Spectacles and Specters

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