Policing Critique
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12358 |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Policing Critique
Isobel Roele∗
Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, and Alexis Gal´
an (eds),The Law of Interna-
tional Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017, 424 pp, hb £79.99.
What is critique? For Martti Koskenniemi, the subject of this collection of essays
and ‘one of the icons’ of international law (9), it is to say ‘no’. He provides
an epilogue to this volume of critical readings of his work which responds
to the contributors in a series of noes – no to abstraction, no to empir icism,
no to constructivism, no to enchantment – but ends in a tantalising ‘perhaps’.
Perhaps it is possible to do international law work critically. Who is this critical
professional? What are moral instincts? How can we introduce them into our
professional lives? For all Koskenniemi’s noes, we never find out.
Editors Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon and Alexis Gal´
an have a different
approach to critique or, rather, criticism. They have compiled a set of readings
of Koskenniemi’s work which sets out to ‘challeng[e] and deeply engag[e]’
his writing (9). Even the more robust readings affirm more than they negate
because of the respect close attention pays to scholarly writing. Assembling a
formidable line-up to reveal ‘fresh perspectives’ on well-known ideas (10), the
editors set out to reclaim Koskenniemi’s over-used oeuvre for serious schol-
arship. Contributors pay particular attention to the indeterminacy thesis, the
culture of formalism, counter-disciplinarity and his turn to history. Although
the editors have taken pains to represent a ‘wide range of functional areas’
and an ‘even broader range of theoretical perspectives’ (10), it is a shame the
range of voices is so narrow – most of the contributors are white men from
institutions in the global North.
Inspired by the volume’s generous, appreciative project, I approach Kosken-
niemi’s negative critique with a view to opening it up rather than shutting it
down. This essay takes critique as an act of reclamation,1reclaiming Kosken-
niemi’sasser tion of international lawyers’ moral agency from the sea of noes that
overwhelm the redemptive impulse. His epilogue, ‘To Enable and Enchant –
on the Power of International law’, is awash with refusal. Abstraction en-
chants, it says, and must be apprehended and interrogated wherever it is found,
∗Queen Mary University of London.
1W.Brown,Edgework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) 21.
C2018 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2018The Modern Law Review Limited. (2018) 81(4) MLR 701–721
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Policing Critique
whether in positivism, high theory, empiricism, or constructivism. The tech-
niques, frame and disposition of this critique are a product of Koskenniemi’s
professed commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion (396). Valuable though
it is, suspicion is only one mode of critique and one that we may have good rea-
son to set aside when it inhibits other projects, especially those which, in Anne
Orford’s phrase, may prove ‘enlivening, productive and critically transformative’
(304).
Koskenniemi’s own critically transformative project, which presses interna-
tional lawyers to take responsibility for their work and follow their ‘gut feelings’
(411) rather than blindly comply with management directives,f alls victim to the
hermeneutics of suspicion. Koskenniemi is convinced that ‘it would be wrong
to simply dispense with international law altogether’ (410), but he cannot tell
us how to find out what our moral sensibilities are saying, or decide when
we ought to follow them. To do so would be to truck with abstraction and
this is verboten. As Eve Sedgwick showed, suspicion says no absolutely, with-
out exception. Her alternative was to read reparatively.2How might we read
Koskenniemi’s work reparatively? Literary studies, Sedgwick’s home discipline,
suggests some possibilities. Here I draw in particular on Rita Felski’s The Limits
of Critique3to understand how the narratives of suspicion – its structural biases,
we might say - police the limits of critique and prevent Koskenniemi from
fanning what Susan Marks and Andrew Lang call ‘the spark of hope’ in his
work (322).
I attempt to kindle the spark with other, fictional, narratives. Fictions let
us substantiate Koskenniemi’s waifish gestures, opening them to critical ap-
preciation, not shutting them down. What is Koskenniemi getting at when he
advocates moral agency? What does he have in mind when he talks about moral
sentiments? Where might such an approach take us in the future? I turn to the
fictional narratives of the police procedural to bring Koskenniemi’s figure of
the critical professional to life, drawing on the HBO series The Wire to imagine
them as maverick cops.
THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION
Koskenniemi declares that his critique is driven by the hermeneutics of suspi-
cion (396). The term is usually credited to Paul Ricoeur, who used it to affirm
the suspicious thinking of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. He thought they were
united by three things: a shared suspicion of false consciousness, a method of
deciphering it; and a goal of substituting it with a better mode of conscious-
ness.4Koskenniemi fits this bill, too. He tackles false-consciousness head-on in
his epilogue by suggesting that law has an ‘enchanting power’ which obscures
2 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so paranoid, you
probably think this essay is about you’in E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003).
3R.Felski,The Limits of Critique (Chicago, Ill: Chicago University Press, 2015).
4 P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, Ct: Yale University
Press, 1970) 34-35.
702 C2018 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2018The Moder n Law ReviewLimited.
(2018) 81(4) MLR 701–721
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