Description
In his ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin describes the power of forms of violence that exist outside of law. He suggests that such violence threatens law, comparing it to the ‘great criminal:’ one who performs great violence and garners the ‘secret admiration’ of those who witness their actions. However, they are admired because they can perform such violence outside of law, not for their violent results.
While the acute fear of nuclear weapons has progressively diminished since the Cold War, they have consistently appeared in our fiction. In particular, the narrative use in entertainment fiction, through film and television, demonstrates the power of conceptualizing nuclear weapons as an idea, and operationalizing their immense destructive capacity as a plot device. This generates a fascinating inconsistency, because there is simultaneously a shared understanding of the exceptional power of nuclear weapons and a paucity of fear of the actual devices, many of which are maintained at high alert in the ‘real world’, presenting a constant and continuous threat to our right to life.
As more states and global institutions recognize nuclear weapons as illegal, their continued existence in the ‘real’ and fictional worlds suggests they have become Benjamin’s ‘great criminal’ and have ‘aroused the secret admiration of the public.’ If so, what threats to the global community are revealed when we recognize that the destruction of nuclear weapons actually exists beyond the laws we designed to manage them?
