First and foremost, the monolingualism of the other would be that sovereignty, that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also primarily the very language of the Law. And the Law as Language. Its experience would be ostensibly autonomous, because I have to speak this law and appropriate it in order to understand it as if I was giving it to myself, but it remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law. The madness of the law places its possibility lastingly [à demeure] inside the dwelling of this auto-heteronomy. (Derrida 1998 p. 39)
Abstract
In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics of international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise.
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Notes
I am referring here to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000).
I am borrowing here from Jean-Luc Nancy (2002).
I am here referring to the politics/political difference proposed by Marchart (2007), in his rereading of Heidegger’s ontic/ontological difference.
In homage – and very much thanks – to Peter, this article is an attempt to articulate such a position.
I am referring here to the ‘diction’, or ‘dictum’, intrinsic to ‘jurisdiction’.
In a Derridean gesture, it is important to annotate here, in a footnote, Peter’s reference to Gerrit W. Gong (1984)’s work on the ‘standard of civilization’ (2001, p. 126, 201; and elsewhere). Gong’s work (1984, p. xii) was supervised by IR English School scholar Hedley Bull. Hence, a critical interdisciplinary study of IL and IR is already at play within Peter’s work.
In 2013, months before I left London back to Rio, Peter and I had been discussing the possibility of going to India together. Peter had been invited to give a series of lectures and, in his immense generosity, asked me if I would like to join and accompany him. In this context, we had been discussing certain reading(s) of modern (inter)national law, including his own (and my own reading of his work), and, as I recalled it retrospectively, gestured towards an ‘aporetic’ position which I here named as ‘decolonial deconstructionist’. In my own reading, Peter’s work, as Derrida’s, displaces ‘identities’ such as the ‘critical’, the ‘post-structural’, the ‘deconstructionist’, the ‘post-colonial’ and/or the ‘decolonial’. During the years we have been in contact, before and after the ‘Indian tour’ context, I have always felt Peter positioned himself and his work in this kind of aporetic position. Most unfortunately, we never went to India together. But, instead, as a Derridean gift, Peter came to Brazil, and shared his ‘gifts’ in Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Itu (SP), São Leopoldo and Porto Alegre (RS). I was lucky enough to accompany, and ‘be-with’ him, from the ‘arrival’ in Rio (RJ) to the ‘departure’ in Porto Alegre (RS). For traces of his ‘Brazilian tour’, see Fitzpatrick (2013b).
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This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES) Finance Code 001.
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Yamato, R.V. Before the and of the World(s): Peter Fitzpatrick and the (Inter)national Supplement. Law Critique 32, 347–362 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-021-09303-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-021-09303-0