2024: First Place, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice
Reciting Law After Auschwitz
by Benjamin Goh
Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2024)
Abstract:
This paper reads in parallel two specimens of jurisprudence and literature that were republished in the aftermath of Nazism and the Holocaust. Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (‘Pure Theory of Law’) (1934/1960) and Maurice Blanchot’s La Folie du jour (‘The Madness of the Day’) (1949/1973) are historicized to unfold the ineffaceable traces, and public demands, of the mid-twentieth-century catastrophe. Between the postulate of purity and the law of recitation, it is the latter effect of our present anamnesis, I suggest, that undergirds and affirms the historical turn of legal theory.
Keywords: Jurisprudence; Law and Literature; Holocaust; Hans Kelsen; Maurice Blanchot
About the author:
Benjamin Goh is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He works in the field of law and literature, particularly on topics in copyright history and postcolonial studies. “Reciting Law After Auschwitz” is based on research first undertaken in the NUS English Department and the Kent Law School. He is grateful for the prior guidance of his teachers from both institutions, and for the present recognition given in honor of Zipporah B. Wiseman’s lifework in law and literature.