Affirming educative violence: Walter Benjamin on divine violence and schooling

ABSTRACT

In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the pedagogical context, and secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Walter Benjamin
• school education
• schooling
• divine violence
• educative violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This awareness, and the preliminary context of corporeal punishment, justifies translating the multifaceted term Gewalt as violence, in the context of education.

2. In Wittgensteinian terms, truth cannot be told, but can be shown. For further comparison between the thinkers, see (Friedlander 2016).

3. Lewis (2019) contrasts Masschelein and Simon’s view to that of Benjamin, contending that while they, in alignment with prevailing educational thought, underscore the significance of attention, Benjamin provides an alternative perspective on the educational merits of distraction: ‘It is through diffuse alertness that the world opens up’ (Lewis 2019, 183). Our argument implies that the disparity between Benjamin and Masschelein and Simons is not as substantial as Lewis proposes.

4. Elsewhere (Simons and Masschelein 2010) Masschelein and Simons use the term ‘pedagogic subjectivation’ to refer to the dis-identification that takes place in school, and the consequent experience of potentiality and ‘being able to.’ This special kind of subjectivation is explicitly posited against the Foucauldian ‘governmental subjectivation,’ which ‘ties [the subject] to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (quoted in Simons and Masschelein 2010, 591).