Jean d’Aspremont has written a fine book that describes international law’s main character and intrinsic way of operation. In many respects, this book is the author’s last attempt of salvaging doctrinal international law from its often too obviously perceived irrelevance.Footnote ¹ A rich body of French philosophy from the 1970s and 1980s underpins many of the ideas of the book. But despite its sophistication, the book is an easy read, with a caveat. One needs to be in the right mood to be able to enjoy it and to indulge in its very risky argument – precisely that mood which is facilitated by the bourgeois situational status that the author acknowledges to be part of a scholar’s life. The argument of The Epistemology of the Secret is that international law, like any other serious epistemological project, assumes that the world is a continuous stream of hidden knowledge, which the discipline has the obligation to reveal. International law will inevitably not only order that knowledge but also create the very hidden knowledge it is supposedly revealing, unveiling it while suppressing other sources of truth. In what follows, I will describe the contents of the book, providing along the way a few critical comments.

After an introductory ‘Preface’, the first chapter expands on the main argument of the book just summarized. International law is enlivened by two interdependent necessities, ‘the necessity of secret content’ and ‘the necessity of revelation’.Footnote ² D’Aspremont considers international legal texts to be mainly a repository of secrets waiting to be discovered, but with a twist. Those secrets are in fact produced in the moment of being purportedly revealed. ‘The content [of international law] held to be hidden is actually created at the very moment it is disclosed by the act of revelation’.Footnote ³ The text in international law overflows with hidden content. While the content is hidden, it is however ‘at home and from home’.Footnote ⁴ For that content is never unfamiliar to international lawyers’ ‘practical, linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, cultural, imaginary, and emotional universe’.Footnote ⁵ In that sense, revelation is not a neutral attitude or a mental activity responding to a reality out there, an ‘adequatio rei et intellectus’, in the definition of truth of the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ⁶ International law’s revelation is an act of ordering of what ‘can be said, thought, perceived, and actioned through international law’.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, ordering is in this case not consciously done by international lawyers – we are not dealing here with conspiracy theory.Footnote ⁸ The author shows in this and other instances that he is wary of the constant pursue of narratives of evil as a professional attitude. This wariness is also visible, e.g., in the clear demarcation between his critique to the epistemology of the secret and other ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, in his resistance to equate the epistemology of the secret with ideology,Footnote ⁹ and in the sense of exhaustion conveyed in the book with critical international lawyers’ continuous ‘discovery of new (dirty) secrets’.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, d’Aspremont appears to argue that this revelation (dirty or not) is exactly what the epistemology of the secret forces international lawyers to do. In a ‘fascist’ way, the ‘necessity of revelation’ never allows international lawyers to simply contemplate the law. Instead, they are ‘never left in peace’, obligated to constantly reveal the content of ‘texts, practices, actors, effects, representations, past, etc.’Footnote ¹¹

The ambivalence of the epistemology of the secret is already hinted at and delineated there. The epistemology of the secret completely defines the identity of international lawyers, their thinking, their dreams, their ambitions, their livesFootnote ¹² and perpetuates a status quo that d’Aspremont certainly describes as appalling in many respectsFootnote ¹³ – imperialist, capitalist, racist, destroying the planet, bourgeois, phallocentric, fostering virilism and masculinism, and, he notes in a concluding comment of the book, facilitating or even producing ‘the misery and moral collapse of the world currently witnessed’.Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas the anti-imperialist and post-colonial critique is a valid one, the book does not capture the fact that imperialism and colonialism are neither things of the past, nor exclusively European matters. This one-sidedness runs the risk of portraying the entire world as a helpless, past, present, and future victim of Europe.Footnote ¹⁵ Not only that, but it also fails to acknowledge the enormous contribution to European culture of, among many others, the Arabic philosophers.Footnote ¹⁶

With all its ordering power, the epistemology of the secret is in fact unavoidable, so the author argues. According to d’Aspremont the presupposition of a pre-existing meaning in texts, ‘the logocentrism’ cannot be avoided, and the humanities are, as a matter of fact, loyal to it, while international lawyers cannot escape it either.Footnote ¹⁷

The second chapter traces classic epistemologies of the secret: Greek logocentrism, Christian governance of the mind, and modern thought, which is embodied in modern scientific thought, modern critique, bourgeois literature, Freudian psychoanalysis, and structuralist thought. D’Aspremont aptly choses to dwell at length with the epistemology of the secret in modernity. The modern critical mind that the Enlightenment embodies, organizes ‘the permanent trial of the world, of oneself, of others, of the latter’s saying and findings’.Footnote ¹⁸ Modern science and bourgeois literature race obsessively towards ‘the pursuit of “the real” at the heart’,Footnote ¹⁹ while Freud transformed ‘the hidden’ into a pathology that needs to be revealed to be healed. D’Aspremont points thus to dubious moral aspects of trying to heal a human being by revealing the pathological hidden. As he shows, in modernity curiosity, understood in a negative sense, has become almost a virtue and a central form of entertainment. Pre-moderns, instead, wrote against the dangers of curiosity for the soul.Footnote ²⁰ Why d’Aspremont then seems to be consistently critical not only of revelation, but also of the existence of the hidden, is difficult to understand. Is there not something, and often much, in the heart of a human that is and ought to remain hidden? Is the hidden not necessarily sacred, a community, that invisibly unites people? In turn, ‘the spectacle’ depletes our humanity, as if in a process of digging the roots of a tree. ‘The spectacle’ itself exerts all the efforts towards isolating people from each other, to generate the dependency to it of increasingly lonely people.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, d’Aspremont’s book displays illuminating paradoxes along these lines. This is the case when referring to the futility of the attempt to make art transparent. ‘[L]ike other epistemologies of the secret, the epistemology of the secret of the bourgeois literature conceals language and makes it transparent’.Footnote ²²

Hence, as d’Aspremont notes, structuralism has accepted that the source of the structure should not be looked for, let alone revealed. However, it still advocates the revelation of the code of the structure, in pursue of its constraining capabilities.Footnote ²³ Post-structuralist thought is in The Epistemology of the Secret also not an available alternative. Due to post-structuralism’s failure in decentring logocentrism, it reaffirms, rather than defeating the epistemology of the secret.

All in all, the extremely heavy reliance on Michel Foucault jumps off the page in this book, while the author does not pause to explain it. However, in a book that seeks to reaffirm the form of the law and is deeply distrustful of the hermeneutics of suspicion, it is not easily justifiable. A more elaborated treatment of the question of truth, a notion that is central to the book, would have been desirable as a more reliable guide for readers.

The book turns in Chapter 3 to questions of the content of international law that seem to be intuitively related with the epistemology of the secret: the increasing demands of transparency, the secret treaties, spies and intelligence and international law and the requirements and impossibility of transparency in international law. The chapter establishes some connections between the argument of the book and Mark Fenster and Andrea Bianchi’s work on transparency,Footnote ²⁴ only to conclude that these authors are, though illuminating, also caught in the epistemology of the secret.Footnote ²⁵ This should not lead us to think that d’Aspremont sees himself as an external analyst of the questions dealt with. On the contrary, his very book is nonchalantly situated in the epistemology of the secret and its ‘parochialism’.Footnote ²⁶

Chapter 4 continues with concrete contemporary manifestations of the epistemology of the secret: texts and speech materials, the latter being ultimately also textual materials. The book is supported throughout by an immense apparatus of rich footnotes. Moreover, some parts of the book, such as the bulk of Chapter 4, consist in shelving a sizeable amount of the existing literature according to what kind of hidden knowledge the International Court of Justice and legal scholars are being solicited to help with or to address, and later to reveal. This is one of the aspects of the book that strikes this reviewer as being of great practical utility, something that comes as a surprise in this type of book. D’Aspremont constructs a bibliography of tropes that will be helpfully revisited by any international lawyer, pointing to contents that one might seek for, to unveil them for one’s activity of revelation. Some names appear very often in that literature, while others, confirming d’Aspremont’s thesis in his own book, are sidelined or simply absent. At any rate, given his criticism to the ordering activity of the epistemology of the secret, one wonders whether that absence is a compliment to those non-present works. Part of the act of the necessity of revelation, it is argued in the book, is the mass production and suppression of alternative materials in which the discipline is engulfed. The third section of Chapter 4 deals with these questions according to five ways in which that occurs: through sources, the law of international organizations, histories of international law, comparison and interpretation of international law.

The book builds up momentum, during which readers might be asking themselves what the solution to all this is. Is d’Aspremont not going to offer any way out of this oppressive necessity of the epistemology of the secret? Fortunately, this is what the fifth chapter does in the form of the concept of ‘obnubilation’.Footnote ²⁷ Obnubilation is for the author a way of disordering the strict contours of the epistemology of the secret, outsmarting it ‘by refusing to uphold the distinction between the hidden, the unknown, the invisible, on the one hand, and the revealed, the known, and the visible, on the other’.Footnote ²⁸ This proposal assumes that the order created by the epistemology of the secret is dehumanizing and engenders inequality. Therefore, international lawyers can question it with clear conscience.Footnote ²⁹ Obnubilation is a practice of non-understanding that refuses to commit to universal truths in the service of oppression.Footnote ³⁰ According to d’Aspremont, it shares similar features with ‘opacity’, forms of disorderingFootnote ³¹ , the recovery of narratives, post-critiqueFootnote ³² and Martti Koskenniemi’s culture of formalism.Footnote ³³

The Epistemology of the Secret concludes with a brief ‘Notebook’ in which hopes, anxieties, fears, interrogations, and angers are listed. They bring us back to the hope that international law constitutes for the world, notwithstanding what has been said so far. As mentioned in the beginning, d’Aspremont’s project in the book seems to be the rescue of doctrinal international law when considered as channel of justice and honesty (perhaps?). Thus, rather than killing sacred cows, the book does not take the project of international law solemnly. However, it places great importance in what international lawyers ought to do with international law. In this sense, The Epistemology of the Secret is at once a grave and somehow humorous book committed to the project of international law, despite all its failures. For this reason, its original approach and its erudition, it is a very welcomed contribution to international legal theory.