About The Workshop
SW 93-Crisis of Normativity and Experience of Law
Convenor: Natalia Satokhina
Contact: nataliasatokhina@gmail.com
Perhaps every generation experiences its contemporary situation as a crisis – a crisis of everything that came before, a crisis of previous values. However, it seems that we are dealing not only with a crisis of values, but also with a crisis of normativity as such, as an aspect of experience, and in this sense – with a crisis of humanity. Today, no one is surprised by calls to abandon the illusion of a rules-based order. We all understand perfectly well what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was talking about in Davos in January 2026. Factuality increasingly nullifies what international law, constitutions, and ultimately reason and common sense tell us. As a result, they cease to be our guideposts.
The crisis of normativity as a crisis of experience manifests itself in the shift in the balance between normativity and facticity of our being in the world: gradually losing the normative dimension of experience, we increasingly find ourselves in captivity of factuality. As Hannah Arendt accurately puts it, it is about the bankruptcy of common sense in the modern world, where the most commonly accepted ideas have been attacked, refuted, surprised and dissolved by facts. Thus, the noise of hypersonic missiles is more than enough to silence the voice of international law.
Law that is by definition characterized by a claim to significance is particularly sensitive to such a “tyranny of facts.” The legal, based on the idea of norm, is supplanted by the political, based on power, which subordinates an ought and actually replaces it. This is especially evident for those who experience war as the collapse of normativity and the quintessence of factuality.
At a glance, there is no longer any room for law here, which is being replaced by a permanent state of exception. Does law still make any sense? Or are we witnessing the end of a long history of law? It seems that phenomenological optics become surprisingly illuminating here: when all institutions are powerless and all conventions are destroyed, the aspect of human experience that we call the experience of law finally becomes visible. The question is whether the experience of law is still an integral part of human experience, whether it ever was, and how the crisis of normativity affects our answer to this question.
The workshop aims to exchange views on the nature of the current loss of normativity and its consequences for law as an aspect of experience.
Possible (but not exclusive) lines of thought:
* What is the reason for the imbalance between normativity and facticity as aspects of our experience and the general crisis of normativity that we are witnessing today?
* Is this transformation of experience irreversible? And what are its implications for law?
* Has the world legal order become a permanent state of exception, in which Hobbesian autoritas, non veritas facit legem is now fully embodied? And is it possible to return from this state to law?
* Are international law and law as such capable of supporting the normative dimension of experience in the face of a global crisis of normativity?
* Shouldn’t we reconsider our ideas about normativity and law today?
