The burning library: Benjamin, Hugo, and the critique of violence

ISSN： 1050-9585

Source： European Romantic Review, Vol.20, Iss.2, 2009-04, pp. : 247-260

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Abstract

This article explores the relation between violence and literature as it informs Benjamin's essay “Towards a Critique of Violence” read in conjunction with two poems by Hugo on the Paris Commune: “Whose Fault?” and “Paris Gutted by Fire.” It further considers how Benjamin's citation of “Paris Gutted by Fire” in the Arcades Project underlines the articulation of violence and literature that informs the Arcades Project's account of the dialectical image. “Towards a Critique of Violence” opposes the revolutionary force of “divine” violence to the oscillating rhythms of law in which law posits itself in lawmaking violence and maintains itself in law-preserving violence. As an interruptive force that suspends the normative operations of law, divine violence disrupts normative language in a way that corresponds to the modern function of “literature.” Hugo often seems to offer an analogous pairing of revolutionary and literary violence, but his poems on the commune show how the commune disturbs the coherence between revolution and romanticism that he elsewhere locates within a larger history of progress. At the same time, these poems point to the more radical relation between the violence of the revolution and the violence of the letter that literature foregrounds - a literal violence that cannot be assimilated to progress. In particular, the passage Benjamin cites from “Paris Gutted By Fire” figures reading as an encounter with “an unfathomable abc” (Hugo's phrase) amidst the ruins of the commune. For both writers, reading testifies to a divine violence that confounds legal and historical normativity, and Hugo's lines find verbal echoes in Benjamin's reflections on the Arcades Project itself and the literary and literal violence that haunts its account of the dialectical image as an image to be read.