Paper short abstract:

Troubling clear distinctions revenge and oppositional politics, between agency and haunting, this paper engages in a speculative reading of the Tehlirian trial as an archive that holds in tension genocide recognition, legal definitions of sovereignty, and moral and political testimony.

Paper long abstract:

Tehlirian, whose family had perished in the Armenian Genocide in 1915, was tried in a Berlin court in 1921 for killing Talaat, Ottoman official and architect of the genocide. The verdict that led to Tehlirian's acquittal was based on expert testimony that diagnosed his condition as "psychological epilepsy," marked by recurrent visions of his dead mother who summoned him to avenge the family. Although the German court disavowed any judgement on the state-led mass murder of Ottoman Armenians, the trial turned into an international platform for exposing genocidal violence. But if Tehlirian was perceived by Hannah Arendt as a righteous avenger, he would also subsequently be revealed as an assassin appointed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and a "false" witness who had not in fact seen the killings first hand.

Complicating clear-cut distinctions between between personal lie and collective truth, revenge and oppositional politics, agency and haunting, the medical discourse of insanity and the legal discourse of intentionality, this paper engages in a speculative reading of the Tehlirian trial as a transnational archive that holds in tension genocide recognition, legal definitions of sovereignty, and moral and political testimony. I do so by taking seriously the ghost as a presence in the courtroom. Attending to the epistemological, political and legal work the ghost of Tehlirian's mother did throughout the trial troubles romanticized notions of resistance, and beckons us towards a new political imagination at the fraught intersections of personal suffering and collective justice, melancholy and revenge, haunting and political strategy.