Scenariji nasilja: Benjamin, Kafka, Brecht

How has the recurrence of violence been conceptualized in philosophical and performative discourses? And what is this thing that appears again when violence occurs? Besides their (apparently always) current relevance, attempts to answer these questions echo powerfully within and between the creative and theoretical writings, as well as the artistic practices, of Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. Each demonstrated, in a variety of ways, that in order for violence to be understood it must be inscribed in a narrative, at the same time as it reflects on and re/presents its own reoccurrence. Author's points of departure is Benjamin's formulation of “The Laws of Repetition” in his short essay on toys and play from 1928, on the one hand, and his 1921 essay on violence, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, on the other. The critique of violence can be read as an accumulative 'scenario', finally staging what Benjamin terms 'mythical' and 'divine' violence in order to transcend the inherent contradictions and shortcomings of the more formal, legal discourses on violence. The article serves as a focalizer for the interactions between the work of Kafka and Brecht, as well as the repetitive echoes of the Classical Greek and Hebrew sources with which Benjamin ends the essay. Author draws the attention to how the notion of Darstellung (which means both presentation and representation, and can be seen as a combination of both) activates these discourses of and about the repetitions - the representations - of violence.