The violence of a gesture

Walter Benjamin’s contributions to performance art

Abstract

The article presents and discusses Walter Benjamin’s texts Critique of power, critique of violence (1921) and The destructive character (1931) as possible contributions to performance art. It aims to observe, through them and the subsequent analyzes made by authors such as Werner Hamacher and Irving Wolhfarth, a relationship between violence and performance marked by the interruption of the action and a certain passivity of the act. The main case is the performance La Bête, by Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz, in addition to other classic cases in the history of performance art.