"I am That I Am"--Signifying Text as Object and Action: The Semiotic Underbelly of International Court of Justice in Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (No. 2025/36; 23 July 2025)

 

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How does one approach the recent decision of the International Court of Justice in Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (No. 2025/36; 23 July 2025)? Most will, and quite correctly, seek meaning from its text; and from its text derive a sense in the way in which words embody and give form to authoritative belief in the ordering of things, and the role of humans and human collectives within it; text makes belief corporeal and builds its body from and by reference to other text.  

The highest court of the UN has issued a landmark “advisory opinion” stating that nations can be held legally accountable for their greenhouse-gas emissions. Recognising the “urgent and existential threat” facing the world, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that those harmed by human-caused climate change may be entitled to “reparations”. Their opinion largely rests on the application of existing international law, clarifying that climate “harms” can be clearly linked to major emitters and fossil-fuel producers. The case, which was triggered by a group of Pacific island students and championed by the government of Vanuatu, saw unprecedented levels of input from nations. In a unanimous decision issued on 23 July, the 15 judges on the ICJ concluded that the production and consumption of fossil fuels “may constitute an internationally wrongful act attributable to that state”. The opinion also says that limiting global warming to 1.5C should be considered the “primary temperature goal” for nations and, to achieve it, they are obliged to make “adequate contributions." (Carbon Brief see also Press Release of ICJ here and the focus on the logic of customary international law and the integrity of the sate system)

I  would leave internal and the niceties of of the logic and application of that international legal hermeneutics to others; as well the performance of the politics and power relations that may follow from it. Beyond the confines of its hermeneutics within its field of knowledge/authority, it may be possible to generalize the case as one (important) object critically important for the constitution of the human reality, one defined and constrained by the human in the reality it seeks to construct.  That construction, in some ways, may be far more significant than the peculiarities of this decision (as important as this decision may be in legal, social, and political terms). This short reflection intends to look behind the decision to try to understand why it is that the human community, or at least those members of that community that herd the rest of us, share a belief (backed by action) in the power of the decision and the authority of the text that drives it. 

Humans have had a long history with signification.  In that respect one ought to be mindful of the origins of the word/concept--its etymology from the Latin significare "to make signs, show by signs, point out, express; mean, signify; foreshadow, portend." Nothing is worth knowing if it is not worth signifying. And signifying is what, in the aggregate, constructs the world that humans make for themselves and call it the entirety of the universe worth knowing. In effect signification reminds us that the whole of the world is no larger than human ambition to signify it. 

Humans, however, do not merely read meaning into things that they wish to order. Humans also project meaning in and through all sorts of objects and events from out of which they might extract meaning not of the thing itself, but as transmitters of divine utterances--oracles of intention and consequences. And these transmitters can include all sorts of things--entrails of sacrificed animals, clouds, their own interactions and rituals attached to or through things or events--and text. 

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In the current stage of historical development, however, like in those that preceded it, signification carries with it the forms of its own corruption. This is a corruption that perverts, perhaps better put, inverts, the relationship between object and signification--that is between the object of meaning and meaning itself. When the thing/object is indistinguishable, merges with, its own meaning, then meaning itself becomes a thing. And since all things can be signified, one might put in motion (the temporal element is important) virtual video game of signification Pong. In a world in which things are signified, signification itself is something that can also be made meaningful. The signification of signification is thus both oracular and tautological. That tautology becomes excruciating in the face of text, and morphs into torture (in the sense evoked in Sophocles Oedipus Cycle) when text is itself either the object being signified or text is itself the signification of an act, an intent, a position, a consequence (here). 

 What We Say, What We Do, What We Mean

To alleviate the tedium of text, especially in a context of social relations once built on text and now abandoning it as the manifestation of the oracular and the real, seeks to shift the semiotic gaze from the text to its (1) production and (2) deployment; and (3) engagement with itself in, as, through, against, and from its textual objectification. There has always been an element of challenge to a semiotics of text, one grounded in its reduction to hermeneutics and thus no longer the semiotics of a thing but a post-semiotic engagement in thirdness. It is not so much that semiotics has ignored acts--the phenomenology of semiotics through the lens of Husserl has long suggested the intimacy of the tie, but that, as the authors suggest, in contemporary times that intimacy--that is the phenomenology of semiotics, has gotten away from us. It would perhaps have been useful to have a peek at the phenomenological element as well as such. As well one wonders whether it makes sense to entirely reduce semiotics to acts of interpretation (again its thirdness--of course the aspect of greatest interest to legal semiotics (though that is a pity worth rectifying someday). Detaching, text, and especially legal (normative) text, from its "objectivity" (its essence as an object but also as an object that acquires solidity only as a vessel conveying meaning of and for something else) in and as text, and perhaps, if only indirectly, permits consideration of the possibility of reviving textual signification through its phenomenology, through its experience of itself through performance, rituals, and other forms of manifestation of meaning, action, and consequence. 

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In considering the phenomenology of text, it might be interesting to start from the conceptual cages of text norms (both as language and as the a standard, pattern, or model within which it is possible to "read" text). That cage is also textual, where text that has come to be its own semiotic object (firstness) of worship among those intent on the curation of the cages of conception into structures that eventually produce the text/performativity of things (signified things-secondness) of rule of law and the like. Perhaps an engagement with norms as expectations, and expectations as the dialectics of action-judgment at the level of individuals transposed onto the parallel leveling of collectives might have added an interesting touch. The point is that there is something of an irony about a text that speaks to the liberation of norms and rules from text that itself strictly adheres to the power and hierarchies of authoritative textuality. That can't be helped but perhaps might be usefully acknowledged more directly.

One might be very much taken with the notion of the facticity of norms--and the alignment of facticity in acts rather than text, or in text as acts that then come to life in engagement or expression in and through not-text. Still it might have been fun to play a little with notions of "decision" and "will" (Niezsche's core idea holds about the Four Great Errors). At last one comes to the foundational element of "event" and "performance". That revolves around the nature of experience, events, performance, intention and the like. On the one hand it can be static that appears to focus on action as pictures--events captured in a moment of being that can then be savored at leisure--like in a paper. What happens if one applies a sort of calculus to events and their products? That is what if, as Broekman suggests--there are no events or performances only flows, signal? (here).

The crux of the matter is this: does it matter if the analytic focus is shifted from text object as signifying norm (or norms signified as text) to the signification of norm not as text but as the performance of text or around text and its experienced consequences? It may be true enough that a change of focus is healthy and necessary, but it may as well be true that what is far more powerful is, having refocused, to then engage in a quite fun exercise in aligning the two in the sort of dynamic inter-penetrative dialectic that then enriches (and changes) both. And even better, perhaps, how all of this then bends back to the cognitive cage we have constructed for law and its "rule" to better understand its generative semiotics--that is the foundational elements that the construct and constrain both text and performance (however one conceives of either and both in their (to turn to Luhmann for a second) structural coupling).

But there is always the danger of reductionist simplification and perhaps more dangerous, the logical and linear reductions that make it possible to "code" the analytical pathways and then to leave the field to generative modeling. It is not clear that the object is here is pointing one toward the triumph of simulacra, but there is that danger lurking beneath the surface of analysis. And always the danger of slipping into hermeneutics. Nonetheless, given the interactions between object and meaning, it may be necessary to sell whatever meaning is to be extracted within our great marketplace of semiosis, or rather perhaps, to produce a semiosis of authority from which it may be possible to think about meta-signification, the signification of the cages of cognition within which meaningfulness can be manifested--enough at least to contribute to the interior decorating of the conceptual cages of the enterprise of law. 

I am that I am (Exodus 3:14) . 

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The key here is in the dynamics of meaning as applied to objects from the outside (humans naming things and giving them meaning and purpose) and as inherent in the object itself (the "fact" of an object in itself). The first touches on faith, the belief in the essence of an object/action. The second touches on reason, the qualities of an object/action in themselves. The genesis of this dynamic between semiotics as a faith system and as a descriptive one is on the source of these efforts--the human. Cognition, and its ordering, then, is a function of and develops from out of the human on which it is centered and as a function of which t acquires order. Water has meaning in itself--the aggregation of a series of properties that is put into actin when water appears in a variety of environments. It is that it is (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎ (’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye) (Exodus 3:14). 

What humans do is to personalize that essence in a relational form by exporting themselves into everything else. That personification is made more powerful by the alignment of the human with the faith in the extra-humanity of that relational form. It is in this sense that humans tried to understand themselves as themselves but given form in the image of something greater. Faith is not external but always internalized int he person of those who frame it for their own kind (Exodus 3:11-12). The same impulse applies "downstream"--to the construction of intelligence in the form of objects that can generate their own universe of sense of themselves and as a result of their relationship to the things around them--relationships that acquire meaning only when signified in relation to themselves. Now one can understand not just the impulse to language and its connection to consciousness and ordering, but all systems of human relations, each of which also is created int he image of the foundational relationship of the core of meaning and its peripheries--consider in this light America First and the Chinese Belt & Road Initiatives. The impulse to create and order around a core and in the image of that core is irresistible.  

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 Is it necessary to signify? to have and give meaning of and for things that have meaning in themselves and that, in themselves are indifferent to the meanings with which they are dressed up by other object/forces (eg humans)? That question is banal; and irrelevant. The essential question--the quest--revolves around the forms and performances of meaning, the acts of faith that, imposed on the "reason" of an object, can give it form and function in relation to its creator. Faith in the creator--in this case the human--serves as the fundamental starting point for the constitution of the human in the ordering of the objects around them and in the way in which they are then set in motion. And that brings us back to text and performance, both in and out of time.  Text is both itself (it character as object; its facticity and reason) and also the faith that others invest in that object in the form of meaning, communication, expression, direction, and container of ideas, standards, etc.  These are also objects, but they are faith objects in the sense that they represent the end product of a process of transforming an object into something with meaning that can be used (an instrument or outcome) through acts of signification of the object. These then also become objects around which similar faith processes are erected. And with that erection and form these simple building blocks it is possible to build both a very human reality, and the collectives necessary to ensure that all humans are "on the same page" of text. Text, in this sense is both activated by and through performance but is also the essential element of ordering performance. It is, as its etymology suggests ("from past-participle stem of texere "to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build"") it is signified not in itself but through its construction, performance and conflict.  

 "I am that I am", then, becomes something far more complex where the object can be understood only in relation to those to whom that objectivity is projected. It is in that inter-action that the ideal--a faith in the essence of a thing, the qualities of which are inherent in it beyond its "thingness" becomes corrupted, not in a moral sense (that is the space within which one can approach corruption, but in a conceptual sense of spoiling something). The corruption is not in the thing itself--the text in a writing, or its performance as expressions of intent or objective. The corruption is in the matter of the faith in the thing and its qualities for which virtually everything else serves as an instrument--the sacrifice, the oracle, the science. . . . the hermeneutics.  It is from here that it is possible to understand both the faith and the reason within International Court of Justice in Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (No. 2025/36; 23 July 2025).