Abstract

The article critically discusses Giorgio Agamben’s reception of Walter Benjamin who figures as an important reference for Agamben’s assumption of an inevitably totalitarian nature of all sovereignty. Agamben’s diagnosis of a successful reduction of human beings to their pure life is drawn, after all, from Benjamin’s essay on the »Critique of Violence«. A close reading of Benjamin’s text within its historical contexts, however, leads to a revision of this interpretation. Agamben’s anachronistic reading withholds without notice crucial contents of Benjamin’s conception of ›pure life‹, and thus distorts Benjamin’s argument.