Simon Gros

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Anna Enström’s lecture proposes a reorientation of the contemporary reading of Kant’s peace theory by binding Zum ewigen Frieden to an aesthetic and material reflection on surfaces: the textual surface of the essay, the earthly surface that grounds Kant’s cosmopolitan right, and the historically sedimented surface of Europe’s war architecture as it reappears in Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen’s 1995 light installation The Line – The Light. Against both a triumphalist liberal cosmopolitanism and purely juridical interpretations of Kant’s “treaty,” Enström reconstructs peace as an inherently negative, unfinished praxis, structurally akin to critique itself. Peace emerges less as a stable telos than as a ceaseless task inscribed in historically specific configurations of sensibility and community. Her distinctive contribution lies in showing how the aesthetic can make visible the duplicity of Kant’s ewiger Friede—at once metaphysical idea and fragile social practice—precisely by refusing to present peace as a comforting image of harmony.

Enström frames her inquiry within a double anniversary constellation and its dissonances. She recalls that May 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe and the liberation from German fascism, while at the same time wars in the former Yugoslavia were devastating the European continent and culminating in genocide later that summer. The year 1995 also coincided with the bicentennial of Kant’s essay Zum ewigen Frieden, provoking a surge of editorial and scholarly activity around the text. In contrast to the relatively muted centenary of 1895, this late twentieth-century resurgence of interest in Kant’s peace theory stood in apparent harmony with post-1989 optimism about a new cosmopolitan world order implemented through liberal democracy and the global market economy. As she speaks in 2024, however, Enström insists that the constellation has shifted. What once appeared as a promise—the globalization of liberal norms and market interdependence—now appears as a source of oligarchic erosion, democratic backsliding, rising inequalities, and renewed geopolitical tensions. Kant is not exonerated or condemned by this shift, yet the historical change forces a new question: through which conceptual and experiential lenses can his peace essay still orient thought, once easy identifications with “the international community” and frictionless cooperation have become implausible?

Rather than taking the familiar route of assessing the applicability of Kant’s principles of republicanism, federation, and cosmopolitan right to contemporary international relations, Enström declares a deliberately narrow and, in a sense, stubborn focus: she wants to remain at the surface of the text. The term surface initially seems to mark triviality: the outermost layer, the side that first meets the eye, the presumed realm of flattening and simplification when contrasted with depth. Yet she immediately reverses this evaluative hierarchy. Invoking the earth’s surface as a dynamic, solid but constantly transforming interface between inner forces and outer appearances, she suggests that surfaces are not vacuous; they are precisely those regions where different domains meet and tension becomes legible. The surface of Kant’s essay—its title, juridical form, opening inn-sign anecdote, and the way it names peace as ewig—becomes the privileged place where the conceptual ambiguity she pursues is articulated. To stay at the surface does not mean abandoning depth; it means approaching depth through the way it emerges and fractures at its sensible, institutional, and linguistic boundary.

This surface focus allows her to disclose three interlinked layers. First, the surface defined by the title Zum ewigen Frieden and the juridical treaty form of the essay: these elements stage the problem of how peace appears in language and political form, and how it vacillates between irony, moral ideality, and legal instrumentality. Second, the surface at which politics and ethics, as well as cognition and political order, intersect: the peace essay becomes a site where the theoretical structure of critique encounters the demands of historical praxis. Third, the literal surface of the earth as Kant thematizes it in the third definitive article on cosmopolitan right, where the spherical character of the globe grounds the claim that human beings share a common, finite space of co-presence and mutual exposure. Through these layered surfaces Enström weaves together Kant’s critical philosophy and the material, aesthetic, and political history of twentieth-century Europe.

The lecture’s methodological hinge is the claim that Kant’s ewiger Friede exhibits a conceptual duplicity. It names, on the one hand, a metaphysical or noumenal idea guiding moral reason: an ideal of a world in which external relations of coercion and war are abolished in accordance with duty. On the other hand, it names a practice of peace that unfolds among finite beings embedded in historical and material conditions, always partial, fragile, and reversible. This duplicity, Enström argues, endows peace with an inherent negativity. Peace is not a positive state simply waiting to be realized once the right institutions have been constructed. Peace is rather a practice that is essentially unfinished, a process that “will never be fully realized but must continually be pursued,” structurally analogous to the critical enterprise Kant describes in the Critique of Pure Reason, which he characterizes as a task that can never be carried out once and for all but must be renewed as conditions shift and new dogmatisms emerge. Peace in this sense is less a destination than a form of self-relation of reason and community, oriented by an ideal that escapes presentation in any finite historical situation.

To make this negativity sensibly accessible, Enström turns to the aesthetic. She treats the aesthetic domain in Kant’s philosophy as that realm which can “testify” to what cannot be presented as a determinate concept or exhausted by propositional knowledge, yet nevertheless insists on being felt and judged. It is within aesthetic experience that the unpresentable in the sensible—what cannot be pictured without distortion—can still be approached in a mode of reflection, as in Kant’s account of the sublime. Peace, she maintains, belongs to this region: it becomes conspicuous when it is absent, when war devastates bodies and landscapes, and yet its positive determination escapes straightforward representation. The aesthetic thus becomes a necessary detour for rethinking peace as praxis: certain artworks can show, in their very refusal to present peace as a serene image, the negativity and ongoingness that constitute peace as a critical task.

In order to articulate this, she first introduces what she treats as a dominant but problematic iconography of peace. She examines two well-known sculptures at the United Nations headquarters in New York: Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s Non-Violence (the revolver with a knotted barrel), and the 1954 Peace Monument by Anton Aguilar Augusto, depicting a woman on horseback bearing an olive branch and a globe. Both works are frequently invoked as paradigmatic visual condensations of peace as a universal value. Enström reconstructs how they function: in Non-Violence the weapon is “cocked” yet rendered harmless by the knot, projecting a humorous but clear message of disarmament. In the Peace Monument, the female figure on a war-horse, cloak blown back as if in forward movement, with olive branch and globe in hand, simultaneously evokes martial power and pacific mission. On one level these works celebrate civil courage and multilateralism, speaking to viewers as interchangeable individuals and encouraging a personal stance of tolerance, dialogue, and non-violence.

Yet for Enström precisely this clarity gives rise to a conceptual problem. These sculptures treat peace as a fixed ideal, anchored in timeless values that stand outside concrete social and material conditions. Peace appears as a self-identical end that can be represented in an image and possessed as an object of admiration. The relation between peace and the historical structures—economic, political, military—that make war possible remains largely unthematized. The viewer is interpellated primarily as a moral subject whose attitudes, abstracted from scale, are supposed to instantiate peace in any context. In this setting peace risks becoming a comforting symbol within an “ideal void,” separated from the conflicts that underpin the very institutions exhibiting the sculptures. The UN garden becomes a stage on which peace is celebrated as if it were an already secured horizon rather than a practice implicated in the organization of power.

Against this background Enström introduces the central aesthetic case of her lecture: Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen’s The Line – The Light, performed on the evening of 4 May 1995 as part of the large-scale public art project Peace Sculpture 95 along the west coast of the Danish Jutland peninsula. This project commissioned twenty-two internationally recognized artists to create works distributed across museums, institutions, and public spaces, with many installations explicitly engaging with the remains of the Atlantic Wall—Hitler’s fortifications stretching from the North Cape to the Spanish border. The Danish section of these fortifications, built between 1943 and 1944, still consists of thousands of bunkers scattered along more than five hundred kilometers of coastline, by the 1990s reshaped by erosion and tides into concrete relics embedded in dunes and beaches. Through this choice of site the project already inserts itself into an ambiguous terrain: these bunkers are at once monuments of occupation, reminders of total war, and now decaying objects within a tourist landscape.

In The Line – The Light, Hansen mounted laser projectors on selected bunkers at regular intervals, generating a continuous green beam running along the entire coastline, from Skagen in the north across the German border to the south. Satellite imagery from the time captured this line of light as a trace along the western edge of Denmark. Enström stresses the work’s double reference. On the one hand, the laser reactivates the bunkers’ function as part of a military communication and defense system, turning them again into nodes in a network designed to survey, connect, and control space. On the other hand, the line of light refers to the Danish tradition of placing lit candles in windows on 4 May to commemorate the end of occupation—a practice which began when, upon hearing via the BBC that the war had ended, Danes tore down blackout curtains and illuminated their homes as signs of peace and hope. By substituting a small domestic flame with a technologically advanced long-distance beam, Hansen weaves together memory, communication infrastructure, and the contemporary mass media environment of television and telecommunications.

Moreover, Enström recalls that tens of thousands of people gathered along the shore at dusk to witness the event, while many more followed via television. The installation thereby generated a dispersed but synchronized public, united not by a uniform national ritual alone but by a shared exposure to the illuminated bunkers and the line crossing into Germany. The work, however, did not simply affirm a narrative of Danish resistance and liberation. Instead, it foregrounded the fact that the bunkers had been constructed not only by German forces but largely by Danish workers and financed by the Danish state under occupation law. For a significant group of resistance veterans and others, this evocation of complicity proved intolerable. Hansen’s work became the object of one of the most heated cultural debates in Danish postwar history. It was discussed in parliament, subjected to an unprecedented parliamentary vote, at one point forbidden by law, and even sabotaged when electricity was cut to sections of the line. The artist received death threats and was denounced in the media, including being branded a “Nazi” by voices that themselves emerged from new political formations with far-right provenance. Categories such as hero and collaborator, victim and perpetrator, seemed to slide and cross-contaminate one another in public discourse.

Through this conflict Enström locates the work’s critical force. The Line – The Light dislocates the self-satisfied image of Denmark as a nation of resistance living in “two hundred years of peace” and enjoying a quasi-eternal state of harmony. It exposes the grey zones of historical responsibility: the economic and political accommodations with Nazi Germany, the ambivalent reception of Denmark within the Allied community after 1945, and the later integration into NATO and global security arrangements. Peace, here, cannot simply be equated with the victory of good over evil or with the restoration of a pure national community. Instead, it appears as entangled with structures of oppression and as precarious, dependent on choices and compromises that leave lasting traces in the built environment. The bunkers, re-illuminated and reconnected, become emblems of a history in which Denmark’s role is more ambiguous than patriotic narratives allow.

Enström also draws attention to the community that formed during the performance. Despite the controversy, large crowds of diverse people stood together on the beaches, exposed to the sea, the wind, and the green line, sharing a moment that exceeded the partisan divisions around the work. She interprets this gathering in terms of Kant’s notion of sensus communis, the “public sense” described in the Critique of Judgment. There, Kant characterizes the reflective judgment of taste as a capacity that, in judging, takes into account the potential sensibility of all others, appealing to a “collective reason of humankind.” In such moments, people are not bound together by legal bonds or explicit doctrines but by a mutual orientation toward how something appears, by a shared demand that their judgment be communicable. The beach audience experiences a rudimentary form of political community, rooted in aesthetic reflection: each person’s presence is affirmed without the usual categories of nationality and citizenship being decisive. The installation thus stages an elementary politicity of appearance, where human beings coexist as co-spectators of a configuration that touches on their history and future without offering a clear moral slogan.

At this juncture, Enström makes explicit the link back to Kant’s peace theory. She suggests that The Line – The Light exemplifies the duplicity of peace that she finds in the expression ewiger Friede: peace as both an idea that transcends any particular empirical configuration and a practice that takes place under determinate historical conditions. The laser beam is fixed, frail, and temporary. Its material dependence on energy and technology discloses that every concrete enactment of peace—every ceasefire, every treaty, every commemoration—is conditioned and vulnerable. At the same time, the beam’s continuity and its transgression of the national border evoke a dimension beyond the particular: a suggestion of a connected world-surface across which human beings share a common fate. The work therefore does not affirm peace as a completed achievement; it presents peace as a process, a “peace without peace,” a becoming that enriches what it touches and yet remains exposed to interruption and failure.

Here the semantic analysis of the term ewig becomes decisive. Enström recalls the standard English translation of Zum ewigen Frieden as Perpetual Peace, but she notes that Kant himself expressed dissatisfaction with the French perpétuel, and that later interpreters have contested the adequacy of “perpetual.” In one line of reading, “perpetual” introduces a mechanistic, quasi-physical notion of ongoingness, as if peace could be understood in terms of the constant operation of causal regularities. This tends to obscure the dimension of freedom and the fact that peace, for Kant, arises from human practical reason and the adoption of moral maxims. Another strand of interpretation, however, insists on rendering ewig as “eternal,” thereby stressing the affinity to a suprasensible realm, tying peace to duty and metaphysical idea, at the cost of perhaps severing it from political immanence. Enström does not simply choose between these options. Instead, she excavates the deeper etymological and conceptual layers of ewig, tracing its relation to notions of life-span, vitality, and cyclical time inherited from the Greek aiōn. Ewig then evokes both timelessness and a lived “age,” both the unending and the finite stretch of an individual or collective life.

This semantic duplicity, she argues, mirrors the structure of Kant’s concept. Ewiger Friede refers simultaneously to a moral ideal that transcends empirical history and to a form of life that unfolds in time, experienced as “eternal” precisely because it is finite and therefore precious. Peace is at once the regulatory horizon of moral and political practice and an immanent, vulnerable disposition within the present. The newborn child’s first perception of light becomes, in Enström’s reading, a figure of this duplicity: light signifies truth and eternity, yet the child’s encounter with light marks the beginning of a finite existence. Hansen’s green laser line thereby condenses the double sense of ewig: it is a luminous trace that points toward an ideal of connection beyond borders, and it is a finite phenomenon, dependent on concrete energy flows, technologies, and political permissions.

Against this conceptual background, Enström reconsiders Kant’s own manner of integrating peace into the architecture of critique. She recalls that in Zum ewigen Frieden Kant repeatedly describes the project of peace in terms analogous to those he uses for critique in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the latter, critique is a task that cannot be completed in the sense of a finished edifice; it is rather an ongoing activity by which reason examines its own principles and limits. Kant distinguishes between “philosophy” as the idea of a possible science which has nowhere yet been fully realized in concreto, and “philosophizing” as the actual exercise of the talent of reason in accordance with universal principles upon the existing attempts at philosophy. Philosophy as such remains an ideal, whereas philosophizing is a perpetual task whereby reason reserves the right to investigate, confirm, or reject principles “in their very sources.” Enström draws a structural analogy: ewiger Friede is comparable to philosophy in idea, whereas the practices of peace—ceasefires, treaties, civil disobedience, acts of hospitality, critical artworks—span the domain of “philosophizing” in political life.

Once this analogy is taken seriously, the inherent negativity of peace becomes evident. Peace is negative in the sense that it consists in the removal or suspension of violence, coercion, and injustice, yet this removal never produces a finished, positive state immune to new contradictions. There is always more to be done, further conflicts to resolve, new forms of structural violence that become visible as old ones recede. The negativity of peace is therefore not a deficiency that could be overcome by better institutional design alone; it is constitutive of what it means to aim at peace within history. In Enström’s formulation, ewiger Friede expresses an awareness of an ideal “nowhere yet” that nevertheless must be continuously exercised through the imperfect, often compromised attempts in the present concreto. The very incompleteness of peace becomes the motor of its pursuit.

From here she returns to Kant’s concrete hints within the peace essay. She recalls that Kant points to certain empirical developments—such as the emergence of global commerce and communication—as phenomena that may, under favourable conditions, contribute to the realization of peace. However, these are presented as Hints (Andeutungen) rather than guarantees. Enström insists that Kant’s positive remarks about trade do not amount to the endorsement of a specific socio-economic formation (for instance, a market-driven liberal order) as the privileged path to peace. Rather, they indicate that increasing interdependence creates new conditions under which conflicts might be mediated, though it also creates new forms of exploitation and domination. By reading these hints carefully, she contests later liberal-democratic peace theories that, in her view, have too readily treated international commerce as a straightforward vector of peace and then retroactively attributed this thesis to Kant. Commerce, in Kant’s text, marks the fact of intensified interaction; whether this fosters peace or fuels inequality and war depends on further normative and institutional factors.

Similarly, Enström gives pride of place to the third definitive article of Zum ewigen Frieden, where Kant articulates the cosmopolitan right to hospitality and grounds it in the common possession of the earth’s surface. Because the earth is a sphere, human beings cannot disperse infinitely; they must at some point encounter one another. No one originally has a greater right than another to occupy any portion of the surface. This finitude of space, this impossibility of infinite separation, conditions community as such. For Enström, this passage reconnects with her initial reflection on surfaces. The earth’s surface is the transcendental condition of possible community: it is the shared interface on which human lives touch, whether peacefully or violently. Kant’s cosmopolitan right to hospitality is minimal—a right of a visitor not to be treated with hostility—but it signals that being on the same globe already binds human beings into a common situation.

Here The Line – The Light again functions as an aesthetic translation. The laser crossing the Danish-German border gives sensuous form to the idea that community is cosmopolitan in its very condition. The line does not stop at the frontier; it insists that memory of war, responsibility, and hopes for peace are transnational. At the same time, the very existence of the border, the political struggles over migration, and the debates about national identity make clear that cosmopolitan right is far from realized. The light becomes a fragile, temporary embodiment of a right that is conceptually universal but factically contested. Enström thus uses the installation to bring Kant’s earth-surface doctrine into contact with contemporary European configurations.

The concluding portion of the lecture presses this point home by turning explicitly to present-day Europe. Enström notes that the bunkers of Festung Europa now suggest “new lines of violent division.” The phrase Fortress Europe, which originally designated Nazi fortifications, has become a derogatory term for the legal and physical barriers at the core of the European Union’s migration and border policies. Recent political rhetoric—such as replacing the term “irregular migration” with “illegal migration,” a move long associated with far-right discourse—signals a growing rejection of Kantian hospitality. The EU risks developing into a “community of exclusion,” where the cosmopolitan right to present oneself on the earth’s surface is systematically denied to those fleeing war and destruction. In this context, the memory of Danish bunkers illuminated in 1995 acquires a new resonance: the temptation to convert the shared surface of the globe into a fortified enclosure persists.

What emerges across the lecture is a complex compositional movement in which each layer of analysis both depends on and displaces the previous one. Enström begins with the outer frame of anniversaries and geopolitical shifts, situating Kant’s peace essay within the post-Cold War optimism of the 1990s and the disillusionment of the early twenty-first century. This frame establishes the problem: how to think peace in a time where the very mechanisms once hailed as cosmopolitan (global markets, liberal institutions) now appear to generate inequality and conflict. From there she moves inward to the textual surface of Zum ewigen Frieden—its title, juridical form, metaphors—using the inn-sign opening as a clue that Kant himself already plays with the tension between peace as an inscription above an inn door and the graveyard connotations of “eternal peace.” This move sets up the duplicity of peace as both everyday slogan and metaphysical ideal.

The next layer introduces the conventional iconography of peace at the UN, which stabilizes peace as a positive, representable ideal and thereby risks repressing its negativity. This provides the foil for the central aesthetic case, The Line – The Light, whose detailed description occupies the middle of the lecture. The installation’s complex play with light, bunkers, and border crossings condenses the historical, material, and communicative conditions of peace and war. It becomes the hinge through which Enström articulates her reinterpretation of ewiger Friede and its inherent negativity. After this, the analysis returns to Kant, this time at a deeper level, engaging the etymology of ewig, the structural analogy between peace and critique, and the cosmopolitan doctrine of the earth’s surface. Finally, she re-expands the frame to encompass current EU migration policy and the resurgence of exclusionary politics, thereby showing that peace as a practice remains entangled with present decisions and institutional choices.

This compositional sequence is not linear but spiral. Each return to Kant after the engagement with aesthetic and historical material modifies the initial understanding of the peace essay. What at first appeared as a juridical project to establish a federation of republics now appears as a more complex, tension-laden articulation of a practice that must perpetually renew itself. Conversely, each return to contemporary Europe after a detour through Kant is charged with a new critical acuity: the language of hospitality, cosmopolitan right, and shared earth-surface renders visible the stakes of apparently technical shifts in migration terminology and border policy. The lecture thus performs the very practice it describes: a form of critical reflection that never allows itself to rest in a final synthesis but constantly re-exposes its concepts to new surfaces.

The distinctive method of the lecture consists in refusing the separation of philosophical argument, artistic analysis, and political commentary. Enström neither subordinates the artwork to Kantian theory as mere illustration nor enlists Kant as a simple normative authority to judge contemporary politics. Instead, she lets Kant’s concepts, Hansen’s installation, and the evolving European context interrogate one another. This triangulation yields a richer understanding of each. Kant’s notion of ewiger Friede appears less as a static blueprint and more as the name for a relational, open-ended orientation. Hansen’s line of light becomes legible as a critical intervention in national memory and cosmopolitan aspiration. Current EU policies become visible as betrayals of a minimal cosmopolitan right inscribed in the very finitude of the earth’s surface, rather than isolated pragmatic responses to contingent crises.

In this sense, Enström’s lecture also responds to the conference’s provocation—“Kant as a warmonger?”—in an oblique yet significant way. The charge that Kant could be complicit in warmongering usually arises from readings that view his philosophy of history as treating war as an instrument of progress towards a cosmopolitan condition, or that see his juridical constructions as legitimizing coercive peace. Enström does not confront these accusations head-on, yet her reconstruction of peace’s inherent negativity subtly reframes the issue. If peace is an unachievable yet binding ideal that constantly deconstructs every achieved configuration, then there can be no simple celebration of war as a linear instrument of reason’s plan. War may play a role in Kant’s account of unsocial sociability and the dynamics of states, but the regulative force of ewiger Friede incessantly presses against any glorification of conflict. This pressure becomes particularly tangible when peace is thought through artworks that expose the human and material costs of warfare and the complicities of states that claim pacific identities.

The lecture’s philosophical density thus stems from its willingness to keep multiple tensions active rather than resolving them prematurely. Peace remains caught between metaphysics and history, between idea and practice, between juridical form and aesthetic experience, between national narratives and cosmopolitan claims, between the comforting positivity of icons and the disquieting negativity of artworks that recall complicity and exclusion. Enström’s intervention does not offer a new model of international institutions or a set of policy prescriptions. Instead, it proposes a transformation in how we understand the very conceptual status of peace and its relation to critique. Peace becomes a name for a peculiar kind of practice: one that aims at eliminating violence, is guided by an ideal never locally realizable, and must therefore constantly turn back upon its own conditions, instruments, and symbols.

One can say that the lecture clarifies the relevance of Kant’s peace theory precisely by stripping it of the illusion of easy relevance. Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden gains contemporary pertinence when its juridical architecture is read together with the aesthetic and material “surfaces” on which peace and war are written today: the decaying bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, the green line of a laser cutting across a national border, the language of migration regulations, and the bodies of those who attempt to traverse the earth’s surface to escape destruction. Enström’s reading situates Kant’s concept of peace as a fragile but indispensable resource for thinking a practice that is always on the way, always threatened by regression, and yet irreducible to either utopian fantasy or pragmatic resignation.

By insisting on the inherent negativity of peace and its structural kinship with critique, she preserves ewiger Friede as a critical idea that continually unsettles both complacent self-images of peaceful nations and cynical assertions of the inevitability of conflict. The lecture’s merit lies in making this unsettling productive, by showing how an aesthetic work such as The Line – The Light can bear witness to an unpresentable dimension of peace, allowing us to feel, in a concrete historical and geographical setting, the tension between the finite beams of our efforts and the inexhaustible horizon they seek to reach.