From the Critique of Violence to the Critique of Rights

This essay addresses Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the paradox he notes, that an exercise of a right, if it calls into question the legitimacy of the legal order, can be perceived by the state as violent, even where it is, strictly speaking, nonviolent. Benjamin theorized this in relation to the general strike, which reveals “an objective contradiction in the legal situation” that is nonetheless fundamental to the problematic constitution-in-violence of the state itself. His meditation on the strike can be extended to boycott, divestment, and sanctions as nonviolent exercises of a right that are understood by the state as destructive acts of violence: they present a challenge to the legitimacy of the state precisely in their will to abolish a condition of exclusion and differential rights that is constitutive of the state. In this respect, the observation that BDS seeks “the destruction of the state of Israel” finds its rationale and its limit within the logic of the “Critique of Violence” but also points beyond the institutions of rights, states, and law.