{"id":28272,"date":"2026-04-10T16:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T14:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=28272"},"modified":"2026-04-13T09:01:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:01:51","slug":"the-laws-apocalypse-or-the-law-of-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/the-laws-apocalypse-or-the-law-of-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"The Law\u2019s Apocalypse or the Law of Apocalypse?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the early post-Cold-War years, writing about the \u201cfuneral march\u201d of the twentieth-century history, Hungarian philosopher \u00c1gnes Heller penned, \u201cMan-inflicted apocalypse is the parody of apocalypse. [\u2026] Men are envious of apocalypse; their ambition is to do it better. Why should angels kill off one-third of the human race when the strongest (or most progressive) human beings are also capable of doing it?\u201d (p. 1173<\/a>). More than one year into the second Trump administration, nothing could more aptly resonate with the depraving state of international legality than Heller\u2019s portrayal of man-made apocalypse. The U.S.-backed international order, already on the path of terminal decline<\/a> for years, is now breathing its last breath. If this order had ever been destined to perish, who could have been in a better place to bring it to an apocalyptic moment than the one actor who led its construction in the first place?<\/p>\n

Amidst this chaos, disciplinary voices have come to terms with the end times of the rules-based liberal order (e.g. <\/em>here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>). Yet, many have remained attached to formalistic diagnoses of legality, relying upon \u201crenormalization<\/a>\u201d formula to utter why and how some legalistic requirements were either absent or partially met in a given instance of normative violation. Some even suggest<\/a> that alternatives to the old (dis)order may not envisage \u201ca world without international law\u201d, perhaps implying that the survival of law may still amount to its partial triumph. Yet, inasmuch as man-made apocalypse is nothing but a parody of apocalypse, the question of legality \u201cin the time of monsters\u201d<\/a>, irreducible to a diagnosis of compliance and breach, is fraught with what I call \u201c(counter-)theatrical perversion of legality\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeen to Be Done\u201d: Law, Perversion, and (Counter-)Theatricality<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a descriptive signifier, perversion may evoke not just the distortion of law through recurrent misuse but, as Mohammed Bedjaoui noted five decades ago, an effect of how preaching \u201claw for law\u2019s sake\u201d (p. 101<\/a>) thwarts law\u2019s adaptation to social realities. Yet, this notion, as I encode it in my analysis, is reduced neither to these narratives nor to individual aberrations of those preaching or denouncing law. I elaborate on this idea of perversion following the Lacanian theory.<\/p>\n

\u00c0 la Lacan, perversion points towards \u201ca structure (which is to say something irreducible to a personal style or pathology of individual perverts) that enables an insight into how power works today\u201d (p. 208<\/a>). A perverse individual is situated in \u201ca particular structural position in relation to the Other\u201d in which he \u201chas undergone alienation but disavowed castration, suffering from excessive jouissance, and a core belief that the law and social norms are fraudulent at worst and weak at best\u201d (p. xii<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Castration refers to the symbolic process, tied to the Freudian \u201cOedipus complex\u201d, whereby the child\u2019s identification with maternal parent is challenged by paternal figure representing the symbolic (social) order. In his alienation from maternal parent, the perverse subject acknowledges the \u201cName-of-the-Father\u201d (p. 115<\/a>) \u2013 the signifier of the symbolic order \u2013 and, yet, \u201c\u2018disavows\u2019 knowledge\u201d of it (p. 170<\/a>). This order, the Other (capitalized), is \u201cthe unconscious, the place of parents, culture, and language\u201d (p. 140<\/a>). Law \u2013 which, per Lacan, is not synonymous with a formal system of rules but encompasses what \u201c\u2018demarcates\u2019 the unattainable for desire\u201d (p. 59<\/a>) \u2013 finds home in this category.<\/p>\n

Integral to this revisited idea of legality is the notion of jouissance. Beyond its literal meaning as (erotic) pleasure, Lacanian jouissance signifies \u201can excess intolerable to pleasure, now a manifestation of the body closer to extreme tension, to pain and suffering\u201d (p. 14<\/a>). By way of illustration<\/a>, pleasure is sexual gratification, while jouissance is sexual compulsivity or breaking the taboo of incest. Law essentially entails \u201cthe regulation of the restrictions imposed on the jouissance\u201d of transgression. Yet, this effect remains complex as \u201cit is thanks to the law [\u2026] that a certain act provokes the jouissance which the drive aims at\u201d (p. 108<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The jouissance of transgression, primarily subjective, may amount to \u201cobjective transgression\u201d \u2013 i.e.<\/em> once the (subjective) guilt of transgression is sublimated by \u201cthe perverse self-instrumentalization of the subject\u201d for a (collective) \u201chigher good\u201d (p. 280<\/a>) \u2013 as seen in populist mobilization and totalitarian systems (here<\/a> and here<\/a>). The breach of law, a source of subjective guilt, becomes the virtue of \u201cthe restoration of \u2018law and order\u2019 itself\u201d (p. 268<\/a>), making the transgression of law almost \u201cindistinguishable from its preservation\u201d (p. 271<\/a>). Law and its subjects are mutually constitutive as \u201cneither one wholly or unidirectionally determines the other\u201d (p. 140<\/a>). Since law \u201ccannot banish the pathological\u201d and may only pose limits to jouissance, perversion is an ever-present possibility, often surfacing in linguistic and symbolic practices (p. 48<\/a>). As an \u201cunconscious order which envelops and shapes the destiny of the subject\u201d (p. 74<\/a>), language exposes the perverse subjectivity. At this juncture, the law\u2019s theatricality becomes intermingled with Lacanian perversion.<\/p>\n

The enforcement of law as an expressive performance is linked to its \u201caesthetic power\u201d, including its lexicon, procedures, and symbols. Law is \u201cnot merely to be done but \u2018seen to be done\u2019\u201d (pp. 5-6<\/a>). Correspondingly, in manifesting his disavowal of the symbolic order, the perverse subject resorts to \u201ccounter-theatricality<\/a>\u201d, a (non-exhaustive) range of performative possibilities from vulgar speechcraft and gestures, to ornamental, or even paradoxical, appropriation of legal form for \u201csome grander [good] that only [he] alone can perfect\u201d (p. 171<\/a>). Counter-theatricality is the mark of perversion. Unlike other Lacanian diagnostic structures (neurosis and psychosis), perversion assumes an \u201cin-between-ness<\/a>\u201d via-\u00e0-vis<\/em> the law. The perverse subject does not blindly reject the latter but retains a performatively<\/em> disavowing posture toward it. One cannot but behold this in-between-ness in Trumpism\u2019s parody of international legality.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Own Morality. My Own Mind. It\u2019s the Only Thing That Can Stop Me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Maria Aristodemou puts it, \u201cPublic international law, like all law, prohibits what is most desired [\u2026]. Access to unbridled enjoyment would be unbearable for the subject so law acts as a limit, not to our freedom, but to limitless, and therefore unbearable, enjoyment\u201d (p. 49<\/a>). The normative expansion of international law over the past decades, while posing further constraints on its subjects\u2019 enjoyment, exposed, what Matthew Nicholson describes as, \u201cinternational law\u2019s \u2018phallic\u2019 complex\u2014an expression of its unfulfillable \u2018wish for completeness\u2019\u201d (p. 505<\/a>). This expansion never effaced what critical strands of scholarship have identified as \u201cstructural biases<\/a>\u201d, \u201clegalized hegemony<\/a>\u201d and \u201cinterests of dominant social forces\u201d (p. 26<\/a>) in the design of international law \u2013 a signifier of normative porosity allowing most powerful subjects to enjoy lesser degree of restraint on their jouissance. More parochial precepts such as \u201cAmerican exceptionalism<\/a>\u201d, devised to constantly adjust the barriers to political enjoyment, also revealed the insatiability of imperial \u201cphallic complex\u201d.<\/p>\n

While framed as antithetical to the rules-based order, Trumpism\u2019s \u201cpolitical perversion<\/a>\u201d feeds on such possibilities that the liberal order offered. After all, \u201cpublic international law, no more than any law, cannot escape the pathological\u201d (p. 53<\/a>). If \u201cinternational law is the continuation of politics by other means<\/a>\u201d, the perversion of politics would directly bear upon how law is \u201cenunciated<\/a>\u201d in the Latourian sense. To equate the perversion of legality to its violation, however, misrepresents how the perverse subject identifies with the Other (here, the \u201cwoke<\/a>\u201d international legal order).<\/p>\n

Same as perversion in general, Trumpism unfolds \u201cin destroying more than in conserving\u201d and only \u201cmanifests itself in transference and relation to others\u201d (p. 108-109<\/a>). Why would it wish to dismantle international law, if it could ever do so, if it may simply enjoy the former\u2019s disavowal and denigration? Unsurprisingly, even in one of his most antagonistic remarks about international legality \u2013 \u201cI don\u2019t need international law. [\u2026] My own morality [is] the only thing that can stop me\u201d \u2013 Trump did not \u201cdeny the binding effect of international law<\/a>\u201d. This is precisely why the counter-theatrical belittlement of what counts as the symbolic Other (liberal international order) takes center stage in the expression of perverse subjectivity.<\/p>\n

One could trace this counter-theatricality, in its symbolic and linguistic representations, in the Trump administration\u2019s warmongering in the Middle East: From its Secretary of War,<\/em> a former TV host with \u201cpuerile displays<\/a>\u201d in his press conferences, and the White House\u2019s social media accounts using internet memes<\/a> (on memeifying warfare, see here<\/a>) and references to Hollywood movies<\/a> to boast about waging an unlawful war on Iran, to Trump himself being<\/a> \u201cat his most animated when describing the bloodied and mangled bodies of other people\u201d. The use of force \u2013 endorsed by \u201cdemonstrably rubbish justifications<\/a>\u201d and portrayed as \u201cpart of God\u2019s divine plan<\/a>\u201d to retribute<\/a> \u201cbarbarians<\/a>\u201d and \u201canimals<\/a>\u201d \u2013 has not only recycled the language of colonial wars but has degenerated life-and-death decisions into the choice of \u201cmore fun<\/a>\u201d options or a \u201cfeeling based on fact<\/a>\u201d. Excessive restraint on the jouissance of violence, as the perverse subject may utter, only leads to \u201cpolitically correct wars<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The disavowal of the symbolic order may involve magnifying the latter\u2019s flaws for \u201csome [deliberately ambiguous] grander (second) Other\u201d, leading the perverse subject to \u201cspeak prophetically, declaring either a new or renewed path to law and order\u201d (p. 171<\/a>). Any compliance with the proscriptions of legality is conditioned on the future, if ever, actualization of these \u201chigher goods\u201d. After all, why should one \u201clet<\/a> international law get in the way of peace and prosperity\u201d? Trump\u2019s so-called \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d brazenly embodies this.<\/p>\n

With its inaugural meeting on 19 February 2026 becoming a musical charade<\/a>, the Board, as its Charter<\/a> provides, is constituted as a technocratic international organization and pays lip service to international law as its normative framework. Yet, nowhere in its Charter does the Board engage with standard terminologies of peacebuilding, from self-determination to human rights and development. The Board\u2019s aesthetic angles unclothe the perverse subject\u2019s \u201cdemand for recognition\u201d (p. 114<\/a>). Its logo is centered almost exclusively on an outline map of the United States; its official website<\/a> is replete with Trump\u2019s quotes on \u201cbeautiful, everlasting, and glorious peace\u201d; and its administrative center is based at the \u201cDonald J. Trump Institute of Peace<\/a>\u201d. The perverse subject stands at the center stage of his scripted play where (the parody of) legality operates as no more than a visual enactment of perverse jouissance.<\/p>\n

Trumpism\u2019s disavowal of legality indeed lives off the margin of enjoyment that the rules-based order reserved for the American empire. In this sense, it lays bare but the endurance and dilation of extant power asymmetries of a \u201cglobal caste\u201d (p. 812<\/a>). Yet, this parody of legality \u2013 the law of apocalypse, to resonate with Heller\u2019s allegory of man-inflicted apocalypse \u2013 might underline backstage shifts in the political configuration of subjectivity. What one witnesses in Trumpism is, in Aaron Schuster\u2019s words<\/a>, the amplifying impulse that \u201cthe State should ultimately become part of the Trump brand\u2014American democracy is the new Trump Steaks, grilled to a crisp at Mar-a-Lago\u2014and a worldwide platform for his ongoing reality show.\u201d This is what the discipline, with its oblivion to the intricacies of subjectivity, has terribly missed.<\/p>\n

An Unfinished Epilogue<\/strong><\/p>\n

Agamben once postulated that \u201cpolitics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law\u201d (p. 88<\/a>). Similarly, against the perverse aberrance that Trumpism has unleashed on international law, our legal imagination has been no less spinelessly crippled by the ruinous arrogance of formalism. Painfully slow to cope with the scale of recurrent disavowal of legality, formalism has taken solace in that it can exist as the guardian of \u201cauthentic international law<\/a>\u201d and of its \u201clong memory<\/a>\u201d. It has remained blind to the logic that jouissance \u201ccarries within it its own reason\u201d (p. 108<\/a>) irreducible to, although not irrelevant to, legal enunciations. What proves most perilous is less the characterization of Trumpism as rupture or continuity than the bitter recognition of how little we still know about it. Perversion is a lingering possibility in the life of legality. Trumpism \u2013 perhaps not international law \u2013 might eventually wither away but perversion would always be reborn beneath our formalistic naivet\u00e9, as long as, in Pierre Schlag\u2019s words, subjectivity does not become \u201cpart of the story\u201d (p. 1743<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early post-Cold-War years, writing about the \u201cfuneral march\u201d of the twentieth-century history, Hungarian philosopher \u00c1gnes Heller penned, \u201cMan-inflicted apocalypse is the parody of apocalypse. [\u2026] Men are envious of apocalypse; their ambition is to do it better. Why should angels kill off one-third of the human race when the strongest (or most progressive) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[7499,7131],"authors":[7969],"article-categories":[6000],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-28272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-international-legal-order","tag-usa","authors-soheil-ghasemi","article-categories-article"],"acf":{"subline":"On the (Counter-)Theatrical Perversion of Legality"},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20260410-172928-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28275,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28272\/revisions\/28275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28272"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=28272"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=28272"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=28272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}