Radical Justice

Spain and the Southern Cone Beyond Market and State

By (author) Luis Martín-Cabrera

Hardback - £88.00

Publication date:

15 September 2011

Length of book:

255 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611483567

Radical Justice investigates the convoluted relationship between memory and justice as it is portrayed in political documentaries and detective fiction from Spain and the Southern Cone. It argues that the possibility of achieving justice in these regions lies beyond market and state and is yet to come. Rather than focusing on "high literature" Radical Justice uses popular culture as a site from which to question both the inability of the State and the transnational market to come to terms with the dictatorial past and to deliver justice. This book will interest a wide range of scholars, from national literature and film specialists of Argentina, Chile, and Spain, to philosophers and students of ethics, human rights, and questions of justice.
Reading Radical Justice is not for the faint-of-heart, but for the not-so-faint. I suspect it would be worthwhile. In Radical Justice Martín-Cabrera mourns the impossibility and inadequacy of memory and offers some hope in this bleak vision of at least some modes of resistance, found in the figure of the melancholic detective and in the political documentaries of the second generation struggling to encounter the reality of trauma, or the Lacanian Real, in Martín-Cabrera’s lexicon.