Resisting Closure: Literary vs. Legal Justice for War Crimes and Atrocities

Abstract

War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice. By Michael J. Shapiro. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. 240 pp., £16.99 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-745-67154-3). Writing on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes and crimes against humanity, political theorist Hannah Arendt grappled with the limitations of law and trials in dealing with Nazi war crimes, declaring, “[this] guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems” (Arendt ⇓: 54). Since this trial, the belief in institutionally based justice has grown and increasingly come to dominate discourses on war and international relations despite the clear limitations of law and criminal justice frameworks in responding to situations that go beyond the parameters of legal systems. Often, the law is unquestionably invoked following conflict as legal justice has become the axiomatic, seemingly apolitical, response to atrocities. In his book War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice , philosopher and political theorist Michael Shapiro unravels the entrenched connection between law and justice by contrasting legal justice with the concept of literary justice. Shapiro's use of literary justice is based on that advanced by Felman (⇓:8) who states, “[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.” By opening up the concept of …