A primary purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate Professor P. Singh’s Article, “Colonised’s Madness, Colonisers’Modernity and International Law: Mythological Materialism in the East-West Telos”published in Volume 3, Number 1 of the Journal of East Asia and International Law. In his article, Singh attempted to overlap various conceptions of modernity taken from a wide range of academic disciplines, and experimentally collapse them into one with a post-colonial point of view. In spite of incomplete argumentation and obscurity in the conceptual formulation, I found his original ideas on the internal connection of modernity with the operating mode of international law to be highly impressive. The most critical point against him was the firm and stereotypical dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized without any potentiality of sublating the state of colonization, that is, disconnecting the colonizers with their colony and liberating the colonized from their colony. By such sublation (Aufheben) of the existing oppressive relation between the colonizers and the colonized, we can plan to build a new world of peaceful coexistence between the colonizers and the colonized of the past. But although Singh’s conception of modernity is dangerously one-sided, I expect his further research to penetrate into the deep life-reality of the Indian subaltern, which would make a great contribution to the establishment of the new vision of international law in this global society.

This monograph takes on“ modern art”as the location of modernity. This subject, in my view, holds potential for a productive multi-logue and not just a dialogue, between three binary socio-cultural categories: child and adult, normal and mad, and colonisers and colonised. Modern art raises very interesting questions, and as an area that is often ignored in the analysis of law and science, it forms a powerful field for exploring both, as well as their intersections. Exploring the psychology of colonisation/domination is an important objective of this monograph. In order to get at it, the monograph imbibes Appadurai, Foucault, and Nandy as offering complementary stances on modernity and subsequent globalisation of intra- European relations after the industrial revolution. In doing so the author relates aspects of semiotic theory by looking at theories of myth. This monograph concludes by applying their relevance to the strategy of signification deployed by international law and relations.