The problem of violence rarely reaches center stage in philosophical and theoretical discourses concerning education. Yet violence is inherent to many – perhaps all – educational practices. Education often involves coercion, enforcement and punishing, and school education takes children away from their homes and families, submitting them to sets of rules and regulations they seldom wish to obey. At the heart of every discussion of the legitimacy of educational practices, therefore, lie the questions of whether they exert violence on the educated, what is the nature of this violence, and how its application may be prevented or at least minimized.

My talk will address these questions through the writings of Walter Benjamin, which receive growing attention in contemporary educational discourse (Lewis 2020; Johannsses & Zechner 2022). My point of departure will be Benjamin’s early and enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence” (1978 [1921]). Although education is by no means a central theme in this text, it appears in a crucial moment, as an example of what Benjamin calls “divine violence”. Benjamin presents such violence as transcending both forms of violence which originate in myth: law-making violence, which constitutes the legal order, and law-preserving violence, which protects an already-existing legal order. Against these two forms of violence, Benjamin describes divine violence as “law-destroying”: recognizing no boundaries, it strikes without spilling blood. While mythical violence, in both its functions, “is bloody power over mere life for its own sake”, divine violence is “pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (297).

How can we understand the link Benjamin draws between divine violence and education? Clearly the category of divine violence is not reserved to religion or theology, nor is God the only one to exert it; but in what sense is it manifest in education? Educational violence seems more likely to be classified as law-preserving, for it teaches to obey the law and conform to the legal order, and also as law-making, since educational institutions (similar to police practices, in an example Benjamin gives) operates through countless regulations they make within their wide operating field. I argue that Benjamin had in mind a kind of education through tradition, a transmission of knowledge and skills which allows for negotiation and transformation, by focusing on “the indispensable ordering of the relations among generations […], not of children” (Benjamin 2002a [1926]).

My talk will develop this point by appealing to Benjamin’s writings on childhood and youth (2022b [1938]), but will also link this conception of divine educational violence to the pedagogical implications of the scholastic method presented in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977 [1928]). Following the work of Ori Rotlevy (2017; 2020), I read Benjamin’s discussion of the scholastic treatise, which does not proceed argumentatively but rather presents the topic at hand digressively through contradictory citations and remarks, as an educational process in which the student’s mind undergoes a significant transformation. It is a spiritual exercise aimed at extracting the subject from contemplation in an attempt to school the mind in attunement with the intentionless, a manner of thought not based on the subject’s position, on the relation of a subject intending an object. Such scholastic education, I argue, fits the idea of what Benjamin calls “divine violence”.

[An earlier version of this proposal was accepted to ecer2020 – which was canceled due to covid19 – and I did not have the chance to work on it since then].

Philosophical textual analysis.

While Benjamin was highly suspicious of educational (and other) institutions, my conclusion is that his conception of scholastic education can indeed be integrated into school as an educational institution. In other words, the connection between Benjaminian scholasticism and the school is not merely linguistic. It rather testifies for the possibility of turning the school into a radical, “law-destroying” institution. Drawing on the conception of the school developed by Masschelein and Simons (2013), I outline the idea of the school as a form of divine violence.

Benjamin, Walter. 1977 [1938]. The Origin of German Tragic drama. Trans, John Osborne. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1978 [1921]. “Critique of Violence”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 277-300. Benjamin, Walter. 2002a [1926]. “One-way Street”, in Selected Writings, vol. I, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 444-488. Benjamin, Walter. 2002b [1938]. “Berlin Childhood Around 1900”, in Selected Writings, vol. III, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 344-413. Johannssen, Dennis and Dominik Zechner (eds.). 2022. Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, Tyson E. 2020. Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist education: From Riddles to Radio. New York: SUNY Press. Masschelein, Jan, and Maarten Simons. 2013. In Defence of the School. A Public Issue. Trans. Jack McMartin. Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers. Rotlevy, Ori. 2017. “Presentation as Indirection, Indirection as Schooling: The two Aspects of Benjamin’s Scholastic Method”, Continental Philosophy Review 50, 493-516. Rotlevy, Ori. 2020. “The ‘Enormous Freedom of the Breaking Wave’: The Experience of Tradition in Benjamin between the Talmud and Kant”, New German Critique 47(2), 191-216.