Home > Work > Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics
1 " If the state is just the accumulated results of past conflicts, and if preservation of the state becomes the end that grounds necessity, then the fact of violence becomes a kind of law, and the law, grounded in the need to preserve what fate has established, blurs into the fact of organized violence "
― , Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics
2 " Divine violence expiates; it releases from guilt. It operates not by the destruction of bodies but by the destruction of the systems of laws or ethics that declare an action to be right or wrong. "
3 " In the wake of divine violence...the commandment [to not kill] 'exists not as a criterion of judgement, but as a guideline for the actions of the persons or communities who have to wrestle it in solitude and, in monstrous cases, to take on themselves the responsibility to abstain from it'. Divine violence offers not legitimation but renewed occasions for responsibility. It breaks the binding obligations of an order that lets a person evade responsibility by saying, 'I am just following the law'- whether that law is rooted in the legal means of positive law or the just ends of natural law. Divine violence forces free action. It demands responsibility. "
4 " The richest forms of political life are possible only when people are free to do more than conform their societies to preexisting codes, whether those codes claim to be set by earthly or divine powers. The fullness of political life requires a freedom on the other side of binding code. Because people are born into a world already ordered by codes of many kinds, some kind of emancipation is necessary for political life to begin. The divine violence of the higher law does this work. It does not bring politics to an end; it makes politics possible. "
