Våldet, Rätten och Rättvisan : En kommentar till Walter Benjamins Försök till en kritik av våldet

This paper is an attempt to re-read Walter Benjamin’s essay “critique of violence” by separating what we here presume being its three-part core or axis, namely Right (rätt, as in Law), Justice (rättvisa) and Violence (våld), and then make an inquiry into the relationship between them, or, to what extent these three parts relate to each other. The method for doing so is at first a close-up reading of Benjamin’s text, where the core parts are being mentioned. Thereafter we will take a look at some of the most prominent attempts to read Benjamin to see to what extent their interpretation is compatible to ours. At last, in the concluding part of our paper, a suggestion with a shade of psychoanalysis of how to interpret the essay will be presented, together with a clarification of the three notions we did set out to investigate in the beginning. The aim of this paper is both to make Benjamin’s essay clearer, but also to make more stable ground for a new way of looking at Law and Justice and the relationship between them