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30 L. & Critique 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq30 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique (2019) 30:1-20 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/s10978-019-09237-8 Law of Denial Bagak Ertr Published online: 23 January 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract Law's claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and espe- cially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durdes of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are inter- nal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Peringek v Switzer- land, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Peringek case concerned Switzerland's criminali- sation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after produc- ing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of 'history' and 'historians' in these two judgments, and paying attention to the defer- rals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law's relation to history. This close read- ing offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law's understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-a-vis the task of histori- ography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial. Keywords Armenian genocide - Denialism - Memory laws - Peringek v Switzerland E Basak Ertdr b.ertur@bbk.ac.uk School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK I_) Springer

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