ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a reading of the Ergenekon case file as comprising an archive of the Turkish deep state, because it allows insight into the rationalities and passionate investments that culminate in the reification of the deep state. It deals with a consideration of a way of knowing the deep state beyond the limits of legal and conspiratorial imagination, an articulation that mobilises the legal archive for a counter-conspiracy against the conspiring case files. The conspiracy archives of the Ergenekon trial hide, rather than reveal, the truth unless one devises ways and means of deciphering them. Ergenekon is a sprawling criminal process that began in June 2007 with the police discovery of a cache of hand-grenades in a residential building in Istanbul. In the Ergenekon trial, this surplus is evident already in the criminal legal framing of the matter: the object of prosecution, the deep state, translates into criminal legal perception as a 'terrorist/criminal organisation'.
