Description
This paper aims to engage with a certain ontopolitics of violence grounding the modern international order (Walker, 2010) and its law (Fitzpatrick, 2001). For this purpose, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work, it (quasi-)conceptualizes what will be named as the ‘and’ of the world. Positioning itself in relation to the problem(s) of a One World/Many Worlds (Walker 1988), A World of Many Worlds (Cadena and Blaser 2018), Being Singular Plural (Nancy 2000), and After the Globe, Before the World (Walker 2010), the paper offers a Derridean rereading of the world/World differentiation (Prozorov, 2014). Thus, reengaging with the differentiation between an always already differing and deferring (quasi-ontological) world and ‘our’ sovereign, ‘modern international’ (ontic) world, the paper questions a certain (colonial) ontopolitics of language and law identified by Derrida with ‘globalatinization’ – and with ‘logocentrism’ more foundationally. In-between ‘the and of the world’ and such colonial ontopolitics of ‘modern international’ legal language, it contends, drawing on the works of Derrida, Mansfield (2010), Davis (2001), and Chakrabarty (2008), it is important to (re)think and conceptualize a ‘counter-sovereignty’ and another politics of language and translation.
