Milton, Reading, and Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence"

Violence, in Benjamin’s theory, occurs at the instance that any positive law is put into place. “Law-instating violence” falls under the category of “mythic violence” because it unfolds arbitrarily, as though by fate. “Law-preserving violence” is a byproduct of mythic violence; it is tautological in the sense that it legitimates violence for the sake of its own name. It reproduces the law by re-asserting its binding function through state institutions and policing. These overlapping forms of violence work together to produce a subject accountable to the law. Benjamin’s theory of divine violence attempts to articulate a form of violence that occurs outside of this framework and, similarly, outside of the instrumental logic of means and ends that defines the activity of its agents. In her reading of Benjamin’s essay, Judith Butler highlights the distinction between the guilt necessary to legal accountability, and the divine violence of the Jewish God who, for Benjamin, is “decidedly not punitive.” Rather than a guilt-inducing law, she writes, Benjamin understands the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” as

mandating only that individual struggle with the ethical edict [that is] communicated by the imperative. This is an imperative that does not dictate, but leaves open the modes of its applicability, the possibilities of its interpretation, including the conditions under which it may be refused.

The commandment is not coercive, but is rather an occasion for interpretive struggle, from which, Benjamin writes, “no judgment of the deed can be derived.” As he acknowledges in the essay’s conclusion, divine violence will not be recognizable with the certainty that can be attached to mythic violence “because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to men.”  Benjamin’s definition thus helps us to articulate the moment of transition that Samson’s destruction initiates.

Rather than producing a site of free interpretation for his audience, I want to suggest that Samson’s violence reproduces a textual space: a space of reading and struggle, premised on the destruction of theatrical spectacle. Indeed, a similar kind of operation is at work in Milton’s 1671 publication. In a recent essay for the PMLA, Daniel Shore notes how Milton’s rhetorical strategy in the combat of idolatry is not to destroy idols, but to preserve such monuments by putting them on display for his readers. “Like errors more generally,” he writes, “idols must be singled out, materially preserved, and made available for ‘survay’ and ‘scanning.’” Milton’s late poetry, in particular, finds him countering his opponents by reinscribing them in the material text, thus reintroducing them to an active ground of biblical hermeneutics. The point is to deliver an interpretive situation to his audience that reveals the contradiction of their present political moment. No surprise, then, that Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes is preoccupied with the development of a reading audience against the popular appetite for theatrical spectacle. Rather than a revolution in form, however, Milton’s description sees the poem as a reformation of classical elements. Scolding his contemporaries for having embraced the “intermixing” of comic and tragic elements on the Elizabethan stage, Milton presents Samson Agonistes in opposition to common taste and public opinion, working against the grain, not simply “to gratify the people,” but by raising “pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those such-like passions . . . stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well-imitated.” At once gesturing back to the Greek tradition and forward to the cathartic potential of his dramatic poem, Milton’s preface reconfigures the genre specifically for an audience of readers.

Although Samson Agonistes takes a dramatic form, the author’s preface makes it clear that his work is not to be publicly performed. Rather, the poem is a text awaiting collective interpretation within a culture defined by theatrical representation and architectural restoration. This formal opposition is reproduced within the poem, where, as I’ve mentioned already, the public visibility of Samson’s labor conditions its reception as idolatry for the Israelites and divine proof for the Philistines. At the poem’s ideological centre, is the Philistine temple. “The building,” relays the Messenger,

was a spacious theaterHalf round on two main pillars vaulted high, With seats where all the lords and each degree
Of sort, might sit in order to behold. (1605-8)

The sight of Samson in this highly charged political space is enough to excite the Philistine audience into shouts of praise to Dagon. After he has fulfilled their requirements for performance, Samson is allowed to rest between “two massy pillars / That to the arched roof gave main support.” In what follows, Samson strikes his enemies precisely where they are most powerful: at the very site of cultural production. We, along with Manoa and the Chorus, are again reminded of our textual condition when the Messenger appears and begins to describe the actual violence of the event with a list of natural similes. Along with Manoa and the Chorus, the reader is left to imagine the disaster, prevented from accessing Samson’s inward state at the time of his performance. All that’s clear in the Messenger’s description is the class status of Samson’s victims:

Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but of each Philistian city round
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only scaped who stood without. (1653-59)

Here, Milton alters the biblical account, in which three thousand commoners, watching from the roof, die along with the Philistine nobility. Rather than a moment of transcendent irruption, Samson’s final act repositions his people, along with the vulgar Philistines, as readers within an immanent horizon. Samson embodies what Benjamin has called “the destructive character,” whose only activity is that of “clearing away.” This character is by nature iconoclastic. As Benjamin writes,

No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.

On the Philistine stage, the identity of labor and idolatry achieves its apotheosis in Samson’s feats of strength: shows of power that would reaffirm the ruling elite but instead lead to its destruction. While it is common for traditionalists, writes Benjamin, to “pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them,” the destructive character passes on “situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them.” Samson’s demolition of the Philistine temple delivers a pivotal situation to his people; but, by the end of Samson Agonistes, they have again exchanged this textual space for the theatrical space of visible signs and proofs.

Milton and the (post)secular (II)

 

In my last post, I pointed to some recent treatments of Milton (and other English poets from the seventeenth century) that argue for his relevance to current debates over religion and secularism. This post picks up on what I take to be the more convincing half of Feisal G. Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present. Mohamed opens his second last chapter with an epigraph from John Milbank (a theologian who has, more or less, sought to colonize whatever is meant by the term "post-secular"). Milbank's quote rehearses a familiar move in Christian apologetics: the biblical narrative is shown to break with sacrificial violence in favor of an originary peace. In what follows, Mohamed uses Milton's Samson Agonistes to demonstrate the limits of Milbank’s understanding of biblical narrative, a narrative of order and harmony that Western theologians characteristically impose on what they perceive as an arbitrary violence that is always traced back to the Other. 

Since John Carey’s much scrutinized article in the Times Literary Supplement in September 2002, “A work in praise of terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Milton’s late work in particular has generated sporadic, often reactionary, debates over the nature of religious violence, past and present. Following the religious violence of 9/11, Carey argued, interpretations of Milton’s poem must avoid condoning Samson's final massacre of the Philistines: Israel’s liberator must either be condemned for his religious violence or be avoided altogether. As Mohamed recognizes, Carey’s polemic is a covert attempt to protect Milton and his liberal legacy from its possible endorsement of terrorism, its association with religious violence. One might expect Mohamed to emphasize the ethical ambiguity of Samson’s final act; instead, he argues that Samson is a hero of faith who shows that, with the imposition of uniformity by the state church, Milton has come closer to the “far left wing of Reformed religion.” There is little doubt, in other words, that Milton comes out on the side of Samson. Mohamed’s evidence for this is based on two authorial decisions that characterize the poem. First, the representation of violence in Samson Agonistes is passed over quickly or, at best, described ambiguously, with a host of natural metaphors. Second, there is little or no remorse for the Philistines on the part of the Hebrew chorus, which immediately celebrates Samson’s “miraculous slaughter.” Because of the limited account the Milton chooses to include in his poem, “We are never allowed to forget . . . the victims’ status as Philistine political elite and the attendant association of this class with the oppression of Israel” (103). For Mohamed, the value of Samson Agonistes lies in the way that it retains and represses this ethnic violence. Equally important for contemporary readers is the characterization of Samson as a hero of faith, whose experience of the divine impulse is inaccessible. Unlike Milbank’s claims to Christianity’s original purity, Milton frustrates our attempts to narrate Christianity in such a harmonious manner; with Milton, he writes, echoing Walter Benjamin, we become aware of the barbarism that underlies all civilization.

Mohamed’s last chapter continues his discussion of terrorism by focusing on the silencing of Samson at the conclusion of Milton’s poem. Rather than following the account of Judges, where the captive Samson cries out for God’s assistance in his revenge on the Philistines, Milton obliquely describes Samson’s as bowing his head “as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (1637-8). Some critics have suggested that this instance evacuates Samson of his divine status, thus leaving readers with an ambiguous hero, but Mohamed suggests the opposite. With this silencing of Samson, he writes, Samson is removed from the sphere of human motivation. In the same way, the Israelites insist that their hero’s death is not a suicide but an “accident,” which allows him the identity of a martyr. For Mohamed, however, these distinctions, which tend to distance the religious violence of Milton’s time from that of our own, “are the distinctions typical of religious violence, which distances its martyrs from motives of personal vengeance and emphasizes their divine calling.” We thus witness “a consonance with the culture by which those attacks are immortalized” (121). If Milton can remain commendable for the way his poetry effects interpretive ambiguity, it is because of the parallels it draws with modern terrorism. The performative violence of Samson Agonistes, which strains against Restoration triumphalism, unsettles the illusory peace of the nation even while it affirms the progress of human liberty.

Delilah, PJ Harvey, and Samson Agonistes

Delilah, to be sure, has traditionally been considered a notorious woman; but as she tells us in John Milton's Samson Agonistes, “Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed, / And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds” (971-2). Indeed, her name still appears now and again in popular music (many examples are terrible; see, most recently, "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T’s; as a music lover, it pains me to even bring this song up), where, she is associated with adultery, betrayal, and all-around immorality. She has become a loaded symbol, but she has also become a bit of a cliché.

Delilah’s currency popular culture isn't entirely disappointing. PJ Harvey’s 1992 debut Dry features a song called “Hair,” in which Harvey assumes the voice of Delilah. In "Hair," Delilah's initial fetish for Samson’s hair soon turns diabolical and domineering (at least in the eyes of the man): “Samson the strength that's in your arms / Oh to be your stunning bride / Samson your hair glistening like sun / Oh would that it were mine / Samson your hair that's in my hands / I'll keep it safe you're mine / He said, ‘Wait! Wait! Delilah my babe, / you lied in my face, / you cut off my hair, / you lied in my bed.’” Harvey’s main point of interest is in sexual politics: Delilah’s subversive cunning is the true source of power, while Samson’s divine potency is shown to be quite fragile. In the final lines, she dictates and redefines the terms of their relationship: “Samson you'll stay with your ’Lilah / I hold you in my hands your hairy strength. / My man, my man.” Delilah’s sexual satisfaction turns out to be her great weapon of domination; consequently, Samson has become her possession.


 

Milton’s poetic tragedy, Samson Agonistes, sets things up somewhat differently. Delilah emerges at the centre of this narrative, but we only meet her after the notorious betrayal has already taken place. Samson’s pathetic status as a blind prisoner makes her visit all the more troubling. In addition, Milton has twisted the story such that Delilah is not merely Samson’s mistress; rather she is his wife. Her actions are therefore even more dispicable. Recalling Satan’s epic movements in Paradise Lost, Delilah enters the poem described “Like a stately ship,” brave and richly “bedecked,” resembling the whore of Babylon (710-20). However, Delilah's infidelity has less to do with sex than it does with religion.

Delilah's final excuse for divulging Samson's secret rests on the contraints of her Philistine religion: she was “Adjured by all the bonds of civil duty / And of religion” (853-4). Again appeal to her own weakness, she asks, “what had I / To oppose against such powerful arguments” (861-2). This defense seems like it would have been especially relevant for readers in Milton’s time. One could easily see puritan Dissenters making the same excuse (that is, religious coercion) for their having participated in state-required Anglican worship: Delilah resigns herself to the fact that “to the public good / Private respects must yield” (867-8). Milton would, of course, reject such logic. Indeed, by his divinely inspired martyrdom, Samson eventually proves that “private respects” do not simply die away when they are outwardly repressed. 

Samson is guilty of having been “uxurious”: his over-love for Delilah, his wife, has resulted in his own subjection. With the sensuous rhetoric that ensues, it is not difficult to see how Samson was swayed to give up his secret. Though it may be “feigned remorse,” Delilah’s speech encourages our sympathy and Samson appears unreasonable. That is, until Delilah misogynistically reconfigures her own weakness as “incident to all our sex” and immediately suggests that Samson’s own error “show’dst me first the way” by mistakenly entrusting his secret to “woman’s frailty” (775-83). Furthermore, Delilah explains, “I saw thee mutable / Of fancy, feared lest one day thou wouldst leave me . . . No better way [to endear thee] I saw than by importuning / To learn thy secrets, get into my power / Thy key of strength and safety” (794-99). Here, it seems, PJ Harvey’s Delilah is not too far off Milton’s mark. Her reasoning resonates with Eve’s considerations just after eating the forbidden fruit: she is tempted toward sexual mastery over her partner by withholding a powerful secret.
   
Indeed, Delilah’s final words bring us back, once again, to her currency within contemporary popular culture, where she has become a symbol for subversive feminity, rather than a national hero:
  
    My name [. . .]
    To all posterity may stand defamed,
    With malediction mentioned, and the blot
    Of falsehood most unconjugal traduced.
    But in my country where I most desire,
    [. . .]I shall be named among the famousest
    Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
    Living and dead recorded, who to save
    Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
    Above the faith of wedlock-bands [. . .] (975-986)