those who have won and maintained their power at the expense of their victims:
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. . . . There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
Benjamin (2002: 10) argues that the historical materialist brushes history against the grain through an act of recovery, where the relationship of the present to the past is revealed by what he calls “dialectics at a standstill,” an interruption of the present informed by a history understood as progress. The notion of history as progress begins to appear as a kind of ideological myth that is marshaled to justify the barbarism of the victorious actors of history, to explain away the privilege of the classes who possess power in the here and now. Benjamin, however, points to the articulation of a now that opposes the empty, homogenous time of progress, coming together in a “flash”: “The historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Benjamin 2006a: 396). The task of the historical materialist entails linking that practice of redemption in order “to bring about a real state of emergency” (392).
The historical materialist engages the past in its specific constellation, its “secret agreement,” with the present in which the historical materialist works (Benjamin 2006a). In uncovering the conditions of oppression suffered in the past, this kind of history orients a relation to the present as a task and obligation to elaborate the circumstances in which a redemption, a kind of justice, might be envisioned more concretely. That past offers an affective well from which those working in the here and now might draw in their effort to fight for the future. The way in which one disciplines oneself to read history disposes one to comport oneself appropriately in the present; it disposes one to understand actions in terms of a sustained fight for justice held together by a recognition of the oppressed who still await their redemption. Benjamin, then, suggests adopting a historical materialism that imagines a revolutionary struggle as a struggle for a kind of historical memory to redeem the historical struggles of the vanquished as a fight over who we are as a species, as moving beyond mere life toward an articulation of a just life, an admirable life, both in terms of its relation to the other of our encounters and also in the fashioning of a substantively determinable commitment to environmental health and justice (Agamben 1998).
The oppressed, if one deploys this gesture in the name of an environmental politics, could include those disproportionally exploited and diminished by a racialized and class-driven instrumentalism that benefits some at the expense of others. Katherine Yusoff’s (2008: xiii) genealogical problematization of White Geology helps make this point:
This White Geology continues to propagate imaginaries that organize Blackness as a stratum or seismic barrier to the costs of extraction, across the coal face, the alluvial planes, and sugar cane fields, and on the slave block, into the black communities that buffer the petrochemical industries and hurricanes to the indigenous reservations that soak up the waste of industrialization and the sociosexual effects of extraction cultures.
Yusoff suggests an approach that centers Blackness, and all of the exploitation that the discourses and practices that organize its violent history and present, in our approach to the environmental degradations summarized under the banner of the Anthropocene. The appeal to Yusoff’s work would entail its own extended, centered consideration of the problematics articulated by the environmental justice and environmental racism movements that open beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, the very force of Yusoff’s critique, which we connect here to Benjamin’s invocation of the “weak messianic force” covered over by mainstream history, suggests a way of expanding a focus on the affirmative content an environmental democracy to come would begin to address.3
In characterizing the oppression justified by a historical sensibility informed by progress, and in suggesting a nonexploitative relationship with the marginalized and exploited, Benjamin offers an appeal to justice that could serve as the organizing ethos for our environmental-democratic utopia to come. That normative content thus provides a kind of principle to help one imagine the concrete difference between the world in which one acts and the world that one seeks to bring into being. Doing so provides the motivational coherence informing the political movement to make such a world possible. The utopian possibility heralded by our weak messianic potential, organized by the possibility of redemption, can now be understood as a commitment to a kind of justice premised on a nonexploitative relationship to nature and the marginalized other. In remarking on the “vulgar-Marxist” conception of labor that became predominant in the economic views of the Social Democrats of pre-fascist Germany, Benjamin (2006a: 393) remarks that it “recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.” This understanding of labor, Benjamin suggests, “is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which, with naïve complacency, is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat” (393–94). By comparison, Benjamin avers that Fourier’s ridiculed fantasies illustrate a superior understanding of labor, which, “far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb” (394). This chastened instrumentality of a relationship with nature offers at least part of an affirmative way of organizing one’s orientation toward the content of an environmental democracy that might emerge from the violent repetitions constitutive of our capitalist-technocratic present. That repeated normative opportunity at the heart of the political is not merely ideal or not merely utopian; it is operative within and empirically identifiable as inherent within the iterated corporeal and material bases of politics.
This nonviolative ethos, however, seems to be in tension with the realist pole of Benjamin’s thought. How can this necessary violence, even as a “divine” incursion, be squared with the import of a noninstrumental and nonviolative moral-ethical relationship to nature and those marginalized others?
Butler on Violence as Nonviolence
Judith Butler (2021: 122–33), in their engagement with Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” adds depth to this projection of a democracy to come by locating the political promise and force of nonviolence encoded in the logic of violence that Benjamin explores. In rehearsing the “Critique of Violence,” Butler links that analysis to Derrida’s notion of iterability and how he reads Benjamin in terms of that iterability: “The continuity of a legal regime requires the reiteration of the binding character of the law, and to the extent that police or military powers assert the law, they not only recapitulate the founding gesture (‘This will be law’) but also preserve the law. . . . the law is ‘preserved’ only by being asserted, again and again, as binding” (124–25). In doing so, Butler follows Benjamin and Derrida in enjoining the question of violence along a communicative dimension that allows them to articulate a way of squaring a commitment to nonviolence with a rhetorical counterviolence.4 That counterviolence, though, is of a different register, showing some kinship with what Habermas (2002: 306) has called “the unforced force of the better argument,” but in a way that recognizes a kind of violence that occurs within the communicative and rhetorical terrain in which they work. Contrary to Derrida’s concern about the possible trajectory of a bloodless rendering of divine violence, Butler follows a different path out of Benjamin’s work. This force of nonviolence can, as that which breaks the circle of violence, become the organizing point for a broader ethos of relational nonviolence that fights to broaden the kinds of grievable lives worthy of protection.
Connecting the interesting space occupied by nonviolence within Benjamin’s description of the economy of violence constitutive of the sociopolitical with his ambiguous notion of a divine violence, Butler seeks to situate the possibility of the force of nonviolence as that which would constitute the messianic moment of a Benjaminian iteration. To that end, Butler quotes Benjamin (2004: 245) from a “Critique of Violence,” where he suggests, “There is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is totally inaccessible to violence, the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.” From this assertion, Butler (2021: 126) turns to Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” finding in the figure of the translator a potential capacity “to enhance and augment communicability, suggesting that it can ameliorate impasses in communication.” In that sense, Butler wonders,
If such techniques of nonviolence suspend the legal frame works that govern our understanding of violence, then perhaps that “suspension” of legal violence is precisely what is meant by “divine violence.” It is violence done to the violence of the law, exposing its lethal operation and establishing within civil society an alternative, ongoing technique that has no need of the law. (129)
It is important to emphasize that while Butler appeals to what might be called an ideal-image space that inheres in “language as such” that “overcomes impasse and the failure of language and the impossibility of communication,” that ideal would seem itself to depend on a kind of violence or force that inheres in the intersubjective encounter that is the very space of translation. “For Benjamin,” Butler notes, “translation consists of reciprocal activity of one language upon another, transforming the target language in the course of the exchange. This reciprocal activity alters, intensifies, and augments each language brought into contact with another” (127–28). While it may be true that this reciprocal exchange gestures toward “language as the ‘sphere of agreement wholly inaccessible to violence,’” (Butler 2021: 128; internal quotation from Benjamin 2004: 245), it remains the case that this violence cannot be dissociated from the figurative violence that transforms and alters the sense that those who participate in language would necessarily experience. Thus, though this vision of language might turn toward the possibility of nonviolence, it retains the sense of how the theoretical, the philosophical, the historical, and the cultural remain sites where a kind of violence, a nonphysical violence, remains capable of blasting open our understandings of our received present. As such, nonviolence, even if it entails physical action, is always communicative, always, as a political strategy, aimed at revealing the violence of injustice that sustains the status quo.
Butler’s focus on rhetoric and the communicative dimension creates an opportunity to talk about politics at the level of language and how translation carries within it the transformation of both target-text and language in its totality. If language, in at least its idealizable totality, incorporates a divine violence that is a nonviolence, then one place in which the messianic will appear is in the iteration of language and concepts from which we could not, in any case, free ourselves. That nonviolence that emerges in the very essence of critique (even in the very essence of language), then, is consonant with the idea of a democracy that seeks to preserve a communicative basis for coordinating action and solving problems. It also gestures toward a particular kind of democratic ethos, implying a radical equality of grievability that would seem to have a kinship with Benjamin’s gestures to the historically oppressed.
Conclusion: Utopia, Critical Theory, and the Question of Praxis
One of the tasks that emerges out of the lineage of thought that we have followed here would be an emphasis on the importance of the communicative, the rhetorical, and the imaginative as fundamentally important realms of political activity. In fact, in Benjamin’s work, despite the focus on political realism that animates a “Critique of Violence”; in Derrida’s work, despite its insistence that deconstruction is an operation of justice; and in Butler’s work, despite the ethical-political import of its thematic attention to “precarity” and “grievability,” their philosophical commitment to linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural analysis situates their work as a kind of theoretical-linguistic contribution to the dialectical movement of a critical theoretical praxis.
There will always be those who are immediately dismissive of this train of theorizing as a kind of extraneous conversation, as merely ethical, as merely utopian, but there are ways in which the preoccupation of thinking the world differently, of being able to see it differently, are central to any political effort to move the world in an environmentally admirable direction. For the critical theorist, these efforts to understand the world in which practice grapples with the normative questions that emerge from any practice remain crucial to a critical politics in which the gesture toward the utopian remains possible. Benjamin’s description of the iterative constitution of the sociopolitical anchors any postcapitalist utopian aspirations in the realist fact of politics and in the material circumstances in which utopian hopes move forward in a world not of our own making. And, against the backdrop of our environmental pessimism, the moment of difference contained in the very structure of the iterative reproduction of meaning and society traced in this essay suggests a gateway beyond the empty, homogenous time, the pure presence of what often appears as our dystopian circumstances. That difference that inheres in the structure of iteration, in the very constitution of the political, sustains a hope that things might be different. And this inherent possibility of difference informs an insistence on and gestures toward the utopian space of an environmental democracy. In this rendering of a utopia to come, an environmental democracy would be built on and would foster a reflexive autonomy grounded in a nonviolative relation to nonhuman nature and to those human others who have borne and who bear the brunt of a world ensnared in its commitments to an instrumentally informed notion and practice of progress. This kind of autonomy, which rests as the normative and affirmative heart of the critical theoretical tradition, sustains a notion of utopia in which the work of the utopian is never done, providing a way of figuring efforts to avoid the looming possibilities and necessities of an authoritarian environmentalism. This essay has sought to enjoin a political ethos wherein the iterated production of the political opens up a space for radical moments of political agency; the critical theorist is in every iterated moment, in the conversation essayed here, faced with the responsibility of articulating and enacting an available democratic-environmental disposition—this environmental democracy to come, even in the form of socialist, environmental democracy, cannot be totally determined in advance of an iteration of violence in which it is called forth, but its call is also an insistence on ways, modes, strategies of acting, and on the cultivation of an orientation toward the contexts of our encounter. As Benjamin stumbled toward his concluding fate in a world caught in the vortex of a rising fascism, he was able to find a way of theorizing that the very grounds that bred the pessimism of his times marked the possibility of a difference through which redemption might be found. Likewise, contemporary critical theorists find themselves working within the space of a world whose reproduction implies environmental doom, but where they remain responsible for articulating the possibilities for different ways of seeing and thinking. It is only in the imagining of such a space that some who despair about a way out of our current circumstances will move beyond the debilitating forces that sap them of their abilities to respond. For the critical theorist, one could add, the utopian impulse consonant with the critical theoretical tradition that finds expression in Benjamin’s and his interlocutors’ work is an ongoing task, one in which political action is urgent but where even the realization of its aims threaten an antiutopian set of dangers from which the utopian can never fully escape.
Notes
That notion of autonomy is central to the affirmative aspirations of critical theory. Substantively, the concept of autonomy could be traced back to at least Plato’s depiction of Socrates’s critical interrogation of the Athenian status quo, through Kant’s contrast of autonomy to the heteronomous, and as it is picked up by twentieth-century critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Michael Foucault. For an extended treatment of the role of autonomy in the work of Adorno and Foucault, see Deborah Cook’s (2018) Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West.
Gewalt, typically translated as “violence,” could be translated as “domination” and is related to Verwaltung, which denotes the administration, management, or control of operation, and to Vergewaltigung (rape).
Benjamin’s effort to read history against the grain could also be enlarged to include the nonhuman environment, suggesting a broadened “kingdom of ends” capable of informing the moral-ethical orientation of an environmental politics. Jane Bennett’s effort to bring a nonhuman nature consisting of actants, whether nonhuman species, nonbiological geological features, or even entire ecosystems, might be helpful in this regard. She suggests a strategic anthropomorphism that could allow us to flesh out a more robust sense of the injustice perpetrated against a nonhuman nature. As she puts it, “We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature—to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.” (Bennett 2010: xi).
A further elaboration on the conversation between Benjamin, Derrida, and Adorno staged here would look at the relationship between iterability and negative dialectics as different ways in which sociopolitical continuity and its transformation might be thematized. One justification for staging this concept in terms of iterability is that it provides a way of sustaining Benjamin’s notion of the flash of messianic interruption, as that which marks an utter break with the logics and violence of the status quo.
