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AbstractThis chapter assesses three areas of theoretical work: metatheory, via Jason Demers's The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation and Galin Tihanov's The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond; three studies that theorize on the history of theory, John E. Drabinski's Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss, John Frow's On Interpretive Conflict, and Anne Anlin Cheng's Ornamentalism; and five texts indicative of a surge of interest in the linguisticity of 'death', David Wills's Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty, Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, David Simpson's States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature, and Marc Crépon's Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death and The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy, and the Test of Violence.

Abstract
What resources does philosophy have at its disposal for a critical analysis of the role of violence in a war of all against all? Faced with this question, Walter Benjamin discovers that legal positivism, which believes in the capacity to derive how law ought to be from the sheer concept of a "correct" law, is constitutively blind to the possibility that values may be misaligned with law, and that the basic structures of law and consensus might come after the fact of power. Drawing on the work of contemporaneous legal theorist Leonard Nelson, this article argues that Benjamin developed a potent critique of the dialectic of recognition at work in the legitimation of violence, making way instead for an analysis of what remains unrecognizable to the normative order: power, loitering as a "nonvalue" in the gap between values and legal ends.

My dissertation, »The Politics of Geometry: Mathematics, Architecture and Literature at the Foundations of Cosmopolitanism«, explores and reassesses the mathematical foundations of the project for perpetual peace that has served as the frame of reference for modernity 's view of law, justice and international politics. Aiming to critique the mechanical understanding of peace as a ›suspension‹ of war, I examine its alternative through its transformative mathematical, architectural and literary moments. This alternative, which Kant called ›cosmopolitanism‹, names a regulative ideal for human progress leading to lasting peace, but is predicated on a radical departure from the earth 's physical relations. Drawing on the epistemological and ontological implications arising from the abstraction of modern analytic geometry and the search for universal norms provoked by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, a line of geopolitical thinkers developed the perpetual peace project from a mathematical projection of the natural world in the 17thcentury into the formalization of ethics in the germinal years of the League of Nations. Common to these thinkers, who range across widely varied disciplines and historical periods, is the awareness of a fundamental incongruity between politics and justice, as well as the need to provide (or critique) the foundations of the relation between them. This relation is expressed in a legal tradition in which law derives its force from meta-geometrical concepts of certainty, universality, order and execution. In this view, the law articulates a ›mathematical‹ space assumed to be an unproblematic tool for grasping the world, but whose inadequacy to this task – and the violence that results – become increasingly apparent and necessary problems for the founding of peace. Departing from Walter Benjamin, whose work uniquely reflects on the link between the constitution of scientific objectivity and the expression and execution of political power, my dissertation shows that as politics extends ...

Cover -- Contents -- Note on the Translation of Benjamin's Writings -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Conventions -- INTRODUCTION by Peter Fenves -- "Toward the Critique of Violence" by Walter Benjamin -- ASSOCIATED NOTES AND FRAGMENTS -- 1. Notes toward a Work on the Category of Justice -- 2. Vivification and Violence -- 3. From "Life and Violence" -- 4. On Morality -- 5. All Unconditionality of the Will Leads to Evil -- 6. On Kantian Ethics -- 7. The Spontaneity of the I -- 8. Ethics, Applied to History -- 9. Modes of History -- 10. Methodical Modes of History -- 11. Death -- 12. As Many Pagan Religions, So Many Natural Concepts of Guilt -- 13. On the Problem of Physiognomy and Prediction -- 14. The Meaning of Time in the Moral World -- 15. 1) World and Time -- 16. Morality, Ethics -- 17. The Right to Apply Force / Use Violence -- 18. Capitalism as Religion -- 19. Notes on "Objective Mendacity" I -- 20. Notes toward a Work on Lying II -- 21. Schemata for the Psychophysical Problem -- 22. Literature for a More Fully Developed Critique of Violence and Philosophy of Law -- Literatur zu einer ausgeführteren Kritik der Gewalt und zur Rechtsphilosophie -- AFTERWORD: Toward Another Critique of Violence by Julia Ng -- Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Pure Will -- Translator's Preface -- Excerpt, "Self-Responsibility" -- Kurt Hiller, "Anti-Cain: A Postscript to Rudolf Leonhard's 'Our Final Battle against Weapons'" -- Translator's Preface -- Essay -- Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence -- Translator's Preface -- Excerpts -- Erich Unger, from Politics and Metaphysics -- Translator's Preface -- Excerpts -- Emil Lederer, "Sociology of Violence: A Contribution to the Theory of Social- Formative Forces" -- Translator's Preface -- Essay -- Glossary -- Notes -- Note on the Translators -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N.