Description
Book SynopsisAround twenty years ago, a challenge was laid down to international law by those writing at the critical periphery of the discipline; a challenge that has yet to find satisfactory response. Although often (mistakenly) characterised as nihilist, this book seeks to recast it in positive terms; to pose the question of what – if anything – is left of international law and ethics if we accept both that apolitical rules are impossible and that the values that must – inevitably – be used to justify them are irreducibly, radically subjective. After detailed analyses of different political and international legal philosophers who have confronted this issue, the answer is located in a “turn to literature” and a rehabilitation of the ancient notion of rhetoric.
Table of ContentsThe Monograph Series; Foreword; Acknowledgements Part I Setting the Scene: Chapter I The Scope and Aims of the Book: Introduction; Some Preliminary Clarifications; Post-Foundationalism; Ethics; Justification and Responsibility; Aims and Limits; Chapter II International Law and the Critical Challenge: The Primacy of the Periphery; The Foundational Contradictions of International Legal Thought; Liberalism and the Modern Problematic; The Critical Challenge to International Law; Chapter III Reactions to the Critical Challenge: Some Preliminary Exclusions; Modern Reactions; Instrumental Pragmatism; Positivism; Hermeneutics; Confessions, Dichotomies, and Trends at the Periphery; Beyond the Critical Challenge; Part II The Foundations of a Post-Foundational Ethics: Chapter IV A Common Problematic: The Common Problematic; Nietzsche and the “Sceptical Attitude”; Ethics in Sartre and Beauvoir; Camus: A Shift in Focus; Chapter V Foucault, Ethics and Enlightenment: Power and Freedom; The Legacy of the Enlightenment; The Ethics of Self-Creation; Towards a New Game? Chapter VI Rorty, Epistemology and Literature: The Possibility of Other Narratives; The Rejection of Epistemology; The Public, The Private and the “Literary Culture”; The Limits of the Public/Private Metaphor; Chapter VII The Foundations of a Post-Foundational Ethics: The Problematic of Ethical Post-Foundationalism; Two Formal Considerations; Inclusion/Exclusion; The Critical Relation; Arguments to Avoid; Epistemology; Fetishism; Disingenuity; Argumentation and Literature; Part III The Turns to Ethics in International Law: Chapter VIII Kratochwil, Rhetoric and Communicative Action: The Turn(s) to Ethics; Post-foundationalism, Ethics and Norms in Kratochwil; Argumentation and Rhetoric; The Normative Dimension of Communicative Action; Chapter IX Korhonen, Situationality and “The Cave”: Facing the Post-Foundational; From Silence to the Fortress: Tekhne and Phronesis; The Mysticism of “the Cave” ; A “Retreat” to the Fortress? Chapter X Franck, Democracy and Fairness: Franck and Post-foundationalism; The Preconditions of Fairness; Fairness and Democracy; The Disingenuity of Universality; Chapter XI Rawls and the Law of Peoples: Rawls’ Trajectory; The New “Original” Position; Human Rights and Distributive Justice; Post-Foundationalism and Justification; Part IV A Shifting Paradigm?: Chapter XII From Contradiction to Aporia: Contradiction and Beyond; Apology/Utopia and Absurdity/Responsibility;From Contradiction to Aporia; Chapter XIII The Recovery of Rhetoric : The Shifting Paradigm; The Expulsion of Rhetoric; The Recovery of Rhetoric; The Limits of the Argumentative Paradigm; Chapter XIV The Expansion of Rhetoric: On Truth in Literature; Beyond Argument; Surface and Enacted Meaning; Ethics and the Literary Rhetorical Paradigm; Chapter XV The Rhetoric of Eunomia: Why Eunomia?; The Structures of Eunomia – An Overview; The Rhetoric of Eunomia; Enacted dialectics; Language; Voice; Metaphor; Technique; The Mystification of Society; Eunomia, Philosophy, Literature; Part V Conclusions: Chapter XVI Framing the Legal Within the Post-Foundational : On the Idea of Frames; To Recap; Framing the Legal; A Metaphorical Suggestion; Bibliography; Index.
