‘He Descends as the Representative of Humanity’: Tehlirian, Historical Truth and the Work of Trauma as Event

The trial and subsequent acquittal of Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921 has cast a hue of heroism on the man who assasinated Talaat Pasha, chief architect of the Armenian genocide. In her account of the Eichmann proceedings, Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of Tehlirian as a young avenger who restores general public order and the law, vindicates human rights and mets out justice by helping publicize atrocities suffered by his own people – all of which set against fantasies and yearnings of Armenians for their own State – flatly collapses humanity into national self-preservation: the rational, measured act of a man who “may share a sense of his own insignificance, and choose to play not for acquittal, but for truth and history” (Koskenniemi: 2002). Yet the act and its reception, as much as what Arendt called, following Kirchheimer, the trial’s “irreducible risk” (Arendt: 1963) – the unpredictable outcome – disrupt the grid of a calculated truth-seeking exercise of “free will” by compelling its inscription into an entirely different analytic register: one that Freud scholar Janine Altounian calls “traumatic transmission” to the genocide’s universal legatees (Altounian: 2005). No less an advocate for outlawing and criminalizing genocide than Raphael Lemkin recognized the ambivalence of invocations of pity and compassion as legitimation of conduct destructive of life in the name of humanity: part sentimentality, part threat. Lemkin oscillated between crediting Tehlirian for cooly upholding the “moral order of mankind” and bemoaning the deed as that of a man succumbing to passion and making himself the “self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind,” thus threatening justice (Power: 2002). I argue that reading the trial, and notions of pity, humanity and compassion laying at, and yet displacing, its authoritative foundation, as historical elements to be assimilated to the legal archive obscures the repression in the very performative act of Tehlirian’s acquittal of the many different levels at which and the different sentiments – empathy, compassion, anxiety, abnegation and revulsion – through which such an “event” is mobilized and produces meaning. For heirs of genocide survivors, at least, those most susceptible to translate their mourning in the technocratic idiom of human rights and criminal justice, transmission of Talaat’s “monstruous” deed to which Tehlirian’s vengeful act “passionately” speaks entails nothing short of the psychic collapse of those charged with its translation today: the necessary yet precarious work of connecting the delirium of the shattered past of genocide survivors to historical truth when all spaces and trans-subjective functions necessary to constituting meaning and historicizing the genocidal deed are obliterated. This analytical work entails, in turn, a displacement and re-signification in the genocide survivor heir’s psychic register of a space where the event (Tehlirian’s act) and the memory it has triggered (trauma) can be appropriated positively; in a vernacular the complexity of which international law, one of many languages producing as much as threatening order and justice and generating both a sense of ethical connection to (empathy) and alienation from fellow human beings, fails to measure up to.

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