Grimaces and Pursed Lips: Remarks on the judicial ritualization-Pascal, Wittgenstein

This paper aims at clarifying our use of a metaphor family often surrounding the trial (ritualization, dramatization, performance, religious-type ceremony), and supports the idea that the notion of a judicial ritualization expresses the praiseworthy intention to allow time and occasions to the penal international justice - such occasions having no predetermined goal, however, though they make it possible for a variety of emotions to manifest themselves. This article is grounded on a comparison between Pascal's Pensees (Thoughts) and Lettres provinciales (Provincial letters) on the one hand, and Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden bough and his Lessons on religious belief on the other. In an effort to explain our tendency to put the trial in various contexts, it interrogates the kind of knowledge that leads us to form the very idea of a judicial ritualization.