Friendship, Time and Prefiguration in the History of International Law

• Department of Law

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This paper examines the discourse of friendship in the history of international law as a technique for prefiguring the international legal community. Prefiguration has recently drawn attention in legal scholarship, which has approached it mostly through its articulation in the radical tradition, as a form of activism and a technique for social change. This paper turns instead to the Christian origins of the concept and focuses on two dimensions which the radical and Christian traditions arguably share, and that are central to prefiguration: embodiment and time. Through a brief genealogical exercise, this paper poses the questions of whether international law has always operated in an inherent prefigurative manner, proceeding as if the international community it presupposes already, always existed. Drawing on Erich Auerbachs Figura and Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, it develops a framework that traces prefiguration to figural exegesis and its temporal structure, the future anterior. It then explores the connections between time, friendship and community, and argues that friendship, in its classical and Christian articulations, shares this temporal structure. The article applies this framework to the Spanish encounter with the Americas in the sixteenth century, a moment often cast as one of the founding myths of the international community. It shows how Spanish jurists, theologians and other colonial agents called Amerindians forth as friends, placed them within a shared providential history, and turned friendship into a legal obligation. It concludes by pointing to other moments in which international law may have worked prefiguratively, and by asking what this genealogy can tell us about the potential and risks of the present and future – present as future – uses of prefigurative legal techniques in international law.