ABSTRACT: What does Gewalt mean for Walter Benjamin? After Derrida’s famous Force de loi, many authors, such as Agamben, Butler and Žižek, have offered their contributions on the theme. Not much attention, though, has been paid to the genesis of the text in which Benjamin deals with Gewalt. Benjamin’s essay, Zur Kritik der Gewalt, had originally been conceived as chapter one of the second part in a work Benjamin never concluded (Politik), of which nothing else remains, since the second chapter of the first part has never been written while the first part was lost. This first part concerned Lesabéndio, the hero of Scheerbart’s most famous novel. On the basis of these facts, some new trajectories are ventured in this paper pursuing a necessary rereading of the concept of Gewalt in Benjamin.

KEYWORDS: P. Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, W. Benjamin, J. Derrida, Gewalt.