The Violent Entrails of Justice and Law in Raquel by Vicente Garcia de la Huerta and "Critique of Violence" by Walter Benjamin

Even after considering the prominent contributions of Georges Sorel, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin's essay, "Critique of Violence," is undoubtedly the most significant and influential theoretical text written about violence in the 20th century. Here, Benjamin proposes the relationship between law, justice and violence in order to establish a critique, in the etymological sense, of several polarities: law-making in contrast to law-preserving violence, as well as divine in opposition to mythical violence. Since violence is an intrinsic part of tragic emotion, it is possible to read Raquel, by Vicente Garcia de la Huerta (1734-1787), through the lens of Benjamin's essay (and vice versa). The dialogue between both texts reveals intriguing parallelisms and bridges the historical and pragmatic distances separating them. At the same time, it also exposes the extent to which Garcia de la Huerta's tragedy conceptualizes Law, Justice and Violence as a triad of interconnected concepts.