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Force of Name: The Critique of Violence

ion and judgement. To be named, either in the blessed spirit of language or in a fallen language ‘retains perhaps always a presentiment of mournfulness’. To name and to be named, accordingly, always involves overnaming and judgement: ‘The fall, supposed to be out of the ‘‘blessedness’’ of the Logos into the abstraction of judgement, thus appears as alwaysion of judgement, thus appears as always already inscribed in and prescribed by the Logos itself: as nomination it was from the very beginning also judgement. Mournful sadness would then be not so much originary as an expression of the origin’ (Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, p.301; Weber’s emphasis). ‘Overnaming’ could also be thought in terms of what we will later call ‘originary metonymization’ as the very possiblity of the name. Metonymy, we will show, always already disrupts any claim of purity in the name and thus is irreducible to the anteriority of properness. It also carries by virtue of its openness and mutability a force of interruption, or else a messianic force. 25 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 298. 26 See my ‘Justice’s Last Word: Derrida’s PostScriptum to Force of Law’, Derrida Today, 1:2 (2008), pp. 266–90. 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.287. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.287. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.278. 30 Before advancing any further we should be attentive to the semantics and the uses of ‘violence’, ‘force’ and ‘power’ employed in this text. First, Gewalt, a notion extremely difficult to translate, bears both the meanings of violence, which is how it is usually translated – as in Divine and mythical violence – but also of legitimate and authorized force or legal power, which also render Gewalt at various moments in the translations of this text. Then Kraft, which has been translated as both force and power, and appears at least two times in the text as ‘revolutionary’ [revolutionaren Krafte] and ‘expiatory force’ [die entsuhnende Kraft]. Macht translates as power and it is the principle under whose name mythical violence manifests itself. Finally, Walten, the name or the appellation that Benjamin gives to ‘divine violence’ in the last sentence of his essay, means ‘holding sway over’ or ‘prevailing’ and is translated as sovereign, another problematic translation, one also used by Derrida, but in a way that challenges and reinscribes the term. 31 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in OneWay Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), pp.132–54 (p.154). 32 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p.154. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.262. 34 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, pp.150– 51. 35 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and On Language of Man’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), pp.107–23 (p.116). 36 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.281. 37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Roundtable on Translation’, in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp.93–161 (p.116). 38 Jacques Derrida, ‘Penser Ce Qui Vient’, in Derrida Pour les Temps A Venir, textes réunis par René Major, (Paris: Editions Stock, 2007), pp.19–62 (p.36). 39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.293. 40 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.290. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.292. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.292. 43 Jacques Derrida, Signéponge (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), p.48. 44 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.262. 45 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p.17. 46 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p.154. 47 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p.36. 48 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.36. 49 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.37. 50 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.37. 51 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.36. 52 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.36. 53 Plato, Cratylus, 439C. 54 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.46. 55 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.45. 56 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.45. 57 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp.45–47. 58 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, p.138. 59 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.48. 60 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.45. 61 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, p.77. 62 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, p.77. 63 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, p.203. 64 We evoke here, although in a different context, Derrida’s use of this phrase in his preface to Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel, Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2004). 65 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p.293.