Spectacles and Specters

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

Başak Ertür teaches at the School of Law, and co-directs the Centre for Law & the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.