NOTES TO PAGES 427–29- Rada Ivekovic has analyzed the manner in which gender hierarchies in ordinary times are
further utilized in times of war and ethnic strife to create new hegemonies, although she is mindful
of the way that the future can be opened up in these very times. See Rada Ivekovic,Le Sexe de la
nation(Paris: Le ́o Scheer, 2003). - The Fact Finding Report set up by the government never saw the light of day.
- Speaking of the Eichmann trial, Shosana Felman says, ‘‘The trial was a conscious legal effort
not just to give victims a voice and a stage, to break the silence of the trauma, to divulge and to
uncover secrets and taboos, but to transform these discoveries into one national, collective story, to
assemble consciously, meticulously, diligently, an unprecedented public and collective legal record
of mass trauma that formerly existed only in the repressed form of a series of untold, fragmented
private stories and traumatic memories.’’ See Shosana Felman,The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and
Traumas in the Twentieth Century(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7. At this point I
will only say that Felman’s formulation does not allow for many situations in which the public
telling and the attempt to create anationalstory of a wound can itself take on the character of
rumor, of words gone wild, and convert justice into vengeance. A good example is the speech
Felman quotes from George W. Bush after September 11 in which he said, ‘‘I will never forget the
wound to our country and those who inflicted it.... Our grief has turned to anger and anger to
resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies, justice will be done’’
(quoted in Felman, p. 3). Interestingly, Felman concludes that ‘‘the promised exercise oflegaljus-
tice—of justice by trial and by law—has become civilization’s most appropriate and most essential,
most ultimately meaningful response to the violence that wounds it’’ (p. 3). Yet this speech was not
about justice but about justice asvengeance, as the reference to enemy clearly implies, a fact that
strangely goes unnoticed in Felman’s account. Subsequent events have shown more clearly that
naming the tragic events of September 11 acts ofwarrather thancrimesshows the easy slippage
between these categories. The attempt to create a national story of hurt can take the form of rumor
rather more easily than Felman allows. In that sense, the Eichmann trial was exceptional rather
than paradigmatic, because the line between victims and perpetrators was so clear—those lines
become blurred in most situations of ongoing violence, as the experience of Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commissions in various countries have shown. See: Fiona Ross,Bearing Witness: Women and
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa(London: Pluto Press, 2003); Richard Wil-
son,The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003). - G. D. Khosla,Stern Reckoning:A Survey of the Events Leading Up To and Following the
Partition of India(1949; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). - It is worth quoting Pandey in detail on this pattern: ‘‘On the basis of published and unpub-
lished materials and oral evidence provided to him by officials and non-officials in Pakistan, Sy-
monds declared that, ‘at the lowest estimate’ half a million people perished and twelve million
became homeless.’... Nothing in the surviving records, in the calculations made at the time, or in
the contentious debates that have gone on since then, gives us anything like a persuasive basis for
such an inference. Is it, rather, a question of what we can live with? Yet, it is not entirely clear why
it is easier to live with 500,00 dead than with larger or smaller figure. Is it the ‘median’ that allows
one to emphasize the enormity of Partition and point to our surviving humanity at the same time?
Or is it a figure that has gained credibility in academic circles simply by repetition?’’ (Pandey, ‘‘The
Prose of Otherness,’’ 90–91). It seems to me that the issue is not one of our surviving humanity or
of arriving at some kind of an average from widely discrepant numbers, but rather one of tracking
how official discourse functions as rumor and asking what this authorizes. I argue that the reference
to the enormity of the numbers involved authorizes an idea of unprecedented violence that has
unsettled the very possibility of the social contract because the sexual contract is not in place.
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