The risk and promise of action 107 4.3 Reflective judgement 117 5. Political Reconciliation 126 5.1 Beyond realism, toleration, recognition 127 5.2 The political (im)possibility of reconciliation 134 6. Constitution 139 6.1 Between past and future 6.2 Beginning 6.3 Promising "never again" 6.4 "We the people" 7. Forgiveness 7.1 Setting aside resentment 7.2 Inadequacy of reason and necessity 7.3 Political grounds for forgiveness 7.4 Amnesty, amnesia and anamnesis 8. Responsibility 8.1 Guilt and denial 8.2 Good men and good citizens 8.3 Shame and sentimentality 194 8.4 Apology, reparation and the passage of time 9. Remembrance 9.1 Truth and politics 9.2 The redemptive power of narrative 9.3 The judgement of history 9.4 Commemoration Conclusion References
In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancière’s response to Arendt’s aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancière, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoë) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoë and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancière ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancière’s approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life.
This article considers how reconciliation might be understood as a democratic undertaking. It does so by examining the implications of the debate between theorists of 'deliberative' and 'agonistic' democracy for the practice of democracy in divided societies. I argue that, in taking consensus as a regulative idea, deliberative democracy tends to conflate moral and political community thereby representing conflict as already communal. In contrast, an agonistic theory of democracy provides a critical perspective from which to discern what is at stake in the politics of reconciliation since it understands community as a contingent achievement of political action. As such, an agonistic account of democracy suggests the possibility of retrieving the concept of reconciliation from a statesanctioned project of nation-building for a democratic politics centred on the possibilities of self-determination and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence.
Role playing is more likely to promote active learning amongst undergraduate students than a traditional university lecture. This teaching method has been employed effectively in disciplines such as history and in area‐studies subjects such as Middle Eastern politics in which students assume the role of particular historical or political agents. However, it is not obvious how role playing might be used to teach political theory. In this article, I discuss a role‐play exercise that I devised and consider how it helped to promote what Paul Ramsden calls a ‘deep‐holistic’ approach to learning amongst undergraduate students in a second/third year subject in political theory.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.