¹ Derrida, Jacques, The Work of Mourning 74, 115 (2001).Google Scholar

² Admittedly, my first thought was: how uncomfortable, that's a lot of people to have under your skin; sounds quite lumpy.Google Scholar

³ Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology 157-164 (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak trans., 1976).Google Scholar

⁴ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present 425 (1999).Google Scholar

⁵ Derrida, supra note 1 at 201.Google Scholar

⁶ William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, 2.Google Scholar

⁷ Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina and Rush, Peter, Fatal (F)laws: Law, Literature and Writing, 14 Law and Critique 191, 202 (2003).Google Scholar

⁸ Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International 86 (Peggy Kamuf trans., 1994).Google Scholar

⁹ This reading of the meaning of this sense of crisis in the discipline of international law is developed in: Anne Orford, The Destiny of International Law, 17 Leiden Journal of International Law 441-476 (2004).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Charlesworth, Hilary, International Law: A Discipline of Crisis, 65 Modern Law Review 377 (2002).Google Scholar

¹¹ Derrida, Jacques, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, 11 Cardozo Law Review 921, 943 (1990).Google Scholar

¹² Id. at 993.Google Scholar

¹³ Id. at 943.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond 353 (Alan Bass trans., 1987) (discussing the tradition of psychoanalysis in these terms).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Id.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Orford, supra note 9 at 464-476.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Spivak, supra note 4 at 426 (suggesting that where Derrida's earlier work was concerned to guard the question or insist “on the priority of an unanswerable question,” his later work has “a greater emphasis on ethics.”).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Id. Spivak describes this turn as representing “an other-directed swerve” in Derrida's philosophy.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (David Wills trans., 1995).Google Scholar

²⁰ Id. at 58.Google Scholar

²¹ Id. at 5-6.Google Scholar

²² See Anne Orford, Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of Sacrifice, Jean Monnet Working Paper 03/04, NYU School of Law, available at http://www.jeanmonnetprogram.org/papers/04/040301.html. A substantially revised version of this paper will be published in 2005 in the Leiden Journal of International Law symposium on aesthetics and international law.Google Scholar

²³ On the reward of the righteous, see Matthew, 10:34–40 (Revised Standard Version).Google Scholar

²⁴ See Orford, supra note 22. In thinking about international economic law as political theology, I am influenced by: Jennifer Beard, Understanding International Development Programs as a Modern Phenomenon of Early and Medieval Christian Theology, 18 Australian Feminist Law Journal 27 (2003); and Judith E. Grbich, Aesthetics in Christian Juridico-Theological Tracts: The Wanderings of Faith and Nomos, 12 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 351 (2000).Google Scholar

²⁵ The (now infamous) Memorandum for Alberto R Gonzales, Counsel to the President, from Jay S Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, US Department of Justice, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. Sections 2340-2340A (August 1, 2002) sets out the argument that “a nation's right of self-defense” would justify a “government defendant” in torturing or otherwise harming “an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A” of the United States Code implementing the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. For the related argument that self-defence offers a basis upon which to derogate from other human rights norms, see Shabtai Rosenne, The Perplexities of Modern International Law 216, 234 (2004).Google Scholar

²⁶ Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law 203-219 (2003).Google Scholar

²⁷ Derrida, supra note 8 at 176.Google Scholar

²⁸ Id. at 175.Google Scholar

²⁹ Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights 357 (2000).Google Scholar

³⁰ Günther, Klaus, The Legacies of Injustice and Fear: A European Approach to Human Rights and their Effects on Political Culture, in The EU and Human Rights 117-144 (Philip Alston ed., 1999).Google Scholar

³¹ Id. at 126 (emphasis in the original).Google Scholar

³² The UN Charter and the major human rights covenants are regularly described in these terms as an international legal response to the Holocaust and an attempt to protect individuals from future excesses of state power.Google Scholar

³³ Günther, supra note 30 at 126-7.Google Scholar

³⁴ Kafka, Franz, Before the Law, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories 165-166 (Malcolm Pasley trans., 1992).Google Scholar

³⁵ For a related exploration of this question, see Orford, supra note 26 at chapter 6.Google Scholar

³⁶ Derrida, supra note 1 at 201; see, particularly, Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (George Collins trans., 1997); and the beautiful collection of elegies and lamentations written by Derrida after the deaths of his friends and collected in Derrida, supra note 1.Google Scholar

³⁷ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre II: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud at dans la technique psychanalytique 250 (Shoshana Felman trans., 1978) (quoted by Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight 136 (1987).Google Scholar

³⁸ Id.Google Scholar

³⁹ Gallop, Jane, The Father's Seduction, in Daughters & Fathers 97, 99 (Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers eds., 1989).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Felman, Shoshana, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J L Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages 16 (2003).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Id. at 44.Google Scholar

⁴² Id. at 41.Google Scholar

⁴³ Id. at 44.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Derrida, supra note 14 at 81.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Id.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Id. at 67.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Id. at 56.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Id. at 69.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Felman, supra note 40 at 15.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Derrida, supra note 14 at 29.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Id. at 39.Google Scholar