The Destiny of International Law

Abstract

In much international legal scholarship, Iraq stands for what lies beyond the UN Charter – a world in which international institutions have proved unable to challenge the pragmatists of the new American empire, or one in which international institutions must be remade to suit the interests of the only state capable of acting as the sovereign enforcer of the law. Yet this sense of a crisis of legal authority is not novel for international law – rather, it pervades the discipline. Seen in this light, the inability of the United Nations either to prevent the use of force against Iraq, or to develop an effective multilateral response to terrorism, is simply another manifestation of that crisis, another moment in which international law is called upon to renew itself and reassert its relevance. International law is thus a useful site to explore modern responses to the pervasive uneasiness about legal authority and its legitimacy. Attention to anxious representations about what lies ‘beyond’ the law allows an exploration of the nature of the crises of legal authority that haunt modernity, and have returned again so traumatically in this time of terror. International law is also a continuing source of extremely productive responses to that crisis of authority. These responses include conventional attempts to find a new sovereign ground for the law, whether that be in the form of international organizations or of powerful national sovereigns who stand outside the law and guarantee its operation. But international law is also a source of much more surprising and radical responses to the sense of anxiety produced by that crisis. This article develops these arguments through engaging with readings by Jacques Derrida and Shoshana Felman of Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Beyond was written at a time of some crisis for the new discipline of psychoanalysis and for Freud, its sovereign. At stake was the relevance of the discipline, its lack of mastery over its own knowledge, and questions of its proper heirs. All of these issues are at stake for the discipline of international law today.