The notion of, ‘divine violence’ (Gottliche Gewalt), as discussed in Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ (1986), is equated by Agamben with pure means – that is, with pure mediality. With regard to the latter, my thesis would be that a large part, if not all, of Agamben's thinking is organised around the notions of ‘means’, ‘mediality’, ‘medium’ and ‘middle’ – the latter especially in light of Émile Benveniste's linguistic theory (c.f. ‘middle voice’). Of particular interest in this regard is Agamben's development of a philosophy of ‘modal ontology’, where an entity's being would be understood to be inseparable from its ‘mode’ of being. That is – to put it another way – where an entity is inseparable from its ‘form of life’ (see Agamben 2016: 147–175). Here, it is intriguing to see that the middle voice (c.f.: ‘“to walk oneself”’), ‘situated in a zone of indetermination’ (2016: 28), is invoked as a way of explicating the notion of modal ontology. Thus, in referring to Spinoza on substance and mode, we read that: ‘in order to think the substance/modes relationship, it is necessary to have at our disposal an ontology of the middle voice, in which the agent (God or substance) in effectuating the modes in reality affects and modifies only itself. Modal ontology can be understood only as a medial ontology’ (163; emphasis added). The medial is given a broad reach, as the whole idea of ‘use’ is ‘a medial process of this kind’ (163; emphasis added). All of these terms (‘means’, ‘mediality’, medial) raise the question of the appearing of the medium – of the appearing of that which to be what it is normally does not appear.

It is thus through the notion of mediality that violence is brought into proximity with the image, the latter being the subject of the succeeding chapter. Whether or not Benjamin is correctly interpreted here, the notion of violence as pure mediality needs to be rethought when considering violence in Agamben's theory of homo sacer. The latter, despite all the commentary on it, remains to be fully illuminated. What follows is an attempt to provide this illumination.