Law in drag: trials and legal performativity

1 One could hardly argue that law is a subject in subjection. [...] yet, in what follows, I will try to elaborate on the ways in which at least one kind of legal operation, the trial, is implicated in an interpellative process2 that destabilizes its own relation to state power, though neither fully nor innocently. [...] I will argue that the trial is a legal space ripe for critical analyses of identity formation, a place in which the norms that bring certain kinds of moral or moralized subjects into being are contested rather than assumed.