International Order and the Pain of Negativity

• Department of Law

PhD thesis defence by Nico Roman Weber

This thesis argues that an immanent critique of Hegel can offer a utopian alternative to contemporary theories of international law. Preoccupied with either solving seemingly ahistorical problems by copy-pasting concepts from the domestic liberal toolset or deconstructing the false universalisms underpinning this liberal order, lawyers struggle to grasp international law in the framework of a transformative project. I show how Hegel, in a paradoxically sceptical fashion, recovers absolute knowledge, the necessary corollary of universal emancipation, against the foil of his liberal and conservative opponents who abandoned both quests. The central argument of my thesis is that Hegel finds the experience content and actualisation of the absolute in the philosophical 'sublation' of Christian revelation. In the pain of negativity, the finite human spirit realises that its self-righteousness othered and killed God. Following an immanent critique of Hegel’s theory of grace, we can conceptualise the result of human spirit's transformation into absolute spirit as vulnerable and ephemeral: whenever spirit cannot account for otherness, absolute spirit falls from grace and reverts into objective spirit's self-absorbedness. Hegel, however, neglected a great deal of otherness, that of women, the poor, and (colonised) slaves, without letting the modern Protestant Germanic spirit lose its world-historical primacy. I propose that we can go with Hegel beyond Hegel by searching for liberating agency in those whose 'pain of negativity' Hegel partially recognised. This turn to agents of liberation allows a critical reappraisal of a Hegelian voluntarist reading of international legal positivism. The state becomes the epistemologically necessary and normatively hopeful focal point only to the extent that it crystalises the identified agents' historical struggles for self-determination. The role of positivism is to protect the spaces of the actuality of reason that are the historical results of these struggles and from which new, more transformative projects can arise.

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