Psychoanalyzing International Law(yers)

Abstract

This article reads the work of Martti Koskenniemi – arguably the most significant international legal thinker of the post-Cold War era – as an exercise in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Excavating the links between Koskenniemi and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and analysing the origins of those links in Koskenniemi’s debt to the Harvard branch of the American Critical Legal Studies (‘CLS’) movement, it argues that over almost thirty years Koskenniemi has employed psychoanalytic techniques to re-build the self-confidence of international law(yers). The success of this confidence-building project explains the acclaim Koskenniemi’s work enjoys. As international law’s psychoanalyst he has defined the identity of the international lawyer and mapped the structure of international legal argument, stabilising international law’s present reality by synchronising it with narratives of its past. Any attempt to destabilise that reality or depart from present structures into an alternative future must start from an analysis of Koskenniemi’s methods and it is in this sense, and not out of a more pure interest in Koskenniemi’s work, that this article deconstructs Koskenniemi’s oeuvre. It situates his method, reveals his choices and explores their limits in an effort to develop (tentative) proposals for a “new” international law(yer) and an international legal future outside the structure that Koskenniemi has mapped so effectively and affectively.