Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
She thought: there will have to be a terrible justice blowing all over the world to avenge all the needless suffering […] It will take a long time to change this, she thought, we learn very little, we learn very slowly. She was afraid she would be reporting disaster and defeat her whole life.
I'm not getting anywhere, she thought. What I need is an opening sentence, not a conclusion.
Martha Gellhorn, A Stricken Field (1940)Justice requires us to calculate with the incalculable.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’Witness to the first convulsions of the Nazi occupation of Europe in Czechoslovakia, journalist Mary Douglas, in Martha Gellhorn's extraordinarily prescient 1940 novel, A Stricken Field, imagines a future justice: a terrible justice, she thinks it will have to be, to avenge all this senseless, needless suffering. But even as the demand for justice lies everywhere around her – in the arbitrary arrests, capricious violence, lines of desperate refugees, and lost and starving children that the novel describes with such immediacy – Mary has doubts. What if we take so long to understand the nature of this crime that it simply keeps on perpetrating itself? What if we can never catch up with justice? On the other hand, if we arrive at justice too soon, do we not risk falsely concluding an event we have only begun to comprehend? I need a beginning, not a conclusion, she thinks.
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- Information
- The Judicial ImaginationWriting after Nuremberg, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011