Annihilating Critique: Walter Benjamin’s World Politics as the Just-Sharing of Nature

Abstract

This article develops an outline of Walter Benjamin’s idea of annihilating critique as presented in his essay fragment entitled “Theological-Political Fragment.” Annihilating critique is a world politics that releases thought from thinking the good in terms of relativised values and the efficiency of means, in order to think the good as absolute value. My claim is that such a critique is needed to respond to the demand of climate change: the call to me from an immanent outside to change my relation to nature from one based on possessiveness in systems of relative value (the neoliberal market), where the good of nature becomes my own self-interest, to one based on non-possessive having of the good of nature as sharing in common. In developing this critique, the article proposes the concept of just-sharing – the common sharing of the good of nature – through a reading of Benjamin’s brief notes entitled “Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice,” in which a subject is retrieved as the novum of critique. Through just-sharing, a non-possessive subject – one capable of thinking the good of nature as just – is proposed. Such a subject takes responsibility for ends it shares with others by naming them and acting as an agent of their fulfilment. Further reading of Benjamin’s essays on the task of the poet outlines how critique in the name of a non-possessive subject can become a praxis of poetizing, where the critical act itself partakes of the good of nature as just-sharing.