• Corpus ID: 141781754

Spectacles and spectres : political trials, performativity and scenes of sovereignty

@inproceedings{Ertr2015SpectaclesAS,
  title={Spectacles and spectres : political trials, performativity and scenes of sovereignty},
  author={Başak Ert{\"u}r},
  year={2015}
}

• Başak Ertür
• Published 2015
• Law

Political trials are generally understood as extraordinary events in the life of liberal
democracies, dramatically staging claims to and contests over political authority
and legitimacy. Notably, political trials often attract commentary on their theatrics
whereby the spectacle becomes a matter of uneasy scrutiny, despite the tacit crosscultural
acknowledgment that the trial is an inherently theatrical form. This thesis is
an attempt to conceptualise the political operations and effects of the relation
between performance and performativity in trials, treating these as separate but
related terms. It proposes a new framework for studying political trials by drawing
on theories of performativity (J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Shoshana
Felman, Stanley Cavell) which assist not only in rethinking the role and effects of
performance in trials, but also in introducing a multivalence to the meaning of
‘political’ in political trials. In other words, performative theory allows the
formulation of the politics of trials beyond its standard conception in terms of the
utilisation of legal procedure for political ends or expediency, instead attuning us to
the unconscious processes, inadvertent gestures, ghostly operations, structural
infelicities and other similar dynamics that recast the political effects of legal
proceedings. This thesis is therefore an attempt to conceptualise the spectacles and
spectres of justice at the intersection of law and politics. In addition to
incorporating brief discussions of various 20th and 21st century political trials to
develop this theoretical framework, it offers close studies of three cases: the 1921
Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, and two contemporary ‘deep state’ trials from
Turkey – the Ergenekon trial, and the Hrant Dink murder trial. A sustained concern
is with legacies of political violence, how they are addressed or contained by law,
and how they are perpetuated by law.