ABSTRACT
The thread running through this essay is that private international law (the conflict of laws) can serve heuristically to underscore two opposing models of legal ordering. Such a prism is helpful if we want to rethink (as we must!) our late modern legality’s deep epistemological settings in the shadow of the ‘catastrophic times’ to come, whether in terms of environmental devastation or political dislocation. The latter are profoundly linked and indeed constitute the two faces of alterity, natural and cultural, from which modernity has taught us progressively to distance ourselves. Importantly, law encodes the conditions that produce these dual somatic symptoms in our contemporary societies. This chasm produced humanity’s ‘ontological privilege’ over our natural surroundings and a similar claim of superiority of modern (Western) worldviews over the ‘rest’. In this respect, the main achievement of the moderns, as Bruno Latour wryly observed, has been to universalise the collective cecity and amnesia that allow our ‘anthropocentric machine’ to hurtle on regardless, devastating life in its path and devouring the very resources it needs to survive.
