The Proto-politics of Reconciliation

Lefort and the Aporia of Forgiveness in Arendt and Derrida

Bibliographic Data

ID5818752
AuthorsAndrew Schaap (0000-0001-9608-0129, The University of Melbourne, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume41
Issue4
Pages615-630
Publication date2006-11-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1036-1146 • E-ISSN: 1363-030X
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10361140600959817
OpenAlexW1991960762
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited24

Reconciliation is often suspected of being an inherently ideological concept in the sense that it fosters acquiescence to a social order that is neither necessary nor desirable. In particular, it is sometimes argued that this is because reconciliation is a religious concept that has been transposed into political discourse. This transposition is seen to be inappropriate because reconciliation presupposes a prior social unity that needs to be restored when, in fact, no such unity has ever existed between historical antagonists. In this article, I argue that the presupposition of a social unity is, indeed, always in danger of becoming ideological to the extent that this unity is conflated with the nation. However, the invocation of a counterfactual social unity or 'polity' also potentially enables the staging of a reconciliatory politics in a way that politicises the terms of association between former antagonists. I am grateful to participants at both these events for their responses to the paper. Special thanks are due to Keith Breen, Marguerite La Caze, Emma Larking, Hans Lindahl and one anonymous reviewer for their detailed and thoughtful comments on the paper. Notes 1 As Paul Patton (Citation2001, 25) notes, 'Australia is unique among former British colonies in never having signed treaties with its Indigenous peoples and the present Constitution was formulated exclusively by representatives of the European population without consultation with Australian Indigenous peoples. In its 1901 version, the constitution explicitly denied the Commonwealth power to make laws regarding "Aboriginal natives" and excluded them from being counted in the census. While these exclusions were removed by referendum in 1967, other remnants of early 20th century racism remain in the document ... Section 25 which envisages a situation in which "certain races are disqualified from voting" remains intact.' 2 As Patton (Citation2001, 32) points out, 'if the abandonment of extended terra nullius in international law supports the case for the Australian recognition of native title, it is difficult to see why the recognition of native title does not in turn threaten the legitimacy of the British claim to sovereignty'. 3 That is by invoking 'a nation in which various sub-national groups had given up their special claims and historical grievances in the interest of a common, united future' (Phillips Citation2005, 120). 4 Reconciliation would invoke 'not the dissolution of difference' but a 'unity in which division, rather than difference, was transcended' (Phillips Citation2005, 122). 5 For a critique of Gutmann and Thompson see Schaap Citation2006. 6 This is Kant's critique of the Hobbesian social contract. See Habermas (Citation1996, 90-4). 7 On the pessimistic view, not discussed here, the world comes to be interpreted in terms of use-value rather than its intrinsic worth so that human existence appears increasingly meaningless and the bases of social solidarity are eroded (eg Weber, MacIntyre). 8 Cf Chilean intellectual Tomás Moulian (cited in Atria forthcoming): 'There won't be any reconciliation. In the first place, reconciliation is a bad word. Reconciliation is brotherhood. That is to say, it is for two brothers that were separated by some conflict, but recognise the fact that they share the same history and the same blood. Pinochetists and anti-Pinochetists, however, don't share the same blood. Reconciliation is a fake subject. Granted, we have to learn to tolerate each other, but I have no reason why I should love the torturer. No. It is simply a mystic delusion. It is a concept from theological discourse that has been displaced to political discourse. We can say that we need to be able to live in peace, for ethical and practical reasons, so that there won't be any more killing. I am not the son of a disappeared, but I am not reconciling with those who killed or tortured them. No, I am not reconciling.' 9 I am indebted to Hans Lindahl for drawing my attention to this fundamental difference between Schmitt and Lefort. Schmitt writes that, in his definition of democracy as an 'identity of governed and governing', the word identity 'signifies the existential in the political unity of a people in contrast to some kind of normative, schematic or fictive equalities. Democracy assumes in the whole and every detail of its political existence a homogeneous people, that has the will to exist politically' (Kennedy Citation2004, 130). 10 As Gillian Rose (Citation1996, 4) points out, 'Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organise to further the "general" interest within which your particular interest may be represented.' 11 As Lefort (Citation1988, 218) puts it: 'social division can only be defined ... insofar as its terms are determined by relations, but also insofar as those relations are themselves determined by their common inscription within the same space and testify to a common awareness of their inscription therein'. For an excellent discussion of Lefort's understanding of political representation see Dallmayr (Citation1993b, 87f). 12 In a much-cited passage, Lefort (Citation1988, 19) continues: 'democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life (at every level where division, and especially the division between those who held power and those who were subject to them, could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle)' (emphasis in original). 13 As Bernard Flynn (Citation1998, 489) explains, in a democracy 'there is no one who is a priori certified to speak in the name of the people. Each one does speak in the name of the people, but each is legitimately contradicted by others who, with as much right, also evoke the name of the people.' 14 'The people possesses sovereignty; they are assumed to express its will; power is exercised in their name; politicians constantly evoke them. But the identity of the people remains latent. Quite apart from the fact that the notion of the people is dependent upon a discourse which names the people, which is itself multiple and which lends the people multiple dimensions, and that the status of a Subject can only be defined in terms of a juridical constitution, the people are, as we have noted, dissolved into a numerical element at the very moment of the manifestation of their will' (Lefort Citation1988, 230). 15 In relation to South Africa, Antjie Krog (Citation1998, 109) similarly observes that 'there is nothing to go back to, no previous state or relationship one would wish to restore'. 16 Claire Moon discusses these two interpretations according to whether we construe the theological element of reconciliation in terms of narrative or metaphor. As narrative, reconciliation seems to over-determine the terms in which politics can be enacted because it scripts what reconciliation requires too tightly; since it 'prefigures narrative closure as reconciliation' it tends to privilege a certain conception of social unity as a regulative idea in terms of which all conflict is interpreted (Moon Citation2004, 194). As such, the transposition of religious discourses into secular politics can 'work against constituting different political configurations and alliances' since they tend to 'reify the national boundaries of community and the contractual relations adjudicated by the state, and to re-establish the boundaries of the existing legal order' (Moon Citation2004, 197). In contrast, when read as metaphor, the transposition of reconciliation to the secular domain extends the debate about dealing with the legacy of oppression 'beyond the idea of a pragmatic settlement or agreement' while at the same time generating 'debate and contestation about what reconciliation might mean' (Moon Citation2004, 195). 17 'Forgiving is perhaps as much about acquiring a shared remembrance of the violent past as it is about internalising the height of the moral point of view, from which "the unforgivable can be forgiven". In any case, we should not understand this formula ... in such a way that the unforgivable becomes forgivable after all, by internalising a higher point of view. The only way, I submit, in which the unforgivable can be forgiven is by remembering it as "common", i.e. by appreciating the horizontal rather than the vertical dimension of reconciliation ... there is a protology of remembrance, which is as essential as Ricoeur's eschatology' (van Roermund Citation2004). 18 I have benefited from reading Michael Janover's (Citation2005) careful comparison of Arendt's and Derrida's thoughts on forgiveness and politics in preparing this section of the paper. For thoughtful commentaries on Derrida's work on forgiveness in the context of debates about reconciliation see also Verdeja Citation(2004), Moon Citation(2004) and La Caze (forthcoming). 19 Here I think Derrida is wrong. There is no such thing as a gift that does not establish a relation of reciprocity. As Ricoeur (Citation2004, 482) points out, even when forgiveness is pure it hopes for something back: to turn an enemy into a friend. 20 This is an account of 'the political' according to which almost everything we ordinarily take to be politics is described as un- or anti-political. For example, strategic or instrumental action is described as work rather than action and is thus said to express an anti-political mentality. 21 Critchley (Citation2000, 458) explains that 'the messianic a priori describes the structure of intersubjectivity in terms of an asymmetrical obligation that I could never meet, to which I would never be equal'. He goes on to note that Habermas might wonder whether Derrida's emphasis on asymmetry and infinite responsibility would suffer from the ethical overload that Habermas criticises republicanism for. To which, Critchley suggests, Derrida might respond that 'ethics is always-and rightly-an experience of overload' (459). I have explored the disjunction between Arendt's conception of politics and the Levinasian notion of an infinite responsibility in Schaap Citation(2004). 22 According to Paul Patton (Citation2004, 32), the point of Derrida's distinction between the heterogeneous orders of the conditional and unconditional is 'to remind us that we are not completely defined by the existing practices that determine our political being'. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew Schaap Andrew Schaap is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (ARC) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne and is author of Political Reconciliation (Routledge, 2005). His current research aims to understand the relation between the rule of law and popular sovereignty in terms of an agonistic theory of democracy. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Derrida Roundtable at the University of Melbourne in February 2005 and at the Philosophy Seminar at the University of Queensland in October 2005

Invocation · Polity · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy, Sociology, Political Theory · Political Theology and Sovereignty

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