Literary Justice?: Poems from Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp

In the introduction to her groundbreaking book The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Shoshana Felman writes that "as a pattern inherited from the great catastrophes and the collective traumas of the twentieth century, the promised exercise of legal justice—of justice by trial and by law—has become civilization's most appropriate and most essential, most ultimately meaningful response to the violence that wounds it."¹ To these lines, Felman adds an explanatory note:

These pages were written in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11; the United States had just entered into a military war on terrorism whose ultimate historical developments and judicial consequences cannot be predicted or foreseen with total certainty or with a total clarity of moral vision. My point here is not political but analytical. Whatever the political and moral consequences, it is significant that the idea of justice by trial and by law was immediately envisioned and articulated as America's promised reply, and as Western civilization's most significant and most meaningful response precisely to the loss of meaning and the disempowerment occasioned by the trauma.²

The "promised exercise of legal justice" is thus, as a "pattern," civilization's "most ultimately meaningful response" to trauma.

However, within the actualizations of this promise, Felman asserts, something arises that calls for a different kind of testimony, a call to which literature responds. How does literature, Felman asks, do "justice to the trauma in a way the law does not, or cannot?" In her most sweeping answer to this question, she writes: "Literature is a dimension of concrete embodiment and a language of infinitude that, in contrast to the language of the law, encapsulates not closure but precisely what in a given legal case refuses to be closed and cannot be closed. It is to this refusal of the trauma to be closed that literature does justice. The literary writers in this book thus stand beyond or in the margin of the legal closure, on the brink of the abyss that underlies the law, on whose profundity they fix their vision and through whose bottomlessness they reopen the closed legal case."³

Literary justice, then, addresses what is in irrecuperable excess to whatever the language of law can (and must) articulate. As Elizabeth Rottenberg notes, Felman's "exceptionally daring" analyses break new ground insofar as they show how "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.'"⁴ Furthermore, Felman's close readings provide particularly persuasive arguments in favor of a "hypothesis" Jacques Derrida formulated in the context of the preeminent poet of the Shoah, Paul Celan, the hypothesis that "all responsible witnessing engages in a poetic experience of language."⁵ It is the poetic experience of language, the invention of language for what previously lacked language, that encircles the "black hole," the "abyss, the gap that the law tries, but cannot succeed in closing."⁶ In their refusal or failure to welcome a discourse that, in Toni Morrison's formulation, "shape[s] a silence while breaking it," the "trials of the century" are condemned, according to Felman, to unintentionally reenact trauma in their very attempts to provide closure.⁷

This article has a limited scope: First, it critically assesses the concept of a "pattern" of "legal" responses in the context of events postdating the publication of The Juridical Unconscious. In a second step, it demonstrates the rich productivity of the concept of "literary justice" in light of the censored production of poetry in Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

The Pattern of Legal Justice in Western Civilization

Felman's illuminating analyses show that because of the inherent constraints of legal proceedings, the "trials of the century" reenact the very traumas in which they originated. This powerful thesis, far from diminishing the importance of legal proceedings, opens the possibility of detecting precisely those moments when, within the trial, "literary justice" is voiced, be it in moments of silence, moments when the breakdown of witnesses let the "other [End...