Though for the Western political tradition violence is usually deemed merely instrumental, and thus neither essential to, nor constitutive of, the bios politikos, Walter Benjamin.s .Zur Kritik der Gewalt. [.Critique of Vio-lence,. 1921] and Georges Sorel.s Réflexions sur la violence [Reflections on Violence, 1908] constitute an exception.1 In very different ways, both texts put forward a notion of violence which comes to coincide with pure praxis, that is, with pure political action, in great contrast with a political tra-dition which rather identifies in violence a non-political or anti-political form of action. In Benjamin.s case, the ambiguity of the term Gewalt is not sec-ondary to the argument: in German, it can mean force, power, might and violence, depending on the context; it reunites thus potestas and violentia in a dialectics that Etienne Balibar values as positive and fructuous.2 The French violence, on the contrary, presents a univocal connotation, though Sorel, as we will see, redefines it to his own purposes.3 However, the ex-planation cannot be limited to the terminology, but must rather be pursued in their notion of praxis.