The Juridical Unconscious

“In this extraordinarily engaging and provocative study, paradoxically, the failure of the trial may indicate its ‘speaking power.’”—Harriet Murav, Comparative Literature Studies

“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.”—Ross Chambers, Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan