Polarcauste: law, justice and the Shoah in French detective fiction

Abstract

The Holocaust sits uncomfortably within general theories of representation. Moreover, the Shoah also raises fundamental problems for our understandings of law and justice within modernity. ‘After Auschwitz’ serves as both a temporal and epistemological signifier within and about law and justice within modernity. This article studies the ways in which a new literary genre of French detective fiction, the néo-polar, which emerged after events of May 1968, has posited new understandings of law, justice and memory of the Shoah. Drawing on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and deconstruction, the article argues that the new generation of French writers problematise law, justice and politics through a genre in which ‘fiction’ writes and re-writes history and memory in a search for an impossible justice.