Juridical Unconscious

Shoshana Felman is the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her books include Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History.

I have always been an unconditional admirer of Shoshana Felman's critical writing. I don't recall ever having read a flat or flabby paragraph from her pen; rather, she hones her writing so perfectly that it enables her to make the most sensitive arguments in the strongest and clearest way. Her interest has always been in the coming to expression, under various names (madness, woman, trauma…) of what she here ends up calling, after Walter Benjamin, the "expressionless." In that respect her new book, as firmly and subtly written and as absorbing as her previous ones, forms something of a "capstone" to her work. She turns here to trials, and specifically to trials that are perceived as historic; such trials, she argues, are in a complex relation to collective traumas that they partially serve to contain and even silence, but which can also emerge from invisibility in them, sometimes transforming the law itself in the process.

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Storyteller's Silence: Walter Benjamin's Dilemma of Justice 2. Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the O. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata 3. Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust 4. A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law Abbreviations Notes Index