Trauma and mercy: reading the law through the narrative of trauma

Abstract

… trauma is precisely what cannot be seen; it is something that inherently, politically and psychoanalytically, defeats sight, even when it comes in contact with the rules of evidence and with the trial's legal search for visibility. The political is thus essentially tied up with the structure of the trauma. It is to the structure of the trauma, therefore (and not simply to a different ideology), that our “eyes” should be precisely educated.