The Mythmaking of Divine Violence: Revisiting Benjamin’s Critique in an Age of Apocryphal Caliphates by: Gianni Izzo

Abstract

This essay examines the common identification of violence by taking Walter Benjamin's critique as a keystone to understanding how it is used as a device for abstracting its casual nexus of social and political indignities. From the modern Muslim perspectives of Ali <em>Shariati</em> and Ayatollah <em>Mutahhari</em>, an attempt at uncoupling mythic from divine violence is made where the later, without the guarantees and protection of the totalizing juridical systems of the former, is experienced as a politics of tribulation. At today's critical historical juncture of self-declared caliphates, mythic excesses point to a breaking out of the abstraction spell and a return to the “scalar" qualities of Islam. When effective, divine violence inheres with a potent quality of orientation that can be an effective mode in resisting the ideological edifices that sustain state repression, including those proclaimed as being Islamic.