See Daniel Loick, Juridismus: Konturen einer kritischen Theorie des Rechts (Suhrkamp 2017).
Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Piper 2008), 946. Translated by the author. This sentence is missing in the English edition of Arendt’s book.
Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconsciousness: Trials and Traumas in the 20th Century (Harvard University Press 2002), 162.
Felman, Juridical Unconsciousness, 153.
Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” trans. John Mepham, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (Pantheon Books 1980), 4.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 12.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 12.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 2.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 9.
Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done With Judgment,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Essays Critical and Clinical (Verso 1998), 128.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 9.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 9.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 32.
On this, see Pascal Marichalar, Gerald Markowitz, and David Rosner, “Sartre as Prosecutor of Occupational Murder: Notes from a People’s Tribunal in a French Mine (1970),” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 99 (2021).
Cornelia Vismann, Medien der Rechtsprechung (Fischer 2011), 146–83.
Foucault, “On Popular Justice,” 34.
Cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Harvard University Press 1991), 247.
See tribunal’s website →.
For an extensive description of the NSU tribunals, see Madlyn Sauer, Wir klagen an! NSU-Tribunale als Praxis zwischen Kunst, Recht und Politik (Unrast, 2022).
It is noteworthy that this form of prosecution is also based on non-police-based forms of investigation. Tribunal NSU-Komplex Auflösen commissioned the British group Forensic Architecture to investigate the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel in 2006. In its work, Forensic Architecture arrived at results that, contrary to the official version, strongly suggest the involvement of Andreas Temme, a member of the Hessian Secret Service (Verfassungsschutz). See the final report, 77sqm_9:26min →.
Lückenlos e.V., Tribunale NSU Komplex auflösen (self-published 2020), 77. Translated by the author.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Routledge 1973), 287. Translation slightly modified.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 286.
Lückenlos e.V., Tribunale NSU Komplex auflösen, 293.
This text is based on a talk given at the Symposium “Tribunalism: The Case for Art,” organized by Susanne Leeb and Clemens Krümmel at the University of Lüneburg in November 2021. A longer German version will appear in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft later this year. I owe many insights to the work of Susanne Leeb, Madlyn Sauer, and Ludger Schwarte.