Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo by Yasco Horsman (review)

In Theaters of Justice, Yasco Horsman offers close readings of works by Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Delbo, and Bertold Brecht. Thankfully, he also does more than this: he weaves these close readings into a narrative investigation of questions of justice, our relationship to past atrocities, and the possibilities for facing and working through these pasts. Horsman identifies his central questions as: “What, indeed, are the relations among the staging, judging, and working through of the past? To what extent does judging the past facilitate what Adorno calls a ‘serious working through of the past’?” (134).

For those who might wearily expect a conclusion that shows how the texts under consideration do, in fact, help us face and work through the past, there is more to interest. Horsman suggests that “rather than providing a cathartic moment of liberation from the past, [the works of Arendt, Delbo, and Brecht] dramatize how the past cannot be overcome” (139). Further he argues that “each revolve[s] around stumbling blocks to closure in legal (closing a case), therapeutic (finding healing), and pedagogical (reaching a synthetic, positive understanding) senses, which are interminably deferred” (139). And yet, Horsman doesn’t simply proclaim the impossibility of closure either. He resists the ease of claiming either closure or its impossibility—and explores what possibilities there are in between these two extremes.

At first glance, the texts under consideration seem to be widely disparate, and yet Horsman draws their connections well, even elegantly at times. The phrase “theaters of justice” is the lens Horsman uses to explore the performative, didactic, and therapeutic aspects of trials and the potential of drama to engage in questions of guilt, responsibility, judgment, and the like. He looks at how groups of people—whether they be nations, mothers, comrades, or courtroom observers—confront, stage, and/or remember a traumatic past, most particularly the Holocaust here but also the disappeared in Argentina, the Stalinist trials, and the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Concerned with how collectivities can work through pasts they may be tempted to repress, he argues for “literature’s ability to ask for justice in ways that are not available to judges and lawyers and to go beyond the socially important task of providing closure” (12).

The book contains two chapters on Arendt, a short chapter on Delbo, and a long one on Brecht. The first Arendt chapter provocatively looks at Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as a comedy. There are times when Horsman’s interpretive hand seems too heavy, or the theatrical lens seems too constraining, as when he describes her response as “roaring laughter” (17) or “uproarious laughter” (34) or suggests that Eichmann in Jerusalem is written in a “light-hearted” tone. The second Arendt chapter seems less related to the themes of the book until its two-page conclusion, as it is more focused on the legal questions surrounding the trial than on the didactic, theatrical, and therapeutic themes that the rest of the book addresses. While Arendt scholars will have a number of points and interpretations to argue against, Horsman offers a provocative reading of Arendt’s text that opens up new avenues for discussion, bringing some welcome fresh air into Arendt studies. His focus on Arendt’s direct address to Eichmann as a reenactment of the trial itself, and what he calls a “literary supplement” to the trial, is particularly well done.

In the third chapter, Horsman reads two of Delbo’s poems on the Argentinean mothers of the desaparecidos as showing a “demand for justice for the dead [that] stems from somewhere beyond the law and [which] can perhaps not even be phrased in legal terms” (72). Again there are times when the interpretive focus seems a bit forced—for example, his search for extended meanings of “May” or of “the 23rd”—but Horsman is a good and provocative close reader...