Robert Sinnerbrink 87
the critique of violence. Techniques of civil agreement that are intersubjec-
tive and communicative already indicate a sphere ‘beyond the law’ where
the use of unalloyed means is possible. In the case of the ‘conference’, a dia-
logical situation of unconstrained communication, the exclusion of violence
is signalled by the lack of any punishment for deceptive or lying speech.
And such a possibility in turn is opened up, Benjamin claims, by the herme-
neutic dimension of language: ‘there is a sphere of human agreement that is
non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper
sphere of ‘understanding’ (Verständigung), language’ (GS II·1: 192; SW 1: 245).
Benjamin, moreover, distinguishes this ethical moment of dialogical non-
violence from the political moment of pure violence evinced in the proletar-
ian general strike. Can these ethical and political forms of non-violence be
brought together? While Benjamin gestures towards the analogy between
pure means in politics and dialogical communication, he appears to re-
serve this dialogical non-violence for the interpersonal sphere of linguistic
communication, related forms of social intercourse governing confl icts over
goods, and the situation of unconstrained dialogue evinced in the ‘confer-
ence’ (Unterredung). Rather than development the implications of this insight,
however, Benjamin does no more than point to the analogy between the
spheres of politics and of social communication: ‘We can therefore point
only to pure means in politics as analogous to those which govern peaceful
intercourse between private persons’ (GS II·1: 193; SW 1: 245).
Instead of exploring the possibility of introducing dialogical commu-
nication into the sphere of politics, Benjamin’s text, as Derrida observes,
takes on a decidedly theologico-metaphysical tone. Pure revolutionary vio-
lence, according to Benjamin, does not lend itself to any human knowledge
or certainty on our part (Derrida ‘Law’ 56). It fi nds its source in God, the
wholly other, the ‘sovereign violence’ (waltende Gewalt) (GS II·1: 203; SW 1:
252). For Derrida, Benjamin’s relapse here into a theologically infl ected phi-
losophy of history—the historical decline from a pure origin to a teleologi-
cal conclusion through revolutionary repetition—signals his complicity with
crypto-metaphysical thinkers such as Schmitt and Heidegger. But does this
also signal, as Derrida claims, Benjamin’s complicity with ‘the worst’ (Na-
zism, the Holocaust)? As I noted above, the parallel Derrida draws between
Benjamin’s conception of annihilating, sacrifi cial, ‘divine’ violence, and the
‘bloodless’ annihilation of the Holocaust, is controversial to say the least.11
As Werner Hamacher remarks, it should be clear that:
Benjamin’s notions of annihilation and destruction … have nothing to
do with the corresponding propaganda terms of the so-called conserva-
11. As Agamben notes, the ambiguity of Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ can prompt the
most ‘dangerous equivocations’, including the ‘peculiar misunderstanding’ that prompts
Derrida to approximate it to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ (Agamben Homo Sacer 63–7). Quo-
tation on p. 64.

Experience and Play178
dichotomy in the revelation of an ontological truth and is thus the basis of a
concept of experience Martin Jay argues ‘might justly be called noumenal
or ontological’ ( Jay 147). This can be achieved ‘only by relating knowledge
to language’, since ‘a concept of knowledge gained from refl ection on the
linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of expe-
rience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed to truly systema-
tize’ (GS II·1: 168; SW 1: 108). The notion of experience here rejects both the
Kantian Erfahrung, the empirical experience of the scientifi c subject, and the
Diltheyan Erlebnis, the inner experience of the contingent and pre-rational
subject. Founded upon a knowledge autonomously beyond the subject-object
terminology—Jay defi nes it as ‘mythical’ (148)—it is central for the child of
the later writings, as is the focus on language.
The 1916 fragment ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man’ is thus fundamental. Here, in a strongly anti-Saussurean argument,
the ‘name’ is identifi ed as ‘the linguistic being of things’ and therefore the
true knowledge of the thing. The Adamite act of naming depends on how
the language of things is communicated to the namer: it is thus not ‘creative’,
but ‘receptive’, and in it ‘the word of God shines forth’ (GS II·1: 150; SW 1:
69). What matters for the discussion of the child is the relationship between
language and nature after the Fall. When God’s word curses the ground, the
‘muteness’ of nature begins, ‘which is what we mean by the ‘deep sadness of
nature’. This muteness and profound melancholy come from the fact of be-
ing named ‘not from the one blessed paradisiacal language … , but from the
hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered’. Things no
longer have ‘proper names’ (Eigennamen), but rather, in the language of men,
they are ‘overnamed’ (überbenannt) (GS II·1: 155; SW 1: 73). Only the child, in
the later writings, will be given access, through its prelapsarian condition,
to the ‘secret password’ (geheime Losung) of the language of nature (GS II·1:
157; SW 1: 74).5
This conception of nature, which will remain a constant throughout
Benjamin, is profoundly Romantic, precedent and opposed to the objectify-
ing and exploitative attitude of scientifi c/productive observation. Romanti-
cism was the greatest infl uence on Benjamin in these years and was never
merely superseded by either Marxism or Baudelairean modernism. Rather,
it will ‘merge’ with them and persist, as a subterranean but powerful cur-
rent, in the later writings.6 The section of his doctoral thesis, The Concept of
5. For a thorough analysis of the question of language in Benjamin see Menninghaus;
see also Bröcker.
6. On Benjamin and Romanticism see for example Bullock, and Hanssen and Benjamin.
Freud’s infl uence on Benjamin is also important, but as far as the fi gure of the child is
concerned, it seems that the Romantics’ suggestions of childhood as mythical, prelapsarial
innocence and wholeness are not touched by the Freudian notion of a ‘perverse’ and
‘polymorphic’ childhood. The concept of ‘innocence’, which Freud dispels and is instead