Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted—the historically "expressionless."

Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the "juridical unconscious" of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

Felman insists that the failure of testimony plays a constitutive role in testimony per se. The argument holds well throughout the book, even if its logic is downright maddening and at times rather moralizing (simplifying an objection to the extreme: why should the witness who doesn't fail, or the trial that is not marked by an expression of trauma, by qualitatively less significant than those who do?). The highlight of the work is the chapter on Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem, which indeed forms an important counterpart to the reading Arendt's own text. The essay on Benjamin is far less innovative or remarkable, but it is nonetheless worth reading as an attempt by Felman to approach the contemporary Benjamin debates from this line of questioning.

Among the lowest and least necessary points of the book is Felman's ferocious 5-page endnote #2 on Ruth Leys' criticism of Felman's friend Caruth. The note is itself almost worth the price of the book as an indication of how intelligent intellectuals will get personal and loud when they lack substantial arguments. This certainly does not speak well of the professionalism of the Caruth/Felman argument on trauma.

On its own, this book is primarily interesting as an extension of Felman's earlier work. In both the readings of Arendt and Leys, the reader is advised to contrast their texts to Felman's own. Accordingly, the book is at its best when read in contrast to opposing positions. Still, it is not clear whether those who already dislike Felman and Caruth's approach to trauma will be moved. Thus, the problem with the "Juridical Unconscious" is that it adheres to an all-too-easily identifiable line of argument, which it articulates over and over and over. The argument is useful, but hardly so important as to be exhaustive of the intricacies of contemporary trials.