Paul Ricoeur and International Law: Beyond ‘The End of the Subject’. Towards a Reconceptualization of International Legal Personality

Leiden Journal of International Law

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 25-64

  Nijman, Janne E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

cosmopolis; ethics; hermeneutics; Hobbes; international institutions; international legal personality; justice; legal theory; natural law; phenomenology; postmodernism; recognition

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249147305     PISSN: 09221565     EISSN: 14789698     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0922156506003906     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. A. Carty, Post-Modern Law: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Death of Man (1990).
2. P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (1992).
3. P. Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (2000), xv.
4. Interview by Yvaka B. Raynova, ‘Quo Vadis?’, (2000) 2 (winter) Labyrinth, also available at http://phaidon.philo.at/iaf/Labyrinth/2000/ricoeur.html#_ftn1.
5. See also A. Carty, ‘New Philosophical Foundations for International Law: From an Order of Fear to One of Respect’, (2006) 19(2) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 311.
6. See for an extensive account of Kelsen's theory of legal personality, J. E. Nijman, The Concept of International Legal Personality: An Inquiry into the History and Theory of International Law (2004), ch. 3. It is argued there that in redefining law and legal personality Kelsen also defended democracy and fought to liberate individual freedom and responsibility.
7. A. Carty, ‘International Legal Personality and the End of the Subject: Natural Law and Phenomenological Responses to New Approaches to International Law’, (2005) 6 Melbourne Journal of International Law 534.
8. See, e.g. A. Carty, ‘Critical International Law: Recent Trends in the Theory of International Law’, (1991) 2 EJIL 66, at 81-2;
9. M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (2005), 500.
10. The ‘death of the subject/author’ challenged Foucault also to respond to the question of the end of the subject in relation to language. In ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) he argues that the author came into being and to the forefront of the discourse only as part of the juridification of the appearance of texts (who should be prosecuted for this insult?). M. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and introd. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (1977). Foucault's question is not ‘who is the author?’ but ‘what is the author?’ His concept of the ‘author function’ does not refer to the individual who wrote the text, but rather to the author as a function of discourse. The author having come into being only recently in human history, Foucault joined in now that the author is dead. Here, too, Foucault's argument on the disappearance of the subject raises questions in relation to notions of intention and attribution of and responsibility for (literary or linguistic) actions. Rather than an identification of a ‘who’ Foucault's author is indeed again a locus of discursive practices. The author as a function of discourse, what we make out to be the author of a text, cannot fully be identifiedwith the actual person of the writer. The actually identity of the author is not what matters, only the narrator that emerges as part of or as a result of discourse. As we shall see below, Ricoeur uses the notion of narrator too. The narrator who tells his life's story is, however, a ‘who’. Ricoeur agreed to the methodological considerations of the death of the author in relation to reading and understanding texts in literary theory. Fragmented (incomplete) knowledge of the author may distort our understanding of a text, and in that respect it is better not toknowanything. Buthedid not extend thedeath of the author tothephilosophical realmandthe subject of humanism. Reading is a different kind of communication from speaking with someone; the later model of communication is the basis of Ricoeur's dialogical ethics. Ricoeur meets Foucault when he agrees to the image of the subject or the self as a locus of practices or forces, but it is not a full agreement. While Foucault gives up the question of ‘who?’, Ricoeur does not stop at the conclusion of the self as a voidwhere forces rule: the self as narrator - the narrative self - exists only in relation to the otherwho gives him the opportunity to address and unify both its permanent identity and its responsive and dynamic identity. The dialectic relation between the permanent and the changing self, accommodated by the narrator, enables Ricoeur to save the human subject even though man has fallen from its throne. Ricoeur's response to Foucault's understanding of the author is implicitly addressed in this article. The subject may be ruled by discursive forces, forces of power or knowledge, but the self is capable of taking control and is not merely a product of language. The human subjectmay not be sovereign - i.e. independent and autonomous - but it is not a fiction either.
11. J. Habermas, ‘An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centred Reason’ (1987), in L. Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism (2003), at 589-616.
12. Ricoeur clearly distinguishes between structuralism as a method of text analysis and structuralism as a philosophy. Structuralism in the first sense perceives text autonomously: the text is taken as an objective thing, ‘[it] escapes its author and signifies for itself’. Ricoeur accepts the structural analysis as a ‘stage’ in his reasoning, but rejects the philosophical conclusion subsequently drawn on the basis of this practice, i.e. that ‘the subject is eliminated from its position as the author of discourse’. Foucault's ‘idea that man is a recent invention seems to [Ricoeur] sheer invention’. P. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction (1998), 77–9.
13. F. Martel, ‘Le voyagephilosophique de Paul Ricoeur’, (1997) 357 Magazine littéraire. The philosopher Charles Taylor has confirmed the importance of Ricoeur's contribution to the debate.
14. C. Taylor, ‘Une philosophie sans frontie” res’, (2000) 390 Magazine Littéraire, Dossier: Paul Ricoeur, morale, histoire, religion: une philosophie de l'existence, at 30-1. Ricoeur acknowledges the strong influence Taylor has had on his own work on ethics. Ricoeur, note 8, at xiv. It is suggested that Ricoeur's Protestantism is partly to blame for the fact that recognition came to him relatively late, although he has always ‘insisted on a strict separation between philosophy and faith’. ‘There is no doubt that this religious orientation is a significant part of the explanation for the long period of neglect of his work in France’.
15. G. Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2001), 364–5.
16. Ascription or attribution to a person is part of the meaning of intentional action. See P. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer (2005), at 98.
17. P. Ricoeur, ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’, (1995) 21(5) Philosophy and Social Criticism, at 3.