The victim’s address

This chapter explains the victim's address as a way of attending to representation as both a relation and a practice of subject formation and explores some of the places of international criminal justice (ICJ) and how victims have been represented therein. The linguistic practices that hold ICJ together involve both representation and performativity, and attending to these concepts enables a reading of the ways in which subjects emerge. The victim and ICJ communicate and are thereby in a relation of speaker and hearer. But before arriving there, a few words are needed on representation and performativity. The two trials are taken in scholarship on victims and ICJ to signify opposing poles of a spectrum in two fundamental ways. In contemporary scholarship about ICJ and the victim, the victim at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) is represented as an absent figure.