Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

Let us start with Sartre, whose creative appropriation of Being and Time’s phenomenology of death came to prominence first – in 1946’s Being and Nothingness – and probably remains the most widely known in its own right. If Sartre’s vision of existential death is rarely recognized as his alternative to Heidegger’s account, that is both because what Being and Time means by death is not widely understood and because Sartre’s alternative represents the furthest departure from Heidegger’s own view. In general, Sartre’s adoption of a subject/object dualism leads him to pervasively re-Cartesianize Being and Time, as if he were completely oblivious to Heidegger’s overarching efforts to undermine Cartesian dualism. (This obliviousness is already clear from Sartre’s oft-quoted but nonetheless false claim that the “existentialism” he shares with Heidegger can be defined by their shared insistence “that subjectivity must be the starting point.”) Sartre’s phenomenology of the objectifying “look of the other” transforms Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death so dramatically that Sartre can easily appear to be describing a different phenomenon altogether. Read carefully, however, it becomes clear that Sartre’s account of the “the look” allows him to articulate his own version of an existential phenomenon in which I experience “the death of my possibilities” – even though “I am my possibilities” – and yet I live through that experience to tell the tale phenomenologically.

What are the basic coordinates of the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas over the phenomenology of “death” and its larger ontological or ethical significance? Or, put in the “perfectionist” terms developed in Chapter 4, in what ways do Heidegger and Levinas disagree about how we human beings become genuinely or fully ourselves? Examining the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s phenomenologies of death, this chapter suggests that Heidegger and Levinas both understood themselves as struggling to articulate the requisite ethical response to the great traumas of the twentieth century. By comparing their thinking at this level, I contend, we can better understand the ways in which Levinas genuinely diverges from Heidegger even while building critically on his thinking.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of how this project fits into the broader categories of critical eating studies and critical animal studies. Through a reading of Byron’s The Corsair, it offers an example of some of the book’s central arguments: that the development of vegetarianism and veganism must be understood as the result of an east–west dialogic relationship rather than as a one-way process of cultural transmission; that religion will often be used to explain away an individual’s dietary choice; that the connections with gender of vegetarianism and veganism are more complicated than has often been suggested.

Chapter 10 elaborates on an epistemic mutation that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and that Foucault missed. It is this that opened that conceptual universe within whose frameworks the theories analyzed in this book could emerge. This, thus, provides fundamental tools to understand the structure of those theories, as well as the problems they found to account for the issue of conceptual change. Finally, it discusses how this new episteme, in turn, starting dissolving, thus raising the issue of the constitutive incompleteness of systems. It will mark the transition from phenomenology to postphenomenology and from structuralism to postructuralism, which entailed, in turn, a new radical redefinition of the concept of the temporality of conceptual formations. Derrida´s criticism played a key role here. Lastly, as this chapter shows, this transformation, as the other epistemic mutations previously studied, traverse the whole thinking of the period, comprehending both the natural sciences and the humanities. It thus allows us to draw meaningful connections among the different areas of knowledge.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

This chapter discusses the philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential writings on the contingent nature of ironic thinking and expression. Rorty argued that irony does not reveal foundational truths, but is employed to help us “depict the world through multiple points of view.” Irony provides a way of individually recreating the world for ourselves rather than offering a special device to demystify assumptions about reality that somehow exists outside of language. Rorty’s claimed that writers such as Proust, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida are ironists given their questions about the stories and vocabularies we inhabit. Literature is especially useful for creating spaces for irony as sites for creative, nonjudgmental self-examination. But philosophy is also a kind of playful ironic writing that helps us to create useful redescriptions of the world and our roles in it. Colebrook emphasizes that Rorty rejected the idea that irony is just a trope in which one thing is said and another is meant. Irony is “the very opposite of searching for essences,” which is why it is so important for understanding liberalism with its emphasis on the “politics of tolerance, anti-foundationalism, and freedom of speech.”

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

Chapter 5 explores Derrida’s analysis of the problem of judgement through an extended analysis of Derrida’s analysis of presence and différance. It analyses three of Derrida’s readings of other philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Husserl, with the aim of showing how in each case, Derrida believes that the priority of presence (and hence judgement) rests on a transcendental idea that exceeds the given. It argues that despite Derrida’s apparent hostility to the phenomenological tradition, his work is indebted to Sartre, and echoes Bergson’s analysis of resemblance.

The world and the globe are digital and inscriptive events. Before the advent of digital media in its narrow sense, conceptions of humanity presuppose a shared globe and horizon of sense; this presupposed harmony requires various technical systems that also threaten to produce an entropic dissolution. If globalism is the assumed common horizon of sense, hyperglobalism promises the destruction of communalism and the possibility of other worlds.

This chapter provides the framework for the book’s analysis of the ICTR’s archive. First it establishes, theoretically, the link between archives, and the formation of community, as the archive is presented as a site where the themes of law, knowledge and governance coalesce. Second, it looks at other scholarly work on international courts for insights on the interrelationship between law, knowledge and governance and argues that this work has, to date, wrongly treated courts as sites of ‘knowledge deficit’, and further that there is a need to understand how the inner workings of the court contribute to the formation of particular types of community. Finally, drawing on Foucault and Ann Stoler’s work, it shows how the archive can function as an analytical and methodological tool to examine the politics of knowledge production in international courts.