Spectacles and Specters
A Performative Theory of Political Trials
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WINNER, SLSA SOCIO-LEGAL THEORY AND HISTORY PRIZE
SHORTLISTED, THE HART-SLSA BOOK PRIZE
Spectacles and Specters draws on theories of performativity to conceptualize the entanglements of law and political violence, offering a radical departure from accounts that consider political trials as instrumental in exercising or containing political violence. Legal scholar Başak Ertür argues instead that making sense of the often incalculable interpenetrations of law, politics, and violence in trials requires shifting the focus away from law’s instrumentality to its performativity.
Ertür develops a theory of political trials by reconstructing and building on a legacy of critical thought on Nuremberg in close engagement with theories of performativity. She then offers original case studies that introduce a new perspective by looking beyond the Holocaust trials, to the Armenian genocide and its fragmentary legal aftermaths. These cases include the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, the 2007-21 Hrant Dink Murder Trial, and the 2015 case before the European Court of Human Rights concerning the denial of the Armenian genocide.
Enabling us to capture the various modalities in which the political emerges in, through and in relation to legal forms on the stage of the trial, this focus on law’s performativity also allows us to account for how sovereign schemes can misfire and how trials can come to have unintended political lives and afterlives. Further, it reveals how law is entangled with and perpetuates certain histories of violence, rather than simply ever mastering these histories or providing closure.
Spectacles and Specters is a superior achievement in the application of critical theory to law and politics. Ertür’s grasp and deft engagement with political and legal theory surrounding the received (largely liberal) idea of political trials provides precisely the right framework to situate her novel conceptualization, centered as it is on both the generative character of law’s performativity and the performative failures, contradictions, and excesses of law that produce unintended political effects.---Aslı Ü. Bâli, Professor, UCLA School of Law
Offering an exquisite and impressive weave of theory, legal history, trial drama, and political storytelling, Spectacles and Specters is a highly nuanced critical legal study of the modern political trial. Grounded in a set of detailed readings of several trials concerning the 1915 Armenian genocide, the book displaces Nuremberg as the model of the modern political trial and offers a sophisticated theorization of the performativity of the law and state sovereignty.---Avery Gordon, author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins
Ertür provides incredibly rich jurisprudential readings of this series of trials that document a
---Law & Society Review
continual struggle over the historical record, the question of who can establish the history that
rulings should be based upon, collective memory, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust in relation to
the jurisprudence of genocide. This book provides insights to anyone interested in the relation
between law and politics, and a riveting introduction to the issues surrounding the Armenian
genocide to those who are less familiar with this event.
Preface | ix
Introduction | 1
Performativity and Performance • Performativity and Errancy • Rethinking the Politics of Trials •
Law and Violence: An Oblique Address
PART I: A PERFORMATIVE THEORY OF POLITICAL TRIALS
1 Theorizing Political Trials | 21
Kirchheimer: Setting the Parameters • Judgment on Nuremberg •
Arendt: A Trial of One’s Own? • The Breach That Speaks the Bind •
Shklar: “There’s Politics and Politics” • Between Atrocity and Legal Violence
2 The Form and Substance of Doing Justice: Law, Performativity, Performance | 52
Not a Profound Word • Law and Performativity • Masquerade and Fate •
The Trial: Performativity and Performance
3 Sovereign Infelicities | 76
Three Scenes • Sovereign Spectacles • Sovereign Performatives? •
(Mis)Reading the Performative as Performance • Derrida’s Austin: Sovereign Pretensions •
Performing the (Structural) Unconscious • Undoing Sovereignty
PART II: TRACING THE SPECTERS IN THE SPECTACLES
4 Ghosts in the Courtroom: The Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian | 103
Talat • Tehlirian • Enter Ghost • The Telegrams • The Haunted Hunter •
The Many Lives of Tehlirian • The Politics of Haunting
5 Spectral Legacies: Legal Aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide | 131
Legal Returns • Atemporal Histories of Terror • Process unto Oblivion •
“Genocide” as Counter-Memory
6 Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide before the European Court of Human Rights | 156
The Envoy • The Judge, The Historian, and the Politician • Judging the Presence of the Past
Conclusion | 175
Acknowledgments | 187
Notes | 191
Index | 223
