Sovereign Infelicities

This chapter teases out the implications of performative theory for a critique of sovereignty in approaching the so-called “sovereign spectacle” of political trials. The idiom of performativity complicates the scene of sovereign agency through its emphasis on iterability (or conventionality) and performance (or embodied practice). These are two necessary conditions of performativity that undermine the idealized attributes of sovereign agency such as absolute presence, unfettered intentionality, felicitous willing, and transitivity. This particular orientation is reworked for a practice of reading the politics of trials, to propose that a performative perspective allows the conceptualization of the “political” in political trials beyond its overdetermination in terms of expedient instrumentality or sovereign agency, that is, beyond its intentional and willed status, instead revealing the subtler, unintentional, accidental, spectral, unconscious ways in which the sovereign spectacle can unravel in a trial. The chapter begins and ends with three scenes from three different political trials: the 1969–70 Chicago Conspiracy Trial in the United States, Saddam Hussain’s 2005 Dujail trial at the Iraqi Special Tribunal, and the 2010 trial of student protesters Alfie Meadows and Zak King.