Some 15-20 years ago, there used to be a lot of interest among international lawyers in topics like deconstruction, differance and ‘Derrida and law’. Most of it has since dissipated, and it isn’t immediately clear why. Was it just a case of a simple change in intellectual fashions? The usual ebb and flow of critical legal thought? A product of some kind of backlash? Or is it that international lawyers have simply got everything they could get out of Derrida’s writings, and there was not much left there to explore anymore? Is it that Derridean ideas do not really speak to international lawyers’ shared intellectual concerns anymore? What is, in that sense, ‘living and dead’ in Derrida’s work from a legal-theoretic point of view? After a three-year hiatus, the Glasgow Conversations in International Law series is back, on 17 November, with a research workshop co-convened in partnership with the Sciences Po (Paris) Law School. The title of the workshop is ‘Derrida & International Law’, and the main questions we will want to explore are: what happened? is it worth trying to reverse it? what might be the different way of going about it?
This workshop will take place at the School of Law and is an invitation-only event.