Seminar: Reconciliation as Ideology and Politics

Presenter: Andrew Schaap, University of Melbourne

Organised by the Philosophy Department Seminar series
and the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion
at Macquarie University

This seminar will be of interest to all students and academics working in the area of reconciliation, from a social, legal, political or cultural perspective.

Audience: Everyone
Date: Tuesday 12th June 2007
Time: 2:00pm-4:00pm
Location: Building W6A, Room 107

For further information: Contact Mianna Lotz on (02) 9850 8804

Against the critique of reconciliation as an irredeemably ideological concept, I want to retrieve the concept of reconciliation for a popular politics. As a term of political discourse, reconciliation has been objected to for being: too vague, illiberal, question-begging, assimilative, quietist and exculpatory. Each objection draws attention to the tendency of every state-sanctioned project of reconciliation to become ideological in the Marxist sense. In contrast, a politics of reconciliation would: be enabled by the contestability of what real reconciliation requires; refer to human rights in their constitutive political sense; invoke a counter-factual commonality to politicise the terms of inclusion in the society to-be reconciled; acknowledge the risk that the beginning it seeks to enact in the present may not come to pass; be predicated on a gratitude that a willingness to forgive makes reconciliation available as political opportunity in the first place, and; conceive collective responsibility in terms of an ongoing responsiveness to the legacy of past wrongs that might unite the community-to-be-reconciled.

Forthcoming in Constellations: An International Journal of Democratic and Critical Theory, 2008.