Walter Benjamin and Georges Sorel: between the myth of the general strike and a politics of pure means

Abstract

In his Critique of violerice, Walter Benjamin claimed that :he social phenomenon of the revolutionary general strike (theorized on by Georges Sorel in his killections on Violence) was an example of what would be a "pure political mean" (outside any legitimate form of power). In this context, not many contemporary commentators note an important conceptual incoherence between those two philosophers: for Sorel the revolutionary general strike is a social myth, while in Benjamin the category of myth, essentially negative, describes the violence that imprisons life and cryscallizes it in a higher form of political power. In [his article, we demonstrate [his conceptual discrepancy in order in examine mime way it has been approached by other philosophers. The philosophy of history, mime possibility of an ethical political action, and messianic temporality, all appear on the theoretical horizon linking these philosophers, and through these ideas a conceptual impasse can be decoded. Moreover, this horizon can be confirmed if we follow the idea of a "pure political means" that Benjamin proposes and which moves forward to the thought of an unexplored philosopher mentioned by him: Erich linger. In the last part of this article we will develop the keys given by linger, which fall right in line notion of the general strike as a pure political mean.