The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (review)

Shoshana Felman's The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century is an exceptionally daring contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of critical legal theory, literary theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. Felman's book revolves around an analysis of two of the most celebrated trials of the twentieth century—the trial of Adolph Eichmann for Nazi crimes in Jerusalem in 1961 and the trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles in 1995—and shows how they bring to the fore, in a way that is paradigmatic of the twentieth century, the hidden link between trauma and law. Felman argues with great force that these trials (two of the so-called "trials of the century") are not merely legal procedures but also critical legal events. Indeed, as Felman shows, both legal cases quickly become examples of something that exceeds "a simple litigation or a simple controversy over legal issues": because they dramatically articulate the relation between trauma and law, the Eichmann and the Simpson trials turn into "veritable theaters of justice" (4).

What characterizes these trial-events, the book contends, is the way in which they stage a crisis in the law. In both the Eichmann and Simpson trials, the law is implicated in processes that are either unavailable to consciousness or to which consciousness remains purposely blind. In the case of Eichmann, the law must respond to claims "that go far beyond the simple and cognitive need to decide about Eichmann's individual guilt or innocence" (4). In the Eichmann trial, the law is asked not only to judge the entire history of the Nazi persecution and destruction of the European Jews, it is also summoned to act in response to the historical trauma of the Holocaust. In the case of O. J. Simpson, the law, which was supposed to judge an individual criminal case, is called upon to arbitrate between two competing collective traumas: the trauma of domestic abuse, on the side of the prosecution, and the trauma of being black in America, on the side of the defense. Felman shows how, in both the Eichmann and Simpson trials, an unassimilated traumatic history, a history that insidiously intrudes upon the proceedings, literally prevents the law from translating the cases before the court into "legal-conscious terminology" (5).

In both cases, the law strives to contain the trauma but fails to remain safely outside it. In the encounter with trauma, Felman proposes, both the Eichmann and Simpson trials cannot help but repeat, and unwittingly reproduce, the very structures of the trauma they are attempting to heal. In the case of Eichmann, the Holocaust survivor K-Zetnik unexpectedly faints on the stand when he tries to testify to the terrifying moment of selection at Auschwitz. He collapses, argues Felman, because he is re-traumatized by the legal proceedings themselves. The call to order of the judge who instructs the witness to obey—i.e. strictly to answer questions and to follow legal rules—is heard by K-Zetnik "not as an utterance originating from the present of the courtroom situation but as . . . an intrusive threat articulated right out of the violence of the traumatic scene that is replaying in K-Zetnik's mind" (146). This drama of unintentional re-traumatization, triggered by a legal repetition of the trauma that it puts on trial, remains the most memorable moment of the Eichmann trial, according to Felman, because it acts out the very trauma to which it is trying to put an end. Thus, what we are left with is not simply a witness who collapses on the stand but another lifeless, Jewish body. The "juridical unconscious" is precisely Felman's name for this unknowing and unintentional reenactment of trauma as perpetrated by the law in its very effort to right the injuries and injustices of history.

In the case of O. J. Simpson, the trial not only recalls the trauma of race...