Description
Book SynopsisInspiring and distinctive,
After Meaning provides a radical challenge to the way in which international law is thought and practised. Jean d’Aspremont asserts that the words and texts of international law, as forms, never carry or deliver meaning but, instead, perpetually defer meaning and ensure it is nowhere found within international legal discourse.
In challenging the dominant meaning-centrism of the international legal discourse and shedding light on the sovereignty of forms, this book promotes a radical new attitude towards textuality in international law. The author offers new perspectives on interpretation, critique, history, comparison, translation and referencing, inviting international lawyers to reinvent their engagement with these discourses. Chapters define meaning and form in international law, explore deferral of meaning and make an unprecedented use of post-structuralist theory to rethink international law.
After Meaning will be an essential reference point for legal scholars, researchers and students who seek to understand a different way of thinking about meaning in international law. The book’s engagement with post-structuralism will also prove beneficial to anyone interested in the philosophy of language and literary theory.
Trade Review‘If you are the rare kind of jurist on the international scene disposed to engage in introspection so radical that none of your epistemic postulates will be safe, not even your most evident assumptions (that the words of a law-text carry a meaning at once ascertainably present and transmissible, for example), if you think you can withstand the affective cost of such profound intellectual self-transformation, then this title might be your rare kind of book.’ -- Pierre Legrand, Ecole de droit de la Sorbonne, France
Table of ContentsContents: Preface 1. Meaning and form in international law 2. Meaning-centrism in international law 3. Deferral of meaning in international law 4. After meaning Epilogue Bibliography Index
