After Meaning

The Sovereignty of Forms in International Law

Jean d’Aspremont, Professor of International Law, School of Law, Sciences Po Paris, France and School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK

鼓舞人心的和独特的,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.

‘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