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Legal Violence and Its Unacknowledged Terrain in Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court
A critical take on the film, Court, with respect to the legal discourse through which it weaves its narrative of the failure of legal activism. The film is critiqued through a particular branch of critical legal scholarship that associates the activities of the lawyer or legal activist with that of the translator or the interpreter. As activities pertaining to justice and the survival of human beings, acts of misreading and mistranslation are therefore not innocent or incidental to the legal process or legal activism.
An animal can be made to suffer, but we would never say, in a sense considered proper, that it is a wronged subject, the victim of a crime, of a murder, of a rape or a theft, of a perjury-and this is true a fortiori, we think, for what we call vegetable or mineral or intermediate species like the sponge. There have been, there are still, many “subjects” among mankind who are not recognized as subjects and who receive this animal treatment.
“Force of Law” (Derrida 2002: 246)
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