The Politics of Pure Means: On Paragraphs 10 and 11 of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence”

This article is focused on the analysis of paragraphs 10 and 11 of Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence.” The article focuses on two sets of fundamental claims: those addressing the function of the police within the legal order of the state and those addressing what Benjamin calls the “politics of pure means.” Benjamin considers both the police and the politics of pure means as belonging to “the realm of means,” but they represent two alternative configurations of politics. The police state exemplifies the art of government when “the state of emergency is the rule,” that is, when the constantly reproduced fear of violence performs a disciplinary function. By contrast, the politics of pure means names the possibility of a politicization of human beings living together on the basis of subjective dispositions other than fear (which traditionally was thought to justify the creation of the legal order of the state).