No Escape From Fallibility

Richard Bernstein, Violence: Thinking Without Banisters

Polity, 208pp, £17.99, ISBN 9780745670645

reviewed by Matt Ellison

Hannah Arendt used the expression ‘thinking without banisters [denken ohne Geländer]’ to describe a way of thinking and judging without recourse to transcendental grounds. Writing in response to world wars and mass executions, Arendt believed that the standards handed down by tradition were no longer adequate to the demands placed upon thinking in the modern age. What was required was not the reproduction of tired philosophical categories, but a new way of thinking (which she distinguished from calculating or knowing), capable of doing justice to - and making sense of - the unprecedented violence of contemporary events. In this valuable and lucid book, Richard Bernstein pursues the motif of thinking without banisters through the writings of five thinkers - Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon and Jan Assmann - with the aim of determining what we can learn from them on the question of violence.

Any worthwhile treatment of such an intractable theme must proceed cautiously. Accordingly, Bernstein starts by noting that although today we are increasingly overwhelmed by images and talk of violence, we rarely think about it. Indeed, our apparent thoughtlessness - here again Bernstein relies heavily on Arendt - means that we suffer from an inability to even pose questions relating to violence: Can violence be justified? Is non-violence possible? What are the limits of violence? And most fundamental of all, what do we mean by ‘violence’?

In his appeal to thinkers who allow us to pose (and not necessarily resolve) such questions, Bernstein first turns to legal theorist Carl Schmitt. The focus here is on Schmitt’s influential concept of the political, which is predicated on the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction, which for Schmitt is to be understood in a strictly collective, public sense, is important for questions of violence, because it involves ‘the real possibility of physical killing’. Schmitt is useful, Bernstein suggests, in that he provides us with a realistic view of politics: he rejects the possibility of a peaceful, non-antagonistic political realm. He also astutely discerns a shift in the way wars are fought in the modern age: no longer, Schmitt believes, do states seek simply to defeat an enemy; the focus now is on the total ‘annihilation of a foe’ (this shift is also described as that from ‘limited enmity’ to ‘absolute enmity’). Nonetheless, Bernstein deftly shows that in making these distinctions Schmitt relies on an unthematised normative-moral - almost humanistic(!) - grounding. The result is that for all his emphasis on the sovereign decision as that which ‘arises out of nothingness’ (i.e. without a norm or banister), Schmitt is evidence of just how difficult thinking without banisters is.

The next chapter deals with Walter Benjamin’s highly cryptic and much discussed ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). Like Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1927), Benjamin’s text relies on an important distinction: that between ‘mythic violence’ and ‘divine violence’. Commentators including Butler, Žižek and Derrida have sought to grapple with the meaning of divine violence, interpreting it, respectively, as a form of non-violence, as ‘the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision’ and even as a concept which makes it possible to interpret the bloodless gas chambers of the Shoah as a manifestation of God’s wrath. Negotiating these and other interpretations, Bernstein argues that although some are illuminating (Butler’s) and some rather fanciful (Derrida’s and Žižek’s), ‘Benjamin’s remarks about divine violence and its opposition to mythic violence are too condensed and cryptic to resolve the issue of the conflict of interpretations’. This may seem a disappointing conclusion. However, to expect a final word on divine violence would be to misunderstand the aim of Bernstein’s book. His interest in Benjamin’s text lies not in the answers it provides, but in the questions that it continues to raise on the nature of legal and political violence.

Bernstein’s discussion of Arendt revolves around her contraposition of violence and power. Power, Arendt writes in the controversial On Violence (1970), is properly political, relying on speech, persuasion and debate rather than force; it is not to be understood as ‘power over’, but as the ability for human beings to ‘act in concert’. Violence, by contrast, is the antithesis of politics; it is purely instrumental in character and suppresses plurality (the condition for political life). Though Arendt is not so naïve as to believe that violence and power can ever be completely separated in the ‘real world’, Bernstein sees in her conceptual distinctions – freedom/liberation, action/fabrication, power/violence, among others - invaluable resources with which to interrogate the events that surround us. Bernstein’s discussion of Arendt is largely sympathetic, though he does point to her neglect of the potential for theoretical justification of violence, despite her practical support for the establishment of a Jewish army to fight Hitler in 1941. Unlike the close readings of Schmitt and Benjamin found in the first two chapters, the treatment of Arendt found here is wide in its scope, touching on Arendt’s conceptions of freedom, equality and public space. It could therefore serve as something of a primer to Arendt’s ‘exaggerated’ way of thinking about politics in general.

The subject of Bernstein’s fourth chapter is another highly polemical text. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written on the subject of colonial violence, is often read - including, Bernstein notes, by Arendt herself - as a blind apology for a violent uprising against colonial forces. Fanon gives an account of the political, economic, and socio-psychological effects of the colonial system on the colonised, and as such offers us an important perspective on the question of structural violence. Nonetheless, references to the cleansing quality of violence aside, Bernstein shows that Fanon’s book is more nuanced than is often thought, and in fact offers a critique of violence, condemning anti-racist racism and gratuitous forms of brutal violence. Bernstein also usefully shows that while Arendt and Fanon may seem to be radically opposed (her On Violence was partly written in response to the popularity of Fanon’s book in the 1960s), there is in fact a ‘productive tension’ between the two, and that ‘Fanon’s book should be read as a sustained argument showing why overthrowing the colonial system constitutes one of the “exceptional cases” in which violence - directed armed struggle - is justified.’

Having touched on political, legal, structural and colonial determinations of violence, Bernstein turns to a consideration of religious violence through a discussion of the work of Egyptologist Jan Assmann. Assmann’s formulation of the ‘Mosaic distinction’ - the ‘murderous’ opposition between the one true God and other gods, between true believer and infidel - seems particularly timely for considering questions of violence today. However, Bernstein takes issue with Assmann’s further distinction between the potential religious violence of what he calls ‘revolutionary monotheism’ and political violence. The problem, as Bernstein sees it, is that although Assmann makes this distinction to emphasise monotheism’s ‘mission’ to counter the totalising claims of politics and political violence, he ultimately provides a grounding for the potential eruption of religious violence against infidels.

A final chapter ties together the threads of Bernstein’s discussion, and points to some fruitful areas in which Schmitt, Benjamin, Arendt and Fanon may be read together in light of the questions they pose. Some readers may be left frustrated by Bernstein’s unwillingness to provide answers to these questions or to give guidelines for our response to violent events. This surely is the point, however. Here again the importance of Arendt for Bernstein is evident. It would seem that the figures discussed in this book have been chosen because they allow us to comprehend what is happening around us. To comprehend, Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), ‘does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt’. Rather, to try to comprehend events is to bear the burden they place upon us, without the support of a banister. It is ‘the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality - whatever it may be or might have been’. The task of comprehension requires the drawing, revision and perpetual questioning of distinctions. The mutable and unpredictable nature of violence means that any conceptual resources we have for responding to violent events will never be adequate to the task of comprehension. However, this shouldn’t be seen as a privation, but as a positive condition for genuine thinking and judgment. As Bernstein writes, ‘this is not a deficiency … but rather an essential feature of serious political argument. There is no escape from the fallibility and uncertainty of political judgment’.

Violence: Thinking Without Banisters is a valuable book not only because it recognises the impossibility of timeless criteria for thinking about violence and the naïvety of an appeal to absolute non-violence, but also because it raises questions about the nature of political responsibility. Like Arendt, Bernstein is rightly sceptical about the health of public spaces in which violence and other political issues can be discussed. The current assault on the humanities in higher education, based no doubt on the apparent frivolity of thinking and critique, should be seen as part of this same trend. This is why books like Bernstein’s are so important: they encourage us ‘to think what we’re doing’ (Arendt), to draw distinctions, to take risks; in sum, to engage in politics, without which ‘there is nothing left to prevent the triumph of violence’.
Matt Ellison is a freelance writer based in London.