The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century.

• Position: Book Review

By Shoshana Felman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 166. $45.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

The theorization of traumata medical term that found figurative life in a century of mass destruction and persistent persecution--has proven a powerful explanatory tool across a range of disciplines. In her latest offering, literary theorist Shoshana Felman probes the unarticulated, and often hidden, links between trauma and the law.

Society increasingly relies on the conceptual and practical tools of the law--especially trials--to respond to individual and collective traumas. The trial's response is to articulate, and thereby contain, trauma. Yet a trial's premium on conscious recollection confronts, in trauma, a phenomenon that is either unavailable to consciousness or to which consciousness is purposely blind. The result is a missed encounter that both repeats the original trauma and creates a new, legal one. The repetition reenacts the...