WALTER BENJAMIN Y GEORGES SOREL: ENTRE EL MITO DE LA HUELGA GENERAL Y UNA POLÍTICA DE MEDIOS PUROS

In his Critique of violence, Walter Benjamin claimed that the social phenomenon of the revolutionary general strike (theorized on by Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence) was an example of what would be a “pure political mean” (outside any legitimate form of power). In this context, not many contemporary commentators note an important conceptual incoherence between those two philosophers: for Sorel the revolutionary general strike is a social myth, while in Benjamin the category of myth, essentially negative, describes the violence that imprisons life and crystallizes it in a highe...