在〈對暴力的批判〉一文中，班雅明 (Walter Benjamin) 指出暴力的純粹性對應於人類早期社群所過的純粹生活型態。他認為由於工具理性的介入，暴力純粹性開始消逝；執法暴力 (law-preserving violence) 逐漸取代立法暴力 (law-making violence)。易言之，生動的革命力量逐漸僵化成為法律暴力 (legal violence)；暴力因此產生「質變」。藉由提出神聖暴力 (divine violence) 的概念，班雅明不僅抒發其對於純粹生活的烏托邦式想念；他同時也針對暴力的墮落提出指控。
本文擬從班雅明對暴力的批判出發，進一步談論暴力和正義 (justice) 在殖民/後殖民情境與全球化體系中的辯證關係。

In “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin traces the purity of violence back to the natural form of life in ancient communities, where violence is a pure means instead of a means to an end. According to Benjamin, the purity of violence becomes adulterated only when the law-making violence is weakened by the law-preserving violence—that is, when revolutionary forces surrender themselves to a rigid form of legal violence. Utopian as it may be, his conception of divine violence is nevertheless not only a nostalgic recall of a pure form of life, but it also offers a bitter indictment of degraded forms of violence such as modern parliament systems. As well as elucidating Benjamin’s critique of violence, this paper also aims at a further examination of the dialectics of violence and justice in the contexts of (post-)colonialism and globalization.