The previous analyses of the problem of foundation have important implications for how we understand the question of law in Agambenian political ontology. As I show in this chapter, this is because the problem of foundation goes to the heart of the concept of legitimation, throwing light on the secret connection established in modernity between life, authority and violence. I achieve this by carrying out an extended analysis of an essay that is pivotal for Agamben's own engagements with these issues: Benjamin's early essay ‘Critique of Violence’. A key thesis of Benjamin's piece is that there is no stable opposition between lawmaking and law-preserving violence (or in more recent terms between constituting and constituent power): that every legal order, and indeed every judgement passed within a legal order, always contains within it something of the original founding violence that occasioned the positing of the order as a whole. Legitimation is not just something achieved in the past, say with the writing of a constitution - rather, every legal order is always already engaged in a process of re-legitimation, such that the original lawmaking moment is renewed with every decision.