The course will describe connections between justice, film and literature by examining texts, films, psychoanalytical and postmodern articles on film, literature and legal judgments. Film and literature are interested in justice because in them something overt or covert is useful. The "storyteller," is a man who can give advice to his readers says Walter Benjamin. Film is a system of images that thinks life philosophically and in relation to psychoanalysis, which is a philosophy as well. As readers, students are witnessing that literature emerges from a personal and social truth that the storyteller makes accessible. As spectators, students see that the cinematic medium is misleading as the images of daily living—conscious images and those that emerge from the unconscious mind—mislead us. But in the same way that daily experiences are discontinuous and yet they produce possibilities of understanding or generalizing, film and literature clarify and create readability.  The finished film is based on cutting and editing that uncover a personal and social truth related to the structure of the world and the consciousness that copes with it. Yet, because justice is an abstract complex structure the legal language does not usefully represent it. Film and literature develop technical methods that position justice at the core of the work even when it describes a large variety of events.

                What is the relation of film and literature to justice, of the director/author to the possibility of representing questions that uniquely the power of judgment can decide upon? What is the relation of judging and the possibility to define justice to directing, writing and reading, especially in the times in which we are living? What is the relation between narrative and history, confession and justice, storytelling and survival and allegory and knowledge?

Films and Texts: Kremer vs. Kremer, The Seventh Seal, Judgment at Nuremberg, Double Indemnity, Working Girl, Rousseau, Flaubert, Kafka, Camus, Derrida, Benjamin, Lyotard, Amery, Hartman, Friedlander, Blanchot, Gilligan, and Freud.

Course requirements: students will submit a final paper at the end of the term. It is mandatory to view the films and read the texts ahead of each class. Students have to attend class meetings during the semester.