Law, Divine Violence, and the Sanctity of Life

Abstract

AbstractOpening Part II (“Catastrophe and Revelation”), Chapter 4 further investigates sovereignty through Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence. While ‘lawmaking’ violence founds a biopolitical community, and ‘law-preserving’ violence governs it, they interlock, just as Batman and the police use supralegal and legal violence to restore law in the Dark Knight series. Meanwhile, ‘divine violence’ destroys law revolutionarily, but it often turns into ‘pseudo-divine violence’ that sovereign killers justify for community building without revolution, that is, into lawmaking violence. As The Act of Killing shows, here appears a global ethical dilemma: that no absolute justice works as the basis of life’s sacred value. The chapter then inquires into true divine violence without any god-like sovereign and formulates the sanctity of life as a potential humanity yet to come.