Critique, economy, dietetics. Derrida, Benjamin and Viveiros de Castro on violence

Abstract

Through the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, this work traces a deconstructive path regarding the relationship between violence and representation. We argue that a critical paradigm, such as the one performed by Benjamin’s 1921 text on violence, cannot completely destabilize the phenomenological law that links representation to violence. Starting from Derrida’s proposals on arche-violence or original violence, we show the need to move forward to an economic paradigm, which does not reproduce the cutting and classification gestures of Benjaminian criticism. All of this is well known given Derrida’s writings on Benjamin. We go a step further by associating this economy of violence to a certain dietetic logic: from the cannibalistic dynamic of eating the other (manger l’autre), well articulated by Viveiros de Castro in relation to the epistemological canons of European thought in relation to the “new world”. Based on unpublished seminars given by Derrida, we show the possibility of approaching the relationship between violence and representation from a certain “speculative cannibalism” of a new kind.