Divine Violence

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the notion of divine violence. The conversation draws principally on an encounter staged between the term's evocation in Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay, "Toward a Critique of Violence" and the term's later deployment by Slavoj Žižek in his book On Violence. The conversation also touches on Giorgio Agamben's use of "bare life" (a phrase used, though translated slightly differently, by Benjamin in his essay) and how recent podcast conversations on Frantz Fanon overlap or depart from the concerns of divine violence.

The Vader Sessions