Juridical Unconscious Book

I found Shoshana Felman's "Judicial Unconscious" an uneven read. I would give the first half of this book 5 stars, and the second half 3. She begins with a productive, engaging probe of the link between trauma studies and the form of the trial through the writings of Benjamin and then through a reading of the OJ trial. It was at the end of the first half that she reaches the most profound point that stuck with me: that the trial attested to three traumas, namely of race, gender, and the law itself. These appear as a number of connected abysses between black and white, between male and woman/non-male, between the ideal of law and the reality of its practice.

It was in the second part where she explores ideas around whether or not the law can come to speak for the oppressed, the dead, the victim, and it was here that she lost me. It could be time, or the fact that the "victim's rights" movement has been catastrophically instrumentalized in the service of white supremacy that made me hesitant and disappointed, but all the excitement I felt building in the first part dissipated in the second parts reinvestment in the possibilities of a "victim's law" or any justice that could arise from that after such a powerful description of law's lacunae and failures. It just didn't feel convincing anymore following her own critique. It's like she diffuses the second half with the force of the first.