The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the Law Cathy Caruth Balzac’s novel Colonel Chabert, first published in 1832, opens with a peculiar scene: a soldier who is know to have died in battle most improbably and unexpectedly returns to the office of a lawyer to reclaim his property. Disfigured and unrecognizable, the stranger insists that he is actually the famous colonel and asks the lawyer to help him to obtain a form of legal recognition that will restore to him his lawful identity, his property, and his wife. In this strange reincarnation of his own dead self, the character appealing to the lawyer hopes to become legally, and therefore, humanly, alive. Unfolding from this haunting encounter, Balzac’s story dramatizes the attempt by a man who is legally dead to come alive before the law and the capacity and limits of the law to respond to this attempt at legal resuscitation. Set in postrevolutionary France during the Restoration, this ghostly return of a Napoleonic soldier clearly echoes the historic repetitions that were taking place during this period: the return to the prerevolu- tionary past during the Restoration, itself ruptured by the return of the Napoleon during the Hundred Days; and the protracted waves of rev- olutionary socioeconomic shocks to France in the wake of the French Revolution. What is remarkable in Balzac’s text is the singular percep- tion that this haunted repetition, this return, takes place not simply in the realm of history, politics, or war, but rather and specifically on the site of the law. What is at stake in Balzac’s novel is a legal claim that turns the law itself into the place par excellence of historical memory. This appeal to memory and history through law emerges in Balzac, 119