Abstract
At bottom, this chapter concerns itself with the lack of reparation in post-conflict societies such as South Africa and Rwanda, which it reads as intense postcolonial metonymies of a planetary Irreparable. In its insistence on reserving the term ‘reparation’ for the name of a spectre that does not fail to haunt the Irreparable, the chapter considers the conditions of a reparative encounter between the Irreparable and the spectre of reparation, an encounter out of which hope may be generated. In the course of the argument, the chapter returns to the Pandora myth and Gillian Rose’s reading of Plutarch’s Widow of Phocion in order to illustrate that the question of hope turns on an encounter with the spectral remains that eschews the all-too-easy distinction between the psychic/spiritual and the material aspects of ‘reparation’. In conclusion, the chapter proposes Lacan’s discourse of analysis as the psycho-affective socio-political matrix conducive to the reparative intervention.
[T]he ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do
—Derrida 1994, 98
[O]nly if we entertain our ghosts will we have the remotest chance of moving forwards into the next stage of historical time
—Rose 2020
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Notes
- 1.
Once again, I must insist that the signifier ‘citizenship’ in the phrase ‘reparative citizenship’ is not meant to designate a site of exclusion grounded in the ‘formal’, ‘official’ requirements of a nation-state’s citizenship laws. With this word, I have in mind, rather, a designation akin to the way Hannah Arendt invoked the concept to denote political life/the bios politikos in general, which readers of Arendt will know is bounded up in Arendt’s work with the practice/pursuit of freedom. Of this Arendt writes in the context of the French Revolution that the citoyen was a ‘new revolutionary concept’, a ‘new concept of man’. See Arendt (1994, 170).
- 2.
Willemse (2017, 686) uses this term to indicate that, for Agamben, ‘all the elements and creatures of the world’ are exiled from Paradise and/but, as such, enjoy an ‘incorruptible fallenness’. It is in this view of exile and of fallenness as ‘incorruptible’, that the valence of the Irreparable as a source of hope, arises.
- 3.
One should note here also the contrasting way in which recent critical theory has re-engaged the question of hope. On the one hand, Žižek (2015) insists on the trope of ‘hopelessness’ in his recent book The Courage of Hopelessness while, on the other hand, Terry Eagleton (2015) renders a hope ‘without optimism’.
- 4.
It is certainly the case that there is an Arendtian tension that arises here between our capacity as homo faber whose work is production and our capacity for politics as the bios politikos and describing hope in this way as a political ‘making’ seems to undermine the very distinction between production and politics that Arendt was at pains to maintain. This is a tension to which future research will attend.
- 5.
- 6.
In fact, in Jean Anouilh’s famous adaptation (1946, 95), Antigone positively rails against hope: ‘Nous sommes de ceux qui posent les questions jusqu’au bout. Jusqu’à ce qu’il ne reste vraiment plus la petite chance d’espoir vivante, la plus petite chance d’espoir à étrangler. Nous sommes de ceux qui lui sautent dessus quand ils le rencontrent, votre espoir, votre cher espoir, votre sale espoir!’ (‘We are those who endlessly pose questions, until not even the slightest hope is left to be strangled. We hate your hope, your dear hope, your filthy hope!’)
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Barnard-Naudé, J. (2020). What Pandora Did: The Spectre of Reparation and Hope in an Irreparable World. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_4
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