Description
Conceiving of policing in its broadest sense as a “strategy of administering structural violence” (Rossdale, 2021), this paper considers the early thought of Walter Benjamin and his relevance for abolitionist thought. It will argue that everyday practices of prefigurative politics in emancipatory social movements – the “implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here and now” (Raekstad and Gradin, 2020) - constitute a form of Benjaminian divine violence and an effective strategy to resist policing.
Using recent examples taken from but not exclusive to the Palestine solidarity movement, I consider practices of prefiguration including direct action and activist mutual aid, contending that such acts work to undermine the mythic violence of the state in Benjaminian terms. Contra Derrida’s Force of Law (1990), in which Benjamin’s anti-state divine violence takes on a deeply sinister character, this paper draws on Frantz Fanon, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler in placing Benjamin firmly at home within abolitionist struggles and movements against liberal order.
By building an epistemology for liberation based on lived experience and intersectionality, by practising horizontal forms of organising or radical forms of care, we can be alive to ways not to do social struggle that risk reproducing the very systems of oppression we oppose. Protecting each other against a pro-genocide and increasingly fascist police state, we can therefore also engage in the potentially divine violence of prefiguration and the permanently freakish practices of abolition.
