This work looks at the 2009 Iranian show-trials through modern discourses of biopolitics, sovereignty, and history. I argue that, understood as a theatrical phenomenon, the show trials are situated within the Foucauldian mode of biopower. The latter entails a shift from a politics of death to the preservation of the bios. The show-trials also perform a particularly modern narrative of state sovereignty and teleological history. To consider them in this way requires a rethinking of Michel Foucault’s theory so as to include juridico-philosophical discourse within a biopolitical framework. I propose that, as a performative act, the confessions transform the very thing they are confessing. Through the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jacque Derrida, I argue that the confessions make possible a reconceptualization of the political space of sovereignty as simulacrum and that of the political time of history as hauntology. / Graduate

This diploma thesis deals with the theatricality of Milada Horáková and company trial and its theatrical reflections. In this thesis, the political trial is regarded as an ideological fiction on the grounds of the ritual and theatrical character. The dramas, which are inspired with this trial, are interpreted in the following chapters. First of them, it deals with Pařeniště by E. F. Burian in the context of the socialist realism, which was put on the stage in a short time after this trial. It paid attention to re-putting on the stage in 2008 as well. The last part of this thesis deals with contemporary productions, which are inspired with this trial (Horáková, Gottwald by Karel Steigerwald and opera Tomorrow will... by Aleš Březina and Jiří Nekvasil), which depict absurdity and bizzare atmosphere of this trial.