B. “Deeply Unorthodox, Revolutionary, and Messianic:” ^{Footnote 40} An Overview of Benjamin’s Critique and Arcades Project

While Benjamin’s Critique was written roughly a century ago, its style and substance has seemed to have a wider resonance with our contemporary dilemmas than with the legal discussions of 1921. In fact, as Fenves has shown, the Critique “generated almost no response” during the Weimar period. ^{Footnote 41} One can speculate that it was perhaps overshadowed by some of the other interventions that were published side by side in Issue 47 of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik, ^{Footnote 42} which included posthumous essays by Marx & Engels and Max Weber, plus contributions from Ludwig Mises and Hans Kelsen. ^{Footnote 43} Alternatively, as Fenves suggests, perhaps the editor of the Archiv, Emil Lederer, only reluctantly accepted to publish the essay because he understood that it would be relegated to relative obscurity. ^{Footnote 44} For that, among other reasons, a more detailed exploration of the essay’s institutional and intellectual context might allow us to better grasp its content.

First, it is well worth noting that the Critique was originally envisioned as part of a broader project, or even book, on the general theme of Politics. ^{Footnote 45} While Benjamin’s correspondence reveals that in his Critique, he wanted to draw and contribute to an anarchist strand of literature that “treat[ed] violence in a particular way, not only rejecting violence in respect to the state but also more or less defending the revolutionary kind,” ^{Footnote 46} his broader project dealt with the moral philosophy of political life. Taking a passage in Kant’s Towards Eternal Peace as a point of departure, the project would include essays with draft titles such as “Teleology without Final Purpose,” “The True Politician,” and the “Dismantling of Violence”—an ambiguous precursor to the Critique. ^{Footnote 47} In the end, only the Critique and the highly celebrated, but also perplexing, collection of aphorisms One-Way Street would see the light of day.Footnote ⁴⁸

As for the Critique itself, the essay was written for another journal, Die weißenn Blätter, edited by Lederer. ^{Footnote 49} Personal correspondence between Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem suggests that Lederer had commissioned the piece from Benjamin for a special issue on “Sociological Problems of the Present.” ^{Footnote 50} However, Lenderer declined to include Benjamin’s final piece in The White Pages due to its length and difficulty but arranged instead for its publication in the Archiv as a consolation. In its stead, Lederer would publish his own essay “Sociology of Violence: A Contribution to the Theory of Social-Formative Forces” ^{Footnote 51} in The White Pages. While one can only speculate due to the fragmentary nature of the available historical evidence, most scholars see this shift of publishing venue as a product of the tension between Benjamin and Lederer’s approaches to the question of violence. While Lederer’s translator concluded the latter saw violence as something that could be reduced through the Social-Democratic institutionalization of conflict, the former’s insistence on the persistence of violence resonated with far-left and far-right forms of extra-parliamentarian politics. Similarly to Derrida, Lederer’s translator points to overlap between the Critique’s and certain Schmittean overtones as a reason for his editorial hesitance. ^{Footnote 52} Fenves, in turn, suggest that Benjamin’s overtly romantic and perhaps even metaphysical approach to syndicalism might explain their disagreement. ^{Footnote 53} What is clear, is that Benjamin’s notoriously unorthodox approach did not find an easy reception within the mainstream of its times, nor of ours.

This is unsurprising given that, despite any biases, Lederer was not wrong in his assessment of the essay’s length and difficulty. Famously, the text begins by positing that the task of the critique of violence, a statement which resonates with his preface The Task of the Translator, which was written in this same period, ^{Footnote 54} lies in a presentation of its relation to law and justice through the analysis of the relationship between means and ends. This requires, in his view, a critique of the leading approaches to the study of the law in the early 20^th century German field: Natural law and positive law. ^{Footnote 55} These two approaches suspend or exclude certain forms of questions, as the former takes violence for granted as a “natural datum” whereas the latter sees it as a “product of history.” ^{Footnote 56} Therefore, while natural law limits its analysis of law to the judgment of its ends, positive law restricts its purview to its means. For all of their differences, both schools are united by their “common basic dogma: Just ends can be attained by justified means, justified means used for just ends.” ^{Footnote 57} With this in mind, Benjamin discards the natural law tradition, as it “can only lead to bottomless casuistry,” and departs tentatively from a central tenet of legal positivism: The distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned force. As Abbott noted, Benjamin radicalizes this basic dichotomy not to make an argument about the “justification or justifiability of violence” but to highlight the “questions raised by the very fact that we make a distinction between just and unjust violence in the first place.” ^{Footnote 58}

Gewalt, as scholarly commentators often note, has a more expansive meaning than mere violence. ^{Footnote 59} It has a threefold meaning that includes not only also force or coercion but also authority or power. Therefore, by centering the dichotomy between authorized Gewalt and unsanctioned Gewalt, Benjamin aimed to highlight not only that the modern state requires violence to legitimate itself, but also that it must label all other forms of violence as unjust. ^{Footnote 60} For that reason, law “sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system.” ^{Footnote 61} Influenced by George Sorel’s work on the general strike, ^{Footnote 62} Benjamin then poses that revolutionary upheavals of violence can “found and modify legal conditions, however offended the sense of justice may find itself thereby.” ^{Footnote 63} The stage is set for Benjamin’s famous productive dichotomy between lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence. ^{Footnote 64} The latter is exercised by courts and by the police in their “repeated and institutionalized efforts to make sure law continues to be binding on the population it governs,” ^{Footnote 65} while the former is more exceptional. It is the kind of violence that only occurs when a polity is forged, often through the twin processes of war and revolution. ^{Footnote 66} However, the excess of law-preserving violence, as Benjamin notes in the context of the expansion of the policing operations, endows all violence potentially threatening and lawmaking. It signals that the state can no longer guarantee itself. ^{Footnote 67} As Menke puts it, law’s violent implementation “must endlessly repeat its instauration,” which in turn acts as an opening for other forms of lawmaking violence. ^{Footnote 68}

But, if the state is founded and preserved through violence, is there any space for a “nonviolent resolution of conflict”? ^{Footnote 69} Without doubt, replied Benjamin. In his original wording, “the culture of the heart has placed pure means of accord in human hands.” ^{Footnote 70} Chief among them, for Benjamin, was the conference, Unterredung, as a technique of civil agreement. While the polysemic nature of Unterredung lends itself to a variety of interpretations and translations—for instance, the more modest word “discussion” ^{Footnote 71} —in this article I will read it as conference. Just as Benjamin uses it in close connection to the activities of diplomats engaged in international negotiations. ^{Footnote 72} This will allow me to problematize Benjamin’s relatively charitable—and perhaps even Kantian—vision of international conferencing. ^{Footnote 73} While for him the “forms and virtues” of international diplomacy are “beyond all legal systems and therefore beyond violence,” in what follows I will claim that these technologies of civil agreement are also deeply embedded in cycles of lawmaking and law-preserving violence.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even if international law operates beyond the violence of Benjamin’s municipal state, this does leave such law beyond the reach of violence. I argue, the production of international law occurs within the realm of planetary violence/force/authority, intimately linked to processes of imperial rivalry and world-ordering before, during, and after global warfare.

This will allow me to provide for a different engagement between Benjamin’s work and international law. For better or worse, most scholars within the discipline have centered on his concept of history or his methodological insights on allegory and representation. ^{Footnote 75} Instead, I want to focus on his arguably scattered and limited comments in international law to push for a critique of violence that does not take the boundaries of the municipal legal order—die Rechtsordnung—as its point of end and departure. ^{Footnote 76}

In my argument, moreover, I draw insights from Benjamin’s posterior, but perhaps also notoriously long and difficult, Arcades Project. ^{Footnote 77} Roughly six years after the publication of the Critique, Benjamin first mentioned this massive project in his correspondence and continued working on it until his untimely demise in 1940. ^{Footnote 78} Scholars have often read this project as Benjamin’s attempt to synthetize many of his life-long intellectual influences—a tenuous compromise between the “metaphysical and theological” early stage of his work and a later more decisively Marxist phase. ^{Footnote 79} To the mix, moreover, one must also add a potent dose of the surrealist “dream wave,” which sharply molded the ways in which the project would unfold in terms of both substance and style. ^{Footnote 80} The Arcades Project resists any easy characterization as a traditional book—a format which Benjamin saw as obsolete, at least to a degree. ^{Footnote 81} While his correspondence of the mid-thirties suggest that he planned for a volume with six main divisions which paired a historical figure with a historical process—with tentative titles such as “Fourier or the Arcades,” “Grandville or the World Expositions,” “Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris,” or “Hausmann or the Barricades”—the actually existing work is composed mainly of vast collection of notes and commentary, that Benjamin collected in three distinct historical moments. ^{Footnote 82} Whether there was or was not a final manuscript in the black suitcase that Benjamin carried over the Pyrenees the week before his demise will be a question without solution for the ages. What matters is that the Arcades that saw the light of day—first in German in Volume V of Benjamin’s collected writings in the early eighties and then as an English translation in the late nineties—is composed of a set of “records and materials” that Benjamin entrusted to Georges Bataille and which remained hidden at the Bibliothèque National de France during World War II. ^{Footnote 83}

This seemingly endless compendium of notes, primary sources, and secondary references were organized thematically, not necessarily chronologically, by Benjamin into different konvolutes (the German word for folder or file), which have been traditionally translated by scholars into the neologism convolute. ^{Footnote 84} Benjamin’s archive reveals the careful work that the author undertook to organize these convolutes around a sophisticated system of color-based referencing and ordering, using a special paper for every single one of the sheets and 850 bibliographical references. ^{Footnote 85} It would be a mistake, as Andrew Benjamin notes, to see the citations or materials as accessory to the commentary. ^{Footnote 86} As Walter Benjamin himself confesses, the Arcades Project followed the surrealist method of the “literary montage.” ^{Footnote 87} This meant that he “needn’t say anything. Merely show. I [Benjamin] shall purloin no valuables or appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse, these I will not inventory, but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: By making use of them.” ^{Footnote 88}

Along with the assortment of convolutes, Benjamin also prepared a short exposé titled Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century in 1935, which he later revised in 1939, and a short essay titled The Ring of Saturn, or Some Remarks on Iron Construction. ^{Footnote 89} Needless to say, this unfinished and titanic project lends itself to a myriad of interpretations, especially when one considers that the writings and bibliographical entries were composed throughout a period of thirteen years in, and beyond, Germany. Buck-Morss convincingly shows that the project exceeds the confines of Paris, as it was crafted along a spatial grid that evolved with Benjamin’s travels from Berlin to Naples or Moscow. ^{Footnote 90} It was, in fact, a total history of the rise of the capitalist commodity-form and bourgeoise society throughout a century of enormous social dislocations.

But at the same time, it was not a traditional Marxist social history of urban space. ^{Footnote 91} On the contrary, Benjamin aimed to go beyond the limitations of what he saw as the “doctrine of the ideological superstructure” in orthodox Marxism. ^{Footnote 92} Instead of the establishment of a linear causal connection between the economy and culture, Benjamin pushed for an analysis that grasped the “expression of the economy in its culture.” ^{Footnote 93} This is not to say that he was not interested in the concrete transformation in the means of production and consumption, but rather that he sought to trace the relationships between these economic processes and the human perception of the urban lifeworld. In this vein, Benjamin deployed a surrealist “heightened graphicness” in tandem with a heterodox form of historical materialism to interrogate the material “perceptibility” of the industrial transformations of the age. ^{Footnote 94} Through the collection and interrogation of “concrete historical phenomena—architecture, fashion, advertising, prostitution or photography—Benjamin hoped to develop a historico-philosophical construction of the century from which he stemmed.” ^{Footnote 95}

Of particular interest to my own work is Benjamin’s extensive references to architecture and the “warmth” of material things. ^{Footnote 96} As Khatib noted, not only does the project take its title from one of the most salient built environments that accompanied the emergence of capitalism, but also fully structured as an edifice in the making: “a slender but sturdy scaffolding.” ^{Footnote 97} In Benjamin’s own words, the project was to emerge as the “assembly of a large-scale construction out of the smallest and most precisely cut components.” ^{Footnote 98} Additionally, the project analyzed capitalist urban space through a geological cross section of its piles of layers of meaning, composed by the material traces of “leftover commodities” or material infrastructures. ^{Footnote 99} But Benjamin was not solely interested in material places due to their function as fossil evidence of prior life, but also due to their role as articulators of particular “spacetimes” and “dreamtimes” that persist long after their day and age. ^{Footnote 100} After all,

Writing under the sway of both Freud and Marx, as Leslie aptly noted, ^{Footnote 102} Benjamin engages with built environments to exorcise the visions of social ordering that live within them: The inherent “dream consciousness of the collective” that dwell within their dark corners. ^{Footnote 103} To place these later insights in conversation with Benjamin’s earlier notes on law and violence, I bring forward the idiom of the endroit. This allows me to center the places in which practices of Unterredung were held, highlighting the material and imaginary powers that such endroits exercised in the quest of certain empires to enact planetary systems of legal ordering after global upheavals of lawmaking violence.

C. Halls of Crisis: Spaces of Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Lawmaking & Law-preserving Violence

Kriegsgewalt (translated as “military force”) offers, for Benjamin, the “primordial and paradigmatic” example of the lawmaking character of violence. ^{Footnote 104} After military defeat, the victor can erect a “new” law of war, Kriegsrechts, that reconstitutes the sphere of constitutional relations. But this violence, Benjamin recognizes, always requires some sort of peace ceremony—a moment of official sanction that recognizes the legality of this new constitutional order, regardless of whether it needs “de facto any guarantee of [its] continuation.” ^{Footnote 105} While Benjamin seems to think of this moment in the terms of a singular polity, Europe’s turbulent 19^th century offers a fecund ground to reflect on these instances of lawmaking “violent peace” at the planetary level. In other words, if war and revolution do not tend to limit themselves to the tidy borders of any single nation-state, our analysis of the lawmaking effects of these twin phenomena should also defy any reduction to the frontiers of a specific municipal legal order. What follows is a post-national historical account of the interrelation between lawmaking global violence and the places in which its peace was ceremoniously sanctioned. ^{Footnote 106}

Both traditional and critical historiographies of the long 19^th century anchor the start of the epoch with the Congress of Vienna and the reordering of Europe after the Napoleonic upheavals. As Van Hulle and Lesaffer note, the choice of 1815 responds largely to history’s empathy with the victors, as it frames Conservative Restoration, and not the French Revolution, as the motor of the era (See Figure 1). ^{Footnote 107} Despite such efforts, the first decades of the century were marked by the return of liberal and nationalist revolutionary violence, which threatened, and quickly overturned, the order of Restoration. ^{Footnote 108} For that reason, Meyer suggests that we see this epoch as neither the slow but sure rise of liberalism nor as an age frozen under the grip of conservative reaction, but rather as a time of iterative struggles between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forms of lawmaking violence. ^{Footnote 109}

Figure 1. Austria’s stately Ballhaus. Photograph taken by Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín (2023).

Such dance between revolution and reaction began quite early at the Congress of Vienna itself. ^{Footnote 110} Although the Congress was much more of a patchwork of bilateral and informal negotiations than a single event, ^{Footnote 111} its main proceedings occurred in the Baroque Geheime Hofkanzlei, built in 1742 by the architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt to house the Austrian Empire’s foreign policy apparatus. ^{Footnote 112} Erected next to the Hofburg Imperial residence at the Ballhausplatz, the Chancellery remained a “redoubt” of the aristocracy quite late into the 20^th century. ^{Footnote 113} It was, in many ways, “the most important institutional and spiritual meeting place of the socially and politically dominating strata in the Hapsburg-Monarchy—of the nobility and the bureaucracy of the Empire.” ^{Footnote 114} Even after the fall of the Habsburgs it would remain a central endroit of the Austrian state. It later became the official residence of the Austrian Federal Chancellery. It was in its halls, after all, where the law-preserving violence of this inchoate state was fatally wounded by insurgent Nazi lawmaking violence, when an armed group assassinated the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in July 1934. ^{Footnote 115} Indeed, like the Ottoman Sublime Porte, the French Quai d’Orsay, or the English Downing Street, the Chancellery at Ballhausplatz 2 has retained its status as the material embodiment of the metaphor of state power.

But as early as 1814, the vision of counterrevolutionary world ordering that was forged in the aptly named ball house was challenged by the return of Napoleonic revolutionary violence. Ironically, the sanctioning of peace through the adoption of the final act of the Congress in 1815 preceded Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo by a few days, proving, in a way, the resonance of Benjamin’s quip on the violent correlation between peace and war. ^{Footnote 116} Afterwards, the conservative empires of Europe attempted to control the twin perils of revolution and war through the establishment of an international systems of balance known as the Concert of Europe. ^{Footnote 117} In terms of architecture and built environment, the Unterredungs that were held in the next decades under the aegis of this system of the balance of power would follow the same stylistics lines that were upheld in Vienna in 1815. ^{Footnote 118} A “succession of diners, receptions, and conferences” in private aristocratic residences Frankfurt eventually gave way to the 1818 Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle at the late Medieval Adalberstor tower. ^{Footnote 119} The Kongressdenkmal chapel-like monument that was erected afterwards clearly articulates the vision of world ordering of the Monarchical Holy Alliance: An ecumenical, but overwhelmingly Christian, order upheld by the Catholic Habsburgs, the Protestant Hohenzollerns, and the Orthodox Romanovs. ^{Footnote 120} Their vision of international order was not only contained within its two international legal protocols, but also in the endroits chosen to host such negotiations and the monuments that were enshrined after its wake. ^{Footnote 121}

But the twin revolutionary violence of liberalism and nationalism could not be so easily contained within the Baroque Palaces and Christian chapels of the Ancien Régime. Despite the dispensation of law-preserving violence through counterrevolutionary policing, the specter of lawmaking violence reared its head once again. ^{Footnote 122} The second half of the century, especially after the breakthrough of the revolutions of 1848 and the collapse of the Congress system after the Crimea War of 1853–1856, was marked by the rise of a new kind of international architecture, linked to the incipient but unstoppable emergence of global capitalism. ^{Footnote 123} Increasingly, the castles of the aristocracy would cede their place to the “dreamhouses” of the Bourgeoisie—or, to be sure, to a hybrid between the mores of the nobility and the taste of the new industrial elites. ^{Footnote 124} Increasingly, palaces like the Hofkanzlei or Versailles seemed like outdated stages “on which the tragedy of absolute monarchy was performed like an allegorical ballet.” ^{Footnote 125}

A good example of this interpenetration is offered by Benjamin in his comments on the museum in the Arcades. ^{Footnote 126} Benjamin cites the work of the modernist architectural historian Sigfried Giedion to note that every epoch has its own architectural fascination. For the Gothic age, this venue was the cathedral, while for the Baroque it was the palace. The 19^th century, instead, was tormented by the regressive tendency to saturate the present with the past through the museum. ^{Footnote 127} For instance, Benjamin notes the historic museums of Versailles, which were inaugurated “to the everlasting glory of France” in 1837, as an example of such marriage between aristocratic veneer and emerging nationalist feelings. ^{Footnote 128} However, Benjamin disagreed with Giedion insofar he detects that another architectural form eventually overcame, and transformed, the museum during the second half of the century: The international exhibition. ^{Footnote 129} Benjamin saw these new fairs as “places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish” in which the expression of capitalism in architecture and cultural fabric of the time could be seen in its brightest light. ^{Footnote 130}

But expos were merely a salient example among many. Benjamin notes that, among others, “arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, and railroad stations” served as “dream houses of the [bourgeois] collective.” ^{Footnote 131} By the same token, expos were not the only spatial innovations that allowed for new ways to engage in civil interaction through Unterredung. As Soroka noted, one of the most striking features of this time was the rise of the practice of “spa diplomacy” in lake-side or alpine resorts. ^{Footnote 132} Without the safe inheritance of a family castle, the rising bourgeois relied on the role of the “ailing liver” as a “great leveller” that brought them to the same level as their blue-blooded peer in the comforting waters of the mineral spa. ^{Footnote 133} The material practices of diplomacy that underpinned the meeting between the chief minister of Piedmont and Napoleon III in the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in 1858 were entirely different from those that deployed at the previous Unterredungs to suppress the threat of Napoleon I.

But, for Benjamin, the biggest transformations in the means of production, consumption, and architecture were related to the rise of iron and glass architecture. ^{Footnote 134} Indeed, the eponymous Arcades were only possible due to the rapid and revolutionary adoption of this technique of making built environments, which “although in grotesque style . . . [offered] limitless possibilities.” ^{Footnote 135} The austere Biedermeier gave way to the boundless utopia of iron and glass, which promised the possibility of building a “house or passage having not outside -like the dream.” ^{Footnote 136} Benjamin taps from the drawings of the French cartoonist Grandville, which he accurately describes as a precursor to his own surrealist inspirations, ^{Footnote 137} to show the endless revolutionary allure of such technological developments. Perhaps, one day, the bourgeoise could erect a bridge between planets, that rendered the rings of Saturn “nothing other than a circular balcony on which the inhabitants of Saturn strolled to get a breath of fresh air.” ^{Footnote 138}

D. Concluding Remarks: Myth, Technology, Law, and the Promise of “Another World”

At the time of writing, it seems not much has changed. Indeed, the current privatized space race between entrepreneurs shows that the bourgeoisie never truly abandoned its aspirations to dream “another world” through technology. Be that as it may, for our present discussion what matters is the role that international law has played the articulation of such imaginaries of planetary reordering. As Bell has convincingly argued, the success of the capitalist liberal international has depended on its ability to function as a “dream machine” that obscures its racialized premises and imperial ambitions, lulling us in its promises of global stability. ^{Footnote 139} But Benjamin would remind us that such dream is not merely a discursive or ideological production—it relies on material relays, architectures, and infrastructures that create such “spacetimes” and “dreamtimes” for the collective imagination. What is more, Benjamin would argue that any attempt to disentangle such dreams, or nightmares, would require an interrogation of the so-called “world of modern technology.” ^{Footnote 140} In his view, only a thoughtless observer could deny the correspondence between such sphere and the “archaic symbol-world of mythology.”

The stage is set then for an exploration between the transformation of the techniques of construction and technologies of civil argument through Unterredung, aiming to clarify the relationship between these mutations in the means of production and the mythical narratives of global governance. If the rise of iron and glass architecture allowed the “modernist imagination” to reinvent the style of architecture in the 20^th century, ^{Footnote 141} the modernist international layers would push for a similar reform in our field. ^{Footnote 142} These two revisionist projects would meet in their common quest to erect the great conference complexes of 20^th century international organizations during international law’s “move to institutions.” ^{Footnote 143} Here, international lawyers and diplomats dared to imagine their role as “architects of the better world,” literally and metaphorically. ^{Footnote 144} The task ahead is to follow Benjamin’s invitation to exorcise the myths that lie within these conference halls, revealing the intimate connection of this endroits with practices of capitalist accumulation, planetary violence, and the modern desire for cosmic powers. ^{Footnote 145}