The question of the negative opens and closes Fleur Johns's Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law.Footnote ¹ From the prefix (‘non-’) that marks the book's title to the final heading of its concluding chapter (‘Accentuating the Negative’), the negative is the central trope in Johns's ‘quasi-fictional’Footnote ² intervention in international law. Her characterization of the negative is relational: the hyphen within ‘non-legality’ suggests an endless and aporetic co-constitutive relation between the negative (‘non’) and the positivity (‘legality’) that it negates. Moreover, her engagement with ‘non-legality’ is a critical and immanent intervention: hers is a study of ‘non-legality’ (and, hence, of ‘legality’) within international law. However, international law is not one, and international lawyers are not univocal. For Johns, there is no transcendental, metaphysical international law, but international legal practices within international legal fields.Footnote ³ Her work, then, is a field analysis, or, more precisely, an analysis of certain fields (in the plural) of international law.Footnote ⁴ Consequently, Johns engages with the negative episodically, within each of the eventfulFootnote ⁵ and ‘endlessly cross-pollinating fields of contemporary international legal specialisation’ (p. 224). The foci of her ‘quasi-ethnographic’ study, then, are ‘practices of un-law- or non-law-making’ within each of these different international legal fields (p. 31). By accentuating ‘international law's negative spaces’ (p. 223), she aims to expand ‘the contemporary international legal repertoire of ideas and actions’ (p. 217), thus making international legal practice ‘something richer, more ambivalent and more apparent in its accommodation of the beyond-the-pale’ (p. 217). Yet, from the very beginning, as her title points out, the ‘beyond-the-pale’ and the ‘negative spaces’ with which Johns tactically engages are those of international law.

In this review essay, I offer a reading of Non-Legality in International Law that gives particular attention to the ‘international’ dimension of its title, and of the international legal fields and practices with which this groundbreaking work engages.Footnote ⁶ In part, the reading pursued here is motivated by an interest in engaging with a certain, political aspect of Johns's invitation for expanding ‘the contemporary international legal repertoire of ideas and actions’ (p. 217). Inspired by Johns's own poetic experiments in creating a new ‘vocabulary of non-legalities’,Footnote ⁷ together with her reading of international law as a ‘normative language’,Footnote ⁸ the concerns that animate the present intervention are also indebted to a reading of Jacques Derrida's writings on law and language,Footnote ⁹ and of his assessment of the politics of language.Footnote ¹⁰ In this regard, I follow Derrida's observation that ‘[e]very culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some “politics” of language’.Footnote ¹¹ In other words, I follow his observation that the unilateral imposition of a language – or a ‘monolingualism’ – works, politically, through the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of languages to ‘the hegemony of the homogeneous’; that is, to the ‘One’.Footnote ¹² For Derrida, the imposition of a – ‘One’ – language works ‘through a sovereignty whose essence is always colonial’.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, this sense of the always already political, indeed colonial, implications of language is connected to a more fundamental disquiet with the ‘universalization’ of a (certain) hegemonic “language” (‘which is to say, also of a culture’).Footnote ¹⁴ So, the reading of Johns's book pursued here argues that the ‘international’ of its title reinscribes a particular ‘culture’ and a particular ‘language’ into (or, indeed, as) international law. In other words, it questions and engages with a certain assumption and/or presupposition about the ‘international’ dimension (of international law) that seems to be present within Johns's invitation for expanding that ‘international legal repertoire’ (p. 217). In so doing, this essay poses a question concerning the international politics of international law (and its ‘non-legalities’), and, hence, of the book itself.

In this regard, then, I want to draw attention to and engage with a particular aspect of Johns's observation that ‘legal professionals (and other experts seeking or purporting to govern conduct on global scale by lawful means) continually articulate, for and through international law, a jurisdiction bounded . . . by one or more before(s) and after(s), below(s) and above(s), against(s) and/or despite(s)’ (p. 8). On the one hand, considering her engagement with such articulations of ‘a jurisdiction’ that is ‘bounded’ by that which ‘legality’ is not, Johns's new vocabulary of non-legalities (‘illegality’; ‘extra-legality’; ‘pre- and post-legality’; ‘supra-legality’; and ‘infra-legality’ (p. 1 – my emphasis) is a significant contribution to international studies concerned with questions of the negative or the outside.Footnote ¹⁵ On the other hand, considering her quasi-ethnographic engagements with the practices of ‘legal professionals’ and ‘other experts’ within certain international legal fields within which those different ‘non-legalities’ are constructed, Johns's study is also an important contribution to the anthropological and sociological “turns” within international studies.Footnote ¹⁶ No doubt, then, Non-Legality in International Law is a groundbreaking and extremely important contribution to international studies in general, and to international law in particular. Nonetheless, I want to draw attention to and engage with another aspect of that same observation made by Johns. More specifically, I want to draw attention to and engage with the reference to legal professionals and other experts ‘seeking or purporting to govern conduct on global scale by lawful means’ (p. 8 – my emphasis). The point I want to stress here is this reference to the ‘global’. In this regard, consider, additionally, the following passage:

In Johns's book, there is no given, metaphysical “law” or “legality”, nor the “legal”, but ‘normative practices’ of international legal professionals and other experts who, ‘in the course of a project of governing, or seeking to govern, globally’, make ‘international law’ through such normative practices that include, at least in part, ‘practices of un-law- or non-law-making’ (p. 31). Hence, aiming ‘to chart the dynamics and grasp the stakes of contemporary international legal work’ (p. 21), Non-Legality in International Law provides an ‘ethnographically informed’ mapping of such normative practices of ‘international law's “managerialist” functionaries’ (pp. 19–20). Here, taking into account its mapping of such negative constructions of international ‘legalities’, I want to engage with the ‘global’ reference within such international legal practices of making ‘non-legalities’. In other words, I want to draw attention to and engage with the suggestion that international law indicates the – global – projection of the normative practices of international legal professionals: if ‘international law, in short, is what legal professionals say and do in the course of a project of governing, or seeking to govern, globally’ (p. 12), then what I want to engage with and question here is the relation between an ‘international’ law and a ‘global’ project of governance. More precisely, I want to engage with and question the relation between the ‘international’ and the ‘global’; and, hence, the political implications of assuming or presupposing their being synonymous. At issue here is the equation of ‘international’ law with the practice of a self-identifying body of professionals who, ‘for and through international law’ (p. 8), project their ‘managerialist’ governance plans towards the ‘global’, unaware of the historical and political tendency of their own cultural and professional language to universalize from its place of particularity. In other words, at issue here is the complicity of international law within a historical, political, and, more often than not, violent and colonial process of universalization.

So here, displacing a certain fealty of the book to the ‘law’ (in international law), the ‘legal’ (in international legal fields and practices), and ‘legality’ (in ‘non-legality’), I offer a supplementary reading of Non-Legality in International Law that gives more attention to the ‘international’ dimension (of its title; and of international law's ‘non-legality’). In so doing, I wonder about the work of the ‘international’ within and through international law, as well as within and through those international legal fields and international legal practices of making non-legalities; that is, I suggest a rereading of the question of the negative in relation to the ‘international’ (of international law) in order to pose a question concerning that process of universalization.

My ‘supplementary’ engagement with the ‘international’ here is inspired by Derrida's ‘quasi-concept’ of the ‘supplement’.Footnote ¹⁷ For him, the supplement is ‘[l]ess than nothing and yet, to judge by its effects, much more than nothing’.Footnote ¹⁸ If, on the one hand, the supplement ‘adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude’,Footnote ¹⁹ then, on the other hand, it ‘adds only to replace’.Footnote ²⁰ Derrida plays on the double meaning of the ‘supplement’ as both replacing and adding to. In so doing, he is displacing the ‘common sense’ idea that ‘the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it’.Footnote ²¹ In reading the supplement as the aporetic ‘middle point between total absence and total presence’,Footnote ²² Derrida shows ‘the interiority of exteriority’;Footnote ²³ that is, the positivity of negativity, or, to put it with Johns's new vocabulary, the ‘legality’ of, within and through ‘non-legality’. What Derrida is suggesting here is that the supplement always already haunts, contaminates, and, hence, constitutes that in relation to which it is commonly constructed as a (supposed) ‘mere’ addition or ‘surplus’. So what I am suggesting here is that the ‘international’ of international law, and, hence, of international law's ‘non-legalities’, may be read as this kind of Derridian ‘supplement’. After all, there must be something (or some “thing”) that formally and substantively constitutes law as international law; and one may assume that this “thing” has meaning(s), framing(s), and effect(s). But let me be more specific, and suggest a possible focal point for such a problematization of the international ‘supplement’ with in Non-Legality in International Law.

Johns describes her study variously as: an articulation of a new ‘vocabulary of non-legality’ (p. 1 – my emphasis), a (call for the) expansion of ‘the contemporary international legal repertoire of ideas and actions’ (p. 217 – my emphasis), and an account of the ‘extensive, shared repertoire of mediants, chords, proxies and archetypes spanning multiple international regimes’ (p. 221 – my emphasis). There is, following these claims, a sense in which Non-Legality in International Law presupposes or assumes a ‘common’ language: the language that ‘international lawyers already mobilise’ and ‘share’ within and across ‘multiple international regimes’. But in so doing, in presupposing or assuming the ‘common’ language of, for instance, ‘international legal managerialism’, the book is also assuming or presupposing a (certain) ‘being in common’ or ‘commonality’. My contention here is that by rereading international legal managerialism as a language, that is, as international legal language, one may (re)think, question and problematize this ‘being in common’ or ‘commonality’ that is the condition of possibility of the book's alternative tactical engagement with-in international law. For how could the book be able to recognize, map, engage with, and (re)articulate (with-in “itself”) so many different international legal practices, within different but ‘endlessly cross-pollinating fields of contemporary international legal specialisation’ (p. 224), without having and sharing something – ‘in common’ – with such practices and fields? How could these fields cross-pollinate in the first place, or even ‘endlessly’, and how could the international legal repertoire be shared and span ‘multiple international regimes’, without some kind of ‘common’ language, that is, without some form of ‘being in common’, of ‘commonality’, or, as Derrida would suggest, of ‘articulation in general’?Footnote ²⁴

My point here is that Non-Legality in International Law seems to be always already within a broader ‘international legal’ commonality – or ‘international legal’ language – that is (and must be) the condition of possibility not only of each of the international legal practices and fields with which the book engages, but also of their general articulation. Following this, and re-engaging with the suggestion outlined above of a connection between this politics of language and a certain universalization of language and culture, I want to challenge the ‘global’ projection, ‘expansion’, or universalization of such international legal language or ‘commonality’ that is (and must be) the condition of possibility of those international managerialist professionals and their ‘project of governing, or seeking to govern, globally’ (p. 12). My suggestion is that a supplementary focus on and privileging of the ‘international’ of international law (and of international law's negative spaces), would not only mean more attention to the practices and works of international law and international lawyers, but also a more careful analysis of ‘our’ assumptions about the ‘global’ and/or the ‘world’, and about the – political – relations between what ‘we’ assume to be the ‘international’ (that international law supposedly attempts to regulate) and what ‘we’ assume to be the ‘global’ and/or the ‘world’. More specifically, my contention is that a rereading of ‘international legal managerialism’ as a particular – ‘legal’ but, also, ‘international’ – language would allow ‘us’ to (re)think, question, and problematize the process of its universalization; and, hence, not only its legal practices and works, but also its international politics.

In reflecting on ‘the strange phenomenon of Latinity and its globalization’,Footnote ²⁵ Derrida identifies the global hegemony of a particular language, and, hence, of a particular culture (‘that in part is not [exclusively] Latin but [also] Anglo-American’),Footnote ²⁶ thus suggesting, on the one hand, the relation between language and culture, and, on the other hand, the politics of language to which I was referring in the beginning of this essay. Derrida names this ‘process of universalization’ of Latin and Latinity ‘globalatinization’.Footnote ²⁷ The point that I want to stress here is the relation between the becoming global of a particular language (and culture) and the politics of such a process of universalization. For it is precisely within this broader and always already political context that Derrida questions, complaining about the lack of investigation of, the ‘geopolitical and ethico-juridical scope’ of this process of universalization.Footnote ²⁸ As he remarks, this universalization involves ‘a hyper-imperialist appropriation [that] has been underway now for centuries’, and that ‘imposes itself in a particularly palpable manner within the conceptual apparatus of international law and of global political rhetoric.’Footnote ²⁹

The point here is not so much to draw attention to the ‘still irresistible hegemony’ (geopolitically and ethico-juridically) of a certain (Latin and Anglo-American) language and culture, but mainly to suggest, within a rereading of Johns,Footnote ³⁰ the normative (regulative and constitutive) character of language, the co-constitutive relation between a hegemonic language and the ‘hyper-imperialist appropriation’ referred to by Derrida, and, most specifically and importantly, the complicity of ‘the conceptual apparatus of international law’ in such historical and violent process of ‘hyper-imperialist appropriation’. As already intimated, Derrida argues that the imposition of a – ‘One’ – language works ‘through a sovereignty whose essence is always colonial’.Footnote ³¹ A deep sense of a colonial politics is revealed in the way in which a monolinguistic paradigm works to reduce language (which for Derrida will always already be singular and heterogeneous) to the logic of the ‘One’; that is, ‘to the hegemony of the homogeneous’.Footnote ³² My suggestion here is that there is an international legal language that, articulating and being (re)articulated by those international legal professionals and fields studied by Johns, projects ‘itself’ onto the ‘global’ – or, indeed, as (if) the ‘global’, the ‘universal’, or the ‘world’.Footnote ³³ Hence, within those international legal professionals’ project of governing globally there is an inherent problem of ‘colonial violence’ and ‘linguistic imperialism’.Footnote ³⁴ For ‘to found at the same time a universal tongue and a unique genealogy’, in the desire of bringing ‘the world to reason’, simultaneously means ‘a peaceful transparency of the human community’ and ‘a colonial violence’.Footnote ³⁵ At the heart of the problem I am suggesting here is the universalization of an idiom, of a particular language (and culture).Footnote ³⁶

As Derrida suggests elsewhere, one may read language as law; and, of course, law as language.Footnote ³⁷ It is in this sense, for instance, that I would read here Martti Koskenniemi's (Derridian) affirmation that ‘il n’y pas de hors-droit’.Footnote ³⁸ As there is no being outside of a context, and as ‘society is a universal condition of human life’,Footnote ³⁹ there is also no outside of language, no outside of text, and no outside of law. Hence, the importance of Johns's critical, and (thus) immanent, posture within each of her tactical engagements with international legal practices of making non-legality. But if, on the one hand, this particular reading of language suggests that there must (always already) be a general context, text, or ‘articulation in general’ for something to span ‘multiple international regimes’, and for ‘fields of contemporary international legal specialisation’ cross-pollinate (in the first place; and ‘endlessly’), then, on the other hand, Derrida's comments on ‘globalatinization’ suggest that there must (always already) be a politics of language. What I am suggesting here is that, read as a particular language that became or is in the process of becoming (supposedly) ‘global’, international law should also be read as (having, expressing, and performing) an universalizing international politics; that is, the politics of international legal language's process of universalization. It is within this context that, in a rereading of Non-Legality in International Law, I would raise the question of how the (supposedly unproblematic) process of universalization – or expansion – of the (managerialist) international legal language was made and continues to be possible. In other words, I wonder if (and how) the negative/positive play, that is, the negative constitution Johns is concerned with would always already be playing at the limits of the ‘international’ that constituently supplements the legal practices and fields with which she engages; I wonder about the complicity of ‘the conceptual apparatus of international law’ within the violent, and colonial process of universalization of that very international legal language she seems interested in expanding.

What I want to suggest here is that, within this broader, general context, it is (also) important to question and engage with the making of “non-internationalities”; that is, with the international legal practices making the “non-international”.Footnote ⁴⁰ To put it differently, the problem of not contextualizing international law and international law's non-legalities (also) before their constituently – international – supplement is that of not remembering the particularity of that ‘commonality’ that is the condition of possibility of those different legal fields and practices making the non-legal. In other words, one would forget that the “international” is not the “global”, nor the “world”.Footnote ⁴¹ Hence, one would forget that ‘sovereignty whose essence is always colonial’, and which works for the reduction of the singularities and heterogeneities of languages (and cultures) to ‘the hegemony of the homogeneous’. It is in this sense then that I would suggest the main problem, for me, within Non-Legality in International Law: in its quasi-ethnographic ability to speak a common, international legal language, it seems to be revealing within “itself”, but also keeping in place and possibly reinforcing (in its desire to expand the international legal repertoire), a certain – colonial – politics of the “international” (language and culture).