Spectacles and Specters

Başak Ertür is a critical legal scholar based at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

• Preface ixIntroduction 1Performativity and Performance • Performativity and Errancy • Rethinking the Politics of Trials • Law and Violence: An Oblique AddressPART I: A PERFORMATIVE THEORY OF POLITICAL TRIALS1 Theorizing Political Trials 21Kirchheimer: 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 Violence2 The Form and Substance of Doing Justice: Law, Performativity, Performance 52Not a Profound Word • Law and Performativity • Masquerade and Fate •The Trial: Performativity and Performance3 Sovereign Infelicities 76Three Scenes • Sovereign Spectacles • Sovereign Performatives? •(Mis)Reading the Performative as Performance • Derrida's Austin: Sovereign Pretensions • Performing the (Structural) Unconscious • Undoing SovereigntyPART II: TRACING THE SPECTERS IN THE SPECTACLES4 Ghosts in the Courtroom: The Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian 103Talat • Tehlirian • Enter Ghost • The Telegrams • The Haunted Hunter •The Many Lives of Tehlirian • The Politics of Haunting5 Spectral Legacies: Legal Aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide 131Legal Returns • Atemporal Histories of Terror • Process unto Oblivion •"Genocide" as Counter-Memory6 Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide before the European Court of Human Rights 156The Envoy • The Judge, The Historian, and the Politician • Judging the Presence of the PastConclusion 175Acknowledgments 187Notes 191Index 223