Postdramatic legal theatres: space, body, media and genre

Abstract

In analyses of four case studies – the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Hague Yi Jun Peace Museum, the trial of Lucia de Berk, and the French ‘Contaminated Blood Affair,’ – the dissertation shows that new forms of spatiality, corporeality, media and genre are currently breaking open, undermining and renewing the existing legal order. Scholars in the field of Law and Culture have always conceptualized law as a theatrical affair in terms of the logic of drama, a form that consolidates the legitimacy of the existing legal order. In recent years, scholars, lawyers and citizens have also been taking note of a legitimacy crisis that confronts legal institutions in our time. The dissertation argues that this crisis becomes apparent in a close reading of the forms law’s theatricality currently takes, as legal institutions are increasingly confronted with, or permeated by, a theatrical logic that theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann called the ‘postdramatic’. This is celebrated on the one hand, because of the political possibilities that might arise out of these confrontations. On the other hand, cultural responses to these legal events also make apparent a revaluation of dramatic forms. The thesis is an exercise in reading law ‘with’ artworks.