Violence, law and rage: a possible relationship between Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

After a friendship traversed by war and exile and despite the fact that their works are touched foreshortenedly, this article starts from the possibility of reading a dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt about the relationship between power and violence. Although the first had been dedicated to the subject in the twenties and thirties and the second just specifically in the year 1970, the stormy nature of the twentieth century would only confirm their forecasts or debate their assumptions, turning violence into its most ostensible feature. Hence the philosophical relevance of recovering the way in which these central authors for 20th century philosophy thought about violence, and epiphenomena such as rage and anger; in order to reveal some clues about contemporary politics that are combined in an extremely current way with new crítical perspectives such as the so-called "affective turn"