Can Trauma be Told? Juridical Discourse and Affect in Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts

Francis Haselden

doi:10.12681/syn.27560

Abstract

A poet and an appellate criminal defence attorney specialising in sex crimes, Vanessa Place reproduces the evidence of rape crimes presented during trials in Statement of Facts (2010). At the heart of these trials lies a trauma that legal language seeks to convey. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s concepts of the differend (différend) and litigation, I ask if the documentary poem represents the traumatic event or if it simply reproduces legal language. I propose that the discourse of the law fails to account for trauma because of a mismatch between the forms of language required to establish facts in a court of law and the traumatic event itself. Yet, the transformation of this language into a poem makes it possible to indicate this mismatch while at the same time bringing the unspeakable violence of the traumatic experience to the surface of the text as read by the poet.

Highlights

A poet and an appellate criminal defence attorney specialising in sex crimes, Vanessa Place reproduces the evidence of rape crimes presented during trials in Statement of Facts (2010)
Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s concepts of the differend and litigation, I ask if the documentary poem represents the traumatic event or if it reproduces legal language
The transformation of this language into a poem makes it possible to indicate this mismatch while at the same time bringing the unspeakable violence of the traumatic experience to the surface of the text as read by the poet

Summary

Introduction

A poet and an appellate criminal defence attorney specialising in sex crimes, Vanessa Place reproduces the evidence of rape crimes presented during trials in Statement of Facts (2010). My hypothesis is the following: the discourse of law fails to account for trauma because of a mismatch between the forms of language required to establish facts in a court of law and the traumatic event itself. Before analysing Place’s poetic practice of the legal text, it is first necessary to explore how Lyotard conceives the traumatic experience which, according to him, is similar to what he calls the phrase-affect.

Results

Conclusion