Until the release of Lida Maxwell’s book, the term, “lost cause” called to my mind the Southern “Lost Cause Movement,” a small but vocal cultural association intent on restoring antebellum white supremacy, and revizing Civil War history to cast the confederacy in a favorable light. Its proponents bemoan the supposed abuses of Unionists that contributed to the alleged economic exploitation of the South, the rise of Reconstruction, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which, they believe, is unforgivably punitive. Although the mission of this racist fringe group shares little in common with the undoubtedly progressive theory of lost causes outlined in Public Trials, it bespeaks the significance of narration in shaping not only retrospective understandings of history but also the politics of the present and future: It takes failure as a starting point from which to appeal to the public to imagine what might have been. These themes echo loudly in Maxwell’s work.
It is a rare gift to encounter a book as historically textured and politically provocative as Public Trials. Even more unusual is one that so effectively unsettles dominant binaries of success and failure for the purpose of advancing an argument with such political heft and import. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary political phenomena—from the abuses of the East India Company in the eighteenth century to the recent case of the alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and from Hannah Arendt’s review of the comedic writing of Nathalie Sarraute to an original and persuasive reading of Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film, Zero Dark Thirty—Maxwell puts these disparate subjects into conversation with one another in exciting, unorthodox ways. Performing some of the same practices of narration that are the objects of her analysis, Maxwell treats her readers to a rich, productively paradoxical, nonlinear story of democratic promise and downfall, the realization and impossibility of justice, and the indispensability and limitations of law.
Contrary to what Maxwell calls “fatalistic” claims of the political theory jeremiad that democracy is dead or dying, she argues that narratives of democratic failure, as seen in a variety of writings on public trials, animate democratic politics. Specifically, these accounts of democratic failure that authors put to use, not to bemoan the end of democracy but to reinvigorate it for the present and future, are what Maxwell calls “lost cause narratives.” Like failure, the term “lost” is, for the author, not a permanent state but temporary misplacement, resulting from a set of conditions that reveals alternative possibilities. In Maxwell’s words, “where fatalistic narratives portray democratic failure as revealing the (possible) failure of democracy as such and call for civic deference to elites and rules, lost cause narratives portray democratic failure as a contingent event that could have been otherwise. By emphasizing how things could have been in past democratic failures, lost cause narratives suggest that the future is similarly contingent, and they appeal to a belated public that could seek justice for the past and in the present” (pp. 161–62). Through exclusive focus on public trials, Maxwell interprets the writing of Edmund Burke, Emile Zola, and Hannah Arendt not only as diagnostic accounts of political shortcomings but also as arguments for unique political possibilities inherent in democratic failures. Echoing the claim of Judith Halberstam in Queer Art of Failure (2011), she sees that awakening to the creative potential of failure does not undermine the critical perspectives of the authors in question but deepens them.
Focusing on three public trials exemplifying the lost cause narrative, which ended with the unsuccessful impeachment of Warren Hastings, the false indictment of Alfred Dreyfus, and the rightful execution of Adolph Eichmann, Maxwell is concerned with neither the dubious legitimacy of the outcomes nor empirical facts of these events, but rather the ways they are captured in writing by Burke, Zola, and Arendt. Throughout the book, Maxwell questions what kind of democratic politics is reflected in and generated by their accounts. The ambiguous status of “the public” is consistent among the trials mentioned. Zola’s view of it is particularly riddled with (unavoidable) contradictions: it is simultaneously trustworthy and easily deceived; it is guilty of anti-Semitic bias and desires truth. In all cases, the authors both appeal to the existing public and attempt to solicit a new one for the purpose of realizing an authentic justice, which the legal system is, on its own, incapable of fulfilling.
The status of democracy in the eyes of the authors remains an open question, and possible tension, in the book. Throughout the discussion, Maxwell claims that lost causes are uniquely suited to open up new democratic possibilities. Is this a move that can be abstracted from the authors’ political life and work, regardless of their attitudes toward democracy, or are they actively, deliberately participating in this democratic practice? To put this differently, is Maxwell suggesting that readers might repurpose their lost cause narratives for democratic ends, regardless of the authors’ positions on democracy, or that the authors themselves possess democratic commitments, though tacit and inconsistent? This is not addressed in the text, though it is consequential. If the latter is true for Maxwell, then the burden is on her to establish the presence of democratic inclinations on the part of the authors, for these are not self-evident. For example, the prevailing view of some recent political theorists is that Arendt’s views of democracy are questionable. Her glorification of the individual actor, rather than the demos; her reliance on the pre-Socratic separation of the public and private spheres; and her relegation of matters such as housing, education, and health to the realm of the prepolitical and even the antipolitical social surface in the arguments of theorists such as Sheldon Wolin and Alan Keenan, who read her as a largely antidemocratic figure. Whether Maxwell is suggesting, as has Bonnie Honig, that Arendt’s work can be put to use for democratic aims, despite her ambivalence, or, as Jeffrey Isaac claimed, her political theory is itself radically democratic, explicitly confronting this question would likely enrich the discussion in Public Trials.
Maxwell concludes Public Trials with a reference to the closing line of Zero Dark Thirty, uttered by a pilot tasked with returning the protagonist to the United States following the successful killing of Osama bin Laden, to which she was integral: “Where do you want to go?” The character responds with a single tear and silence. Among other things, Maxwell interprets this as a possible invitation to the public to offer its own answer. I suspect that the author herself might be doing the same in her book. Throughout the discussion, she neither issues normative answers to the question of what attunement to democratic failure should do, nor instructs her readers as to where lost causes can be found. Instead, because of Maxwell’s firm political commitments to justice, her unequivocal belief in the tensions and promises of failure, and her critical confrontations with the limitations of public trials, as well as the possibilities they reveal, the readers of Public Trials, who, I submit, are far more fortunate than the viewers of Zero Dark Thirty, are well positioned to ask a revised version of the film’s concluding question, one far more democratic and imaginative: Where might we go from here?
