Reciting Law After Auschwitz

This article stages a mutual interrogation of law, literature, and history by reading in parallel two specimens of jurisprudence and literature republished after Nazism and the Holocaust. Hans Kelsen’s “Pure Theory of Law” (1934/1960) and Maurice Blanchot’s “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 purity of law and the law of recitation, the latter more adequately responds to Auschwitz, the Nakba, and other man-made catastrophes. This affirmative dimension of law warrants no less attention than its role in prohibiting and censuring violence internationally.