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  • Introduction
  • Michael G. Levine (bio) and Bella Brodzki (bio)

"Will the twentieth century be most remembered for its mass atrocities?" the legal scholar Martha Minow asked in the late 1990s. Given the history of widespread massacres, of violence directed by governments against their own populations, of systematic rapes, torture, and terror that so defined the century and that, in their traumatic aftershocks, still define us today, how could this not be the case? Minow herself seems inclined toward such a view, providing a long list of these atrocities at the beginning of Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, only to add:

And yet, a century marked by human slaughter and torture, sadly, is not a unique century in human history. Perhaps more unusual than the facts of genocides and regimes of torture marking this era is the invention of new and distinctive legal forms of response. The capacity and limitations of these legal responses illuminate the hopes and commitments of individuals and societies seeking, above all, some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings.1

Thus, when Minow asks whether the twentieth century will be most remembered for its mass atrocities, she is asking us in weighing this question to consider as well the novel ways the law sought to respond to them, the ways it itself was renewed, reinvented, and, in the judgment of some, also severely compromised in its endeavors. Whatever the answer to Minow's question may be, it is clear that in the course of the twentieth century traumatic histories and juridical proceedings became more intimately related than ever before. So thoroughgoing were the changes in this relationship that it [End Page 273] is now not only possible but indeed necessary to see trauma—individual as well as social—as "the basic underlying reality of the law."2

The articles assembled in this special issue all seek to address this new relationship, often doing so in dialogue with Shoshana Felman's groundbreaking study, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Published in 2002, this work is described by one reviewer as "exceptionally daring" and is relevant to the present collection for a number of reasons: first and most simply, for the comprehensive definition of trauma it offers.3 "The word trauma," Felman explains,

means wound, especially one produced by sudden physical injury. The original use of the term derives from medicine; it has later been borrowed by psychoanalysis and by psychiatry to designate a blow to the self (and to the tissues of the mind), a shock that creates psychological split or rupture, an emotional injury that leaves lasting damage in the psyche. Psychological trauma occurs as a result of an overwhelming, uncontrollable and terrifying experience, usually a violent event or events or the prolonged exposure to such events. The emotional damage remains hidden, as though the person were unharmed. The scope of the symptoms manifests itself only belatedly, sometimes years and years later. The trigger of the symptoms is often an event that unconsciously reminds the subject of the original traumatic scene, and is thus lived as a repetition of the trauma. Trauma thus results in lifelong psychological liabilities, and continues to have delayed aftereffects throughout one's existence. Classic examples of traumatic catalysts include wars, concentration camp experiences, prison experiences, terrorism incidents, auto and industrial accidents, and childhood traumas such as incest or sexual and physical abuse. Classic examples of traumatic symptoms include anxiety (for signs of danger) or, conversely, numbness and depression; addictions, compulsive repetition—in thought, speech, or fantasy—of the traumatic situation, or, conversely, amnesia; and repetitive nightmares in which the traumatic event is reproduced.

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Second, her highly interdisciplinary approach draws on recent work in the fields of critical legal theory, literary theory, philosophy of law, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry and thereby raises provocative new questions about the relationship between trauma and the law. Of particular importance in this regard is the use she makes of the psychoanalytic notion of acting out, a notion that in turn informs her understanding of silence as something more than an absence of speech. Silence, for her, is first [End Page 274] and foremost a mute force, a dumb...

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