Abstract

One hundred years after its first publication, Benjamin’s Critique of Violence continues to be a reference text for the study of political violence. However, the anarchist ideas that move implicitly and explicitly throughout its pages -and that lend historical meaning to his concept of divine violence- have been relativized by the prevailing messianism in certain contemporary analyses. This paper studies in-depth the anarchist horizon of radical political transformation that Benjamin takes from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence: The idea of a final catastrophic revolution whose intrinsic morality will be demonstrated in its capacity to destroy the dialectical historical cycle between violence and power.