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The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, rather than its central axis. We argue that, in consequence, the Oqaluttuaq narratives not only “provincialize” the tradition of hyperborean colonial memories, but also provide a postcolonial mnemonic construction of Greenland as a place of multiple histories, plural peoples, and heterogenous temporalities. As such, the books also narrativize loss and disappearance—of people, cultures, and environments—as a distinctive melancholic strand in Greenlandic history. Informed by approaches in the field of cultural memory and in the study memorial objects, Marks’ haptic visuality and Keenan and Weizman’s forensic aesthetics, we analyze the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq in regard to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as investigate the role of material objects and artifacts, which work as narrative “props” for multiple stories of encounter and survival in the Arctic. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This chapter brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in conversation with two moral sentiment philosophers of the 18th century, Joseph Butler and David Hume. It focuses on the connection between the modern restitutive trope and reparation as premised on shared humanity. The ‘problem’ that the Creature from Frankenstein illuminates is the conditional logic of restitution, which is open only to those who are already included in human society; animals, monsters, and other non-humans do not partake in restitution. By showing that the concept of benevolence has a central place in the construction of prelapsarian desires in Shelley’s novel, the chapter argues that the Creature represents for the other protagonists the humanity’s ‘radical outside’; he is both excluded from the benevolent society and divested of restitutive possibilities. The Creature is a figure of ‘unrestitutability’ because the possibilities of return, undoing and repair are barred from him by the virtue of his constitutive exclusion from humanity.

The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms of the late capitalist monitoring, regulation, and exploitation of biological life of populations. In this context, the post-human turn in political theory has meant the extension of focus from human agency to include animals, plants, inanimate objects, and machines. Focusing on the work of Catherine Malabou, Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi, Brad Evans, and Julian Reid, I discuss some of the problems that arise from the attempt at non-anthropocentric theorizing of politics, including what it means—theoretically, politically, and epistemologically—to consider biological and machinic units in terms of political agency. I suggest that the problems encountered by these post-humanist contributions to the field of political theory are epistemological, analytical, and political. I focus in particular on whether the non-anthropocentric refiguring of politics offers new critical insights into, and resistances against, neoliberal governance.Bhandar B and Goldberg-Hiller J (eds) (2015) Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Evans B and Reid J (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press.Lazzarato M (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (trans J D Jordan). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).Massumi B (2014) What Animals Teach us about Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The figure of a wounded body has been part of the cultural iconography of psychoanalysis since Freud defined trauma as the infringement of psyche's protective membrane that incites a neurotic response and represses memory of the injurious event. Recent feminist and postcolonial critiques of cultural trauma theory have problematised this ‘wound-centrism’ insofar as it has privileged an individuated, event-like and time-framed conceptions of violence, and has neglected systemic, incremental, continuous and quotidian experiences of violence. This article contributes to these critiques by analysing Hanya Yanagihara's 2013 novel The People in the Trees, which narrates an anthropological expedition to a fictitious Micronesian island and sets in motion aggressive colonisation of its populations. Yanagihara's postcolonial trauma novel offers a critical perspective onto the idiom of wounding not by denying its importance for some subjective experiences of violence, but by situating it in relation to other figurations of trauma. I argue that central to this narrative is the idea of traumatic appropriation, understood not only in line with social critiques of colonial and racial regimes of accumulation and dispossession, but also as an expression of epistemic violence that assigns personhood status solely to property owners and endows colonised populations with characteristics of things and commodities.

Jean Amery argued in his essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” that there is a distinctive kind of homesickness, specific to the exile experiences of the assimilated German-speaking Jews during the war. They were dispossessed not only of their homes, citizenship, and cultural community in the present, but also of their past attachments, memories, and identifications. In my text, I discuss philosophic analyses of Amery’s exile essay and point that while they offer important insights into Amery’s validation of first-person experience for phenomenology of exile, they perhaps do not appreciate sufficiently the political undertone of Amery’s essay. I approach Amery’s text in the light of critical theorizing of the politics of exile and border-control, and with a focus on the notions of ‘undesirability’ and ‘expulsion’ that underwrite the extreme political precarity of refuge-seekers. This shows that one of Amery’s central preoccupations in his writings on exile have been political freedom and the possibility of resistance, as well as their constitutive codependence, in the oppressive context of forced exile, marked by a futility of political action. Here the act of writing becomes that of resistance and a reclamation of voice and language in the face of the fascistic powers aimed at expelling, silencing, and eliminating the ‘undesirables’.

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.

At this particular historical juncture of the Anthropocene it is becoming increasingly clear that, as Val Plumwood puts it, the survival of our species depends upon how our relationships with earth others are reconfigured . Yet as the human is once again placed at the centre of our planetary life, this time as a geological agent, a growing body of scholarship has taken up the challenge of rethinking the human and its limits (see for example the special issue of the journal Angelaki 16(4), 2011). This special issue seeks to contribute to this body of work from the perspective of posthumanist explorations of affect, and thereby to open possibilities for articulating non-solipsistic and non-anthropocentric notions of the subject.

The technological transformation of the conduct of war, exemplified by the American employment of drones in Afghanistan and in Iraq, calls for a critical reflection about the fantasies that underpin, and are in turn animated by, the robotic revolution of the military. At play here is a fantasy of a "costless war" or a "sterile war", that is such act of military state violence against the other that is inconsequential for the self. In other words, the seductive appeal of the "costless war" fantasy rests on the desire to develop a self that is invulnerable in the face of violence. Importantly, it is a desire explicitly projected towards a particular American future (of an imagined warfare, or of a super-power status), but also one that is connected to a lacking critical reflection about the intersubjective aspects of violence in the debates about America's post-9/11 military involvements. This article reflects critically about the fantasy of the "costless war" and about its underpinning politics of invulnerability from a perhaps unlikely angle of literature. In a close reading of a short story by Benjamin Percy called "Refresh, Refresh" (2008), it explores its narrative insights into how acts of violence, which are undertaken far from home, inevitably return to affect and damage, perhaps beyond repair, the subject at home. Importantly, the return of violence in Percy's story occurs within the domain of the everyday and the mundane, not of the exceptional, and testifies to the despair experienced by young males "abandoned' by their military fathers. My interpretation draws also on theoretical explorations of the connection between violence, intersubjectivity and vulnerability, based on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas on the subject's ethical captivity by the suffering of the other, and on Judith Butler's recent "uses" of the Levinasian ethical project in her writing about the post-9/11 America.

This article examines the development of Leszek Kolakowski's thought, in the context of changing Polish political landscape; from the early Marxist text, critical of the Catholic Church and its doctrine -- to the late books on Augustine and Pascal and sympathetic analysis of the role of religion in contemporary society. The author attempts to discover a continuity in this development; it may by found, the author argues, in Kolakowski's rationalism, understood first in opposition to religion, but later as fed on religious (or “mythical” as Kolakowski calls it) sources, reason's necessary presupposition.

This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1920–1970), a Jewish-Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor, proposing a reading of his work that connects aspects of the poetic, the traumatic and the peripheral that are relevant to political theories of reconciliation and justice. Celan's work is shown to problematize the dominant understandings of communal temporality that are encoded in the reconciliatory transitional project. This temporality approximates a linear and progressive motion: the transitional community (a) leaves behind the legacies of the “violent past” and (b) imagines (and moves towards) i...

An analysis of Poland's and Bulgaria's foreign policy articulations on Iraq provides a discursive platform not only for the manifestation of national self-positioning in the international arena, but also for the expression of national fears and the re-contextualization of historical narratives. The claim is that the Iraq war became a ‘hoax’ for public expressions of the ‘essence of the nation’. Despite the different conditions and historical experience, in both Poland and Bulgaria the foreign policy discourses on Iraq conjured up a fictitious construct of the nation, which, while playing on the (apathetic) credulity of the public, facilitated the radicalization of the political discourse in both countries by undermining the assertion of diversity as a precondition of politics and instead has invoked the imagination of ethnic and moral unity. The conclusion, therefore, is that the foreign policy discourses on Iraq attest to the possibility of the erosion of politics in the post-communist countries.

The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nature by introducing and discussing Jean Amery's concept of resentment. Central to Amery's view of resentment is the restoration of the victim's social status and dignity, the validation of the experience of victimhood; his view therefore contrasts with the Nietzschean derogative view of ressentiment. On the basis of Amery's conceptualizations and with reference to Derrida's notions of “hiatus” and “forgiveness as impossibility,” the article problematizes the relation of ethics and politics—which the “transitional justice” project takes as given. It suggests that to...

The practice of transitional justice in Poland has been closely linked to the process of democratization, but the nature and dynamics of that relationship have remained hotly contested. While both the opponents and the proponents of so-called ‘lustration’ justified their positions in the vocabulary of liberal democracy, they tended to approach the concepts of rights and democracy from two theoretically distinct positions. The debates surrounding this issue revealed and solidified the post-communist cleavage within the group of the former dissidents in regard to their normative theorization of democracy, and a characteristic of this cleavage was polarization of the concepts of restorative justice and retributive justice.

Democracy from Above: Regional Organization and Democratization. By Jon C. Pevehouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 262 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-84482-7), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-60658-6). In Democracy from Above , Jon C. Pevehouse looks at the impact of regional international organizations (IOs) on the domestic processes involved in the transition to and consolidation of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the observation that international factors have traditionally been neglected in democratization studies, this book is an impressive attempt to bridge insights from international relations and comparative politics in a theoretically and methodologically rigorous manner, using numerous empirical examples. Democracy from Above demonstrates Pevehouse's awareness of several ongoing debates within international relations and political science as well as his ability to discuss critically this vast body of literature. The book is situated in part within the literature on international regimes and international cooperation. In this respect, Pevehouse's approach is unabashedly neoliberal. Indeed, the book includes a critique of the realist and neorealist rejection of the role and autonomy of IOs (pp. 51–56) and hence of their capacity to exert pressure on states to democratize. Of course, Democracy from Above also speaks to the vast literature on comparative democratization. In this context, it criticizes to the so-called actor-oriented approach, which emphasizes the role of individuals and of unanticipated, singular occurrences—or path dependence—in democratization processes (for example, Karl 1990; Karl and Schmitter 1991). Pevehouse …

This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation—of affect and of sentiment—and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational overlaps, but they are both kinds of critique of the liberal individualistic subject. Engaging the methodology of juxtaposition, I bring together the affective porous subject (drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan) with the modern sentiment idea of the sensible body, focusing in particular on the 17th- and 18th-century neurological discourses of sensibility in the work of Albrecht von Haller, Georg Ernst Stahl and others. I argue that the modern sentiment tradition forms part of the genealogy of affect in that its ideas of sensibility and sympathy foreground one of the tenets of affective subjectivity: namely, that the subject emerges through (rather than predates) ecological exposure, membranous permeability and nervous responsiveness. In this sense, both the sentimental and affective notions of the subject operate as forms of critique of the idea of Cartesian self and of the disavowal of relational and/or dialogical subject in Western philosophy.

Dubbed a “wicked problem,” climate change is exceeding our ability to agree upon any of the modern repertoire of responses available to us, perhaps most notably a market for carbon trading. Scientists are calling on social scientists and humanities scholars for radical approaches to social transformation. Responding to this call, in this paper we stage a conversation between two scholars across the humanities and social sciences on how new possibilities of political-ethical action might emerge from within the current environmental catastrophe. The site of our philosophical exploration is an agricultural assemblage in New South Wales, Australia, which we examine through the story of a farmer affected by landscape degradation. We are particularly interested in an encounter between a farmer, the landscape, and other species from which new possibilities for agricultural action emerged. Our conversation focuses on the affective formations and fluctuations accompanying this farmer’s experience of “rapid [environmental] degeneration and collapse” in the here and now. Extending from this case study, we develop a way to theorize the profound sense of sorrow experienced by those confronted with the direct and immediate manifestations of environmental degradation and how this sorrow can become a source of political-ethical action. Through the conversational style of our paper we offer an experimental approach to collaboration that aims to create and maintain space from which new thinking can emerge. Such an approach may be exactly what is needed in response to the wicked problem of our time, climate change.