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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 focuses on the theory of restitution in Hugo Grotius’ writings on the conduct of war and on conditions of ante bellum in his 1604/1605 De Iure Praedae and in the 1625 De Iure Belli ac Pacis. It looks closely at three aspects of Grotius’s restitution theory: first, its association with corrective, compensatory and expletive justice response to wrongdoing; second, its understanding as an expression of a uniquely human desire for social community; and, third, its relation to the broader imaginary of the law of postliminium. This elucidates different, though overlapping, meanings of return at play in the modern restitutive discourse, including the return of expropriated objects to their previous owner; the subject’s return as home-coming and repatriation; and the subject’s return to a previously occupied position or condition.

Simon Curtis’ 2015 film Woman in Gold narrates the struggle of Maria Altmann, a Jewish war refugee from Austria (played by Helen Mirren), to reclaim her family’s property confiscated by the Nazis in a protracted court battle with the Austrian state (Republic of Austria...

This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive goals of politics and law seeking to do justice for the past and to ‘undo’ the expropriations and dispossessions that have occurred, and are still occurring (be it in contexts of coloniality or war), this book looks at the limits and aporias of restitution in texts of philosophy, literature and social theory. As such, it identifies figures and objects situated beyond the possibility of restitution and repair. This includes analysis of the social fantasies and imaginaries that ‘prop’ our contemporary reparative politics—making the past ‘unhappen’, or cancelling out the occurrence of wrongs. What the analysed texts have in common is that they articulate restitution through the motifs of undoing and making-unhappen, as a reparative and curative procedure, and a prelapsarian return to a place, time or condition prior to the event of violence. Insofar as this reading uncovers the mythical-religious ‘substrate’ of the restitutive tradition, and illuminates the political and affective allures of prelapsarianism, this book also offers insights into Western secularism, not as disappearance of religious thought in the public domain, but as its ‘repression’ (in a psychoanalytic sense).

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.

This chapter offers a reading of texts by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein on undoing, restitution and reparation. It elaborates psychoanalytic the insights into the theory of restitution alongside two non-identical, though overlapping, trajectories—the concept of retroactive annulment (Undgeschehenmachen) and Klein’s theory of reparative action—as well as into the discussion on status quo ante, which has been very closely connected to the history of the concept of restitution. It contrasts restitution-as-undoing and restitution-as-repair in Klein’s writings and her important theory of the subject’s reparative and curative undertaking following their destructive impulse towards the love-object. It links Klein’s theory of reparation with a text by Joan Riviere, which presents status quo ante as an expression of the subject’s refusal to submit to analysis. Riviere outlines a figure of an ‘unrestitutable subject’, who refuses ‘to get better’, and obstinately clings to the neurotic state.

Louise Erdrich’s book LaRose (2016) tells the story of two families belonging to an Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota, whose lives are shattered by the accidental shooting of a child, Dusty, by the neighbour, Landreaux Iron, while hunting for deer.1 The profound rift that the child’s killing causes in the families’ coexistence and in the local Ojibwe community at large can be repaired only through a compensatory ritual, whereby Landreaux’s family performs an act of restitution to their neighbours by ‘replacing’ the killed child with their own son, LaRose. Adopted by Dusty’s parents, Peter and Nola, LaRose becomes a substitutive presence in Ravich’s family, filling the void caused by the killing; he stands in the place of another child, and, assuming a new name, personal objects and identity, ...

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’.

While the question of justice for the victims of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war has generated great communal and scholarly interest, in Taiwan it remains a pressing and unresolved concern what implications this traumatic history has had for the consolidation of the postcolonial and post-authoritarian publics. This is not only because the sexual enslavement of Taiwanese women unfolded before the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, in particular of the Indigenous “highlander” groups but also because the post-war public (and private) narrativization of this history, and any pursuit of justice, were impossible during Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian era. Referring to the victims by the Taiwanese term “Ama” (rather than the more common but problematic term “comfort women”), I propose that in contemporary Taiwan the traumatic history of female sexual enslavement is of great significance for contemporary public life because it functions as a kind of “optic,” which reveals and magnifies broader historical dynamics of colonial appropriation, of sexual and epistemic violence against women, and of the marginalization of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged groups. Methodologically, the identification of such an optic draws from cultural theory of psychoanalysis, which links traumatic experience to “unspeakability” and to psychic repression of overwhelming contents, and from sociological and philosophic insights into silencing as a mode of epistemic violence.

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts,...

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.

The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice. Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning the humanitarian restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It locates the genealogy of restitution in Emile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour, individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss.

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.

The figure of the Jewish pariah has permeated Western cultural imagination, as demonstrated, for example, by the re-emergence of the medieval myth of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, in modern anti-Semitism. In Western European states the figure (and fantasy) of the Jewish pariah helped to consolidate national identity in the modern period at the cost of exclusion and violence against Europe’s others. This article focuses, first, on the cultural and political genealogy of the tradition of the ‘conscious pariah’, which emerged in Jewish thought in the nineteenth century, as a formation of the subject who asserts, rather than rejects or evades, her/his status as an outcast. Second, the article situates the Jewish tradition of conscious pariahdom vis-à-vis the work of Holocaust philosopher Jean Améry in order to critically analyse his alleged advocacy of the victim-oriented politics of memory and historical redress. The argument is that in contrast to the dominant interpretations of Améry’s thought as invested in the subject’s own suffering, his negative constructions of Jewishness engender a philosophical gesture beyond the lachrymose readings of Jewish history and pariahdom. Améry’s conception of the conscious pariah is an attempt to inscribe ‘hyperbolic’ ethical content into the experience of deracination and estrangement.

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 …

‘I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman — a mother — killed, then I’ll confront that person’ (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, cited in Landesman, 2002). These are the words of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who currently stands trial before the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which has been established to prosecute crimes committed during the 1994 genocide. Together with her son, she is accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and rape. Nyiramasuhuko is the first women to be tried by the ICTR.