This chapter spells out the notion of the espistemology of the secret. It unpacks the two main components of the epistemology of the secret of international law: the necessary presence of hidden, unknown, invisible content in the texts, practices, actors, effects, representations, past, etc. of international law (what is called in this book the necessity of secret content) and the necessity for international lawyers to reveal such hidden, unknown, invisible content (what is called in this book the necessity of revelation). The chapter distinguishes the epistemology of the secret of international law from the hermeneutics of suspicion, the idea of an ideology of secretism and the idea of an economy of secrets.

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.