Ghosts in the Courtroom

This chapter offers a close study of the fascinating 1921 Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian—an Armenian survivor of the 1915 genocide—who assassinated Talât Pasha, the Ottoman statesman widely seen as the architect of the genocide. In Tehlirian’s trial, the political transpired as a shared state of haunting following the defendant’s introduction of the figure of a ghost, namely, the apparition of his mother who had perished in the genocide, and who, the defendant claimed, ordered him to kill Talât. The invocation of this singular ghost brought many other ghosts into the courtroom, haunting the trial in myriad ways. The chapter traces the signs of this collective state of haunting through a careful reading of the transcript. The chapter argues that the effect of the ghost in Tehlirian’s trial was to give form to the impossible recognition of that which would later be termed genocide. Tehlirian’s trial shows how performatives do not require self-presence in order to be felicitous; how the inadvertent, the ghostly, and the speculative come to inhabit legal forms; and how the political can assume spectral agency in law.