For Benjamin, this state beyond states of exception is achieved by two means: by passionate acts constitutive of “pure means,” or means no longer directed towards a juridical or moral result, an unpurposeful means; and in “divine violence” that is “law-destroying,” that in its anarchism interrupts law as a source of juridical retribution and as the fulfillment of mythical fates. “This very task of destruction poses again, in the last resort, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythical violence. Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.”(“Critique of Violence”)