Abstract
Traditionally, transitional justice has referred to that field of theoretical scholarship that proffers recuperative strategies for political societies divided by a history of violence. Through the establishment of truth commissions, public confessionals and reparative measures, transitional justice regimes have sought to establish restorative conditions that might help reconcile historical antagonists both to each other and to the trauma of their shared past. Because of some of the theoretical lapses in this scholarship some have turned recently to the field of radical democratic and ‘new pluralist’ thought – and especially to agonistic literature – to foreground a theory of post-conflict reconciliation based not on the principles of the sublimation of difference, but rather the perpetual deferral of accord. This essay works both to underscore that effort, as well as to (productively) problematize it. Through unorthodox readings of Giorgio Agamben, Jean Améry and Sheldon Wolin, the essay argues that an emphasis on messianicity as the temporal mode of political repair is ultimately less productive for what I call an agonistics of reconciliation than a more nuanced approach to what Wolin calls ‘fugitive democracy’. Where the former is allied with a problematic politics of mutual respect, the latter affirms a more germane politics of abiding resentment. In the end, a startling conclusion is drawn from reading agonistic reconciliation through Wolin: democracy may be a political experience reserved for scenes of transitional justice alone.
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Notes
See also Michael Shapiro's essay ‘Time, Disjuncture, and Democratic Citizenship,’ Chapter 12 in Connolly and Botwinick (2001).
One might suggest then that agonistic reconciliation, when phrased in terms of respect, is arrayed against Fanonian postcolonial theories which stress the constructive role violence and revenge can play in post-conflict scenarios. On the Fanonian connection here, see Homi Bhabha (1984), ‘Of Mimicrcy and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’.
Though filtered through a poststructuralist lens, in a sense, this is German Sociologist Georg Simmel's point, that conflict is a ‘form of sociation’, that ‘conflict itself resolves the tension between contrasts’ (Simmel, 1955, p. 14).
Not unlike Derrida's theory of justice, Agamben's (non)responsibility for atrocity retains the structure of an unfullfillable promise, one whose resolution remains everlastingly ‘to come’ (Derrida, 2004). It ought to be noted here that though I see important consistencies between Agamben and Derrida, Agamben himself is careful to distinguish his from Derrida's approach. On Agamben's critique, see the work of Adam Thurschwell, and in particular ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben's Critique of Derrida’, in Norris (2005).
Though it hasn’t been articulated in these terms, my critique here does resonate with those recently formulated by Dominic LaCapra (2004), J.M. Bernstein (2004) and Geoffrey Hartman (2002). They each emphasize, in their own respective terms, the frames of reference lost in the parochial focus on the figure of the Musselmann – what I am here characterizing as the epitomization of sadomasochistic intimacy. Bernstein in particular writes of his repugnance and revulsion at Agamben's inability to ‘veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain: from victims to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to the ethical dispositions of those set upon reducing the human to the inhuman’.
Wolin's critique of constitutional power, as well as his articulation of the constituent act altogether at odds with constitutionalism, can be read as akin to Negri's in Insurgencies. See Jason Frank (2010) and Andreas Kalyvas (2005).
It would be interesting to compare Wolin's notion of a democracy which bursts forth periodically to Rene Girard's notion that a scapegoat is necessary to sacrifice from time to time in order to avoid the terrible violence which festers due to mimetic contagion. On democracy and sacrifice, see Norton (2001); also, Fortuna (2008).
See Nicholas Xenos’ excellent essay in Connolly (2001), ‘Momentary Democracy’.
On Polybius’ remarks, see Scott-Kilvert (1980).
As Jeffrie Murphy puts it, ‘Ressentiment is, by definition, an irrational and base passion. It means, roughly, “malicious envy”. It thus makes no sense to speak of rational or justified or honorable ressentiment’ (Murphy, 2004).
In full the quote reads: ‘It did not escape me that ressentiment is not only an unnatural but also a logically inconsistent condition [Zustand]. It nails every one of us unto the cross of the ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Ressentiment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future. I know that the time-sense of the person trapped in ressentiment is twisted around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened. In any event, for this reason the man of ressentiment cannot join in the unisonous peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look forward, to a better, common future’ (Améry, 1998, p. 134).
See Jenny Edkins (2003, p. 59). The psychological concept of hypermnesia also seems to approximate the nature of the twisted time-sense of the person trapped in ressentiment. Hypermnesia, according to William Niederland, is the all too clear and strongly emotionally inflected memory of traumatic experiences of persecution and the related shattering of the self. In a description of a female Holocaust survivor suffering from hypermnesia, Niederland notes that, although she is oriented in time and space, her state of health is controlled by undigested memories of past horrors. She still sees how her bloodstained brother was led away; she hears the screaming of infants and clings to her beaten mother, and in a certain sense she is still staying with the dead and dying of the concentration camp. She is, as Niederland observes, ‘well aware that all these events happened a long time ago, and yet she cannot get away from the memories and agonizing fantasies. In other words, she still lives in the concentration camp …’ (Niederland, 1981, p. 101).
Ressentiment’s modification into what Améry terms the ‘modality’ of the past also brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre's notion that the emotions are ‘magical transformations’ of the world. Sartre sees the emotions as attempts to ‘live through the relations between things and their potentialities where not governed by deterministic processes but by magic’. According to Sartre, in the emotional experience the subject ‘magically’ tries to escape an unbearable reality. Being unable to escape a danger by normal means, the person may ‘faint to fear’; that is, annihilate the dangerous world ‘magically’. See Sartre (1993).
This is potentially linkable to Jean-Paul Sartre, and especially what he in his oeuvre terms ‘bad faith’.
My emphasis. This passage is especially interesting to correlate to Fanon's psychoanalytic understanding of racially charged colonization, see Fanon (2008).
See Wood (1999).
The ‘differentia of time’ is Walter Benjamin's felicitous phrase (2002, p. 456).
On the deconstruction of the state of exception thesis, see also Jason Frank (2010).
This is a view eloquently theorized by Walter Benjamin (2002) and later refined by Derrida (2004).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Bonnie Honig, Alan Keenan, Sophie Peck and Andy Schaap, all of whom read portions of earlier drafts, as well as to two anonymous reviewers, who read in total the present manuscript. The patient readings, thoughtful counsel and constructive criticism all of the above provided made this article possible. I would like also to express my gratitude to the audience I received at the 2009 Rethinking Marxism conference, whose probing feedback pushed my thinking considerably. Finally, my thanks to the editorial board at CPT for the generous support and encouragement.
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Hirsch, A. Fugitive reconciliation: The agonistics of respect, resentment and responsibility in post-conflict society. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 166–189 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.5