The purpose of this article is to raise fundamental questions about the binary opposition of violence and non-violence, which has become a common sense in Korean society. The starting point of this article is Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewa...
The purpose of this article is to raise fundamental questions about the binary opposition of violence and non-violence, which has become a common sense in Korean society. The starting point of this article is Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in which he pushes the relationship between law and violence to its extreme and suggests an alternative concept of “divine violence” that can break through the violence of law by means of thought. By reading Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence” as a practice of non-violence, this article proposes law’s self-reflection and critical pacifism or militant pacifism as conditions for breaking through the binary of law and violence.