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SUMMARY:Doing Justice: Trials\, Performance\, Law - Speaker to be confirme
 d
DTSTART:20170306T170000Z
DTEND:20170306T190000Z
UID:TALK71415@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:35134
DESCRIPTION:Doing Justice: Trials\, Performance\, Law\n6th March 2017\, 5-
 7pm\, CRASSH\n\nBaşak Ertür (Birkbeck College)\nMayur Suresh (SOAS)\n\nT
 his seminar will address the relationship between performance and performa
 tivity in trials and affective quality of legal language.\n\nAbstracts:\n\
 nVoice beyond a concept: Law as Opera\nMayur Suresh\n\nHow might one re-im
 agine the staging of a trial? In this presentation I would like to think o
 f the trial as an operatic performance. To do so\, one needs to consider t
 he relationship between voice and legal language.\n\nThis presentation loo
 ks at some letters that I encountered during my fieldwork of terrorism tri
 als in Delhi. Written in the course of brutal and grinding trials\, these 
 ubiquitous\, relentless epistles ranged from accusing the police of tortur
 e\, to asking the judge for a small favour\, to asking the deputy Prime Mi
 nister to let an accused-terrorist out on bail. These letters\, written ov
 er and over again\, rarely\, if ever\, met with a reply. Why then\, did th
 e authors of these letters write them endlessly?\n\nPart of the answer lie
 s in being attentive to the quality of the voice of the letters. There is 
 something in their pitch\, tone and volume that goes beyond the idea of de
 mand\, persuasion and claim making. The endless\, repetitive nature of the
 se letters points to a more tragic place – almost as their authors are c
 ondemned to perpetually re-inhabit the site of their pain. I think of thes
 e forms of writing as a mode of inhabiting the world through acts of mourn
 ing - not only for the injustices of the past\, but also for futures that 
 have been lost. At the same time\, there is an affective quality to the le
 tters that is beyond the meaning that they seek convey. In their attempt t
 o express an inexpressible pain\, their voice becomes intensely compelling
 . Cast out into the world\, legal language here takes on\, not a deadened 
 quality\, but an amplified one. Soon\, legal language comes to resemble an
  operatic score.\n\nMayur Suresh is a lecturer in law at the School of Ori
 ental and African Studies\, University of London. His research revolves ar
 ound anthropological approaches to legal trials.\n---\n\nSovereign Infelic
 ities: Performativity\, Performance and the Political Trial\nBaşak Ertür
 \n\nThis paper is an attempt to think beyond the currently dominant analys
 es of political trials that view them either as the spectacular instrument
 alisation of legal procedure for political expediency\, or as the mass ped
 agogical means to consensus and closure in the aftermath of atrocity. It d
 raws on theories of performativity (J. L. Austin\, Jacques Derrida\, Judit
 h Butler and Shoshana Felman) to rethink the relationship between performa
 nce and performativity as it unfolds in a trial. The philosophical idiom o
 f performativity proves felicitous both for rethinking the role of perform
 ance in trials\, and for understanding the various ways in which violence 
 is addressed\, negotiated\, re-enacted\, transformed\, and perpetuated thr
 ough legal proceedings. Against readings that approach the political trial
  as a scene of mastery\, that is\, either as the stage of clashing soverei
 gn wills and intentions\, or as the site of therapeutic working through an
 d a route to closure\, a performative account allows us to avoid such over
 determinations of the political. Instead\, it sharpens our awareness as to
  how law's structural unconscious may play out in a trial\, and how embodi
 ed practices bring fears\, desires\, anxieties\, fantasies\, projections\,
  fetishes into the scene of the trial to unsettle and recast the political
 .\n\nBaşak Ertür is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck\, Univer
 sity of London and fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference
 \, Columbia University. Her current research and recent publications focus
 es on political trials\, theories of performativity\, political violence\,
  memory\, and the deep state.\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/events/128428427
 1660768/\nhttp://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27066
LOCATION: Room SG1\, Alison Richard Building\, Sidgwick Site\, 7 West Road
 \, Cambridge\, CB3 9DT
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