Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence: The Grieving and the Unrepentant

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Product Description Contemporary political ethics has to face the question of how to repair relations which have broken down after crimes, oppression, and political violence. The book employs the work of European and feminist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Albert Camus, Simone Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgio Agamben, Immanuel Kant, Jean Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Margaret Urban Walker and Linda Radzik to engage with historical and recent cases: the post-liberation French purge, post-genocide Rwanda and post-colonial Australia and draws out the negative and positive conditions of ethical political responses in these contexts. It develops a philosophical account of ethical restoration through focusing on just punishment, guilt and shame, rebuilding political trust, forgiveness and reconciliation, remorse and atonement, and self-forgiveness. Review One of the virtues of La Caze’s book is that it summons a plurality of voices to build her account. She invokes the usual suspects in the post-atrocity literature, but also authors who are less familiar within this scholarship, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida or even Albert Camus. Likewise, although La Caze is rooted more firmly in the continental tradition, she engages the work of analytic philosophers. And when she relies on canonical authors, she draws on them in original ways, that bear directly on neuralgic discussions, as when she delves into the work of Immanuel Kant to shed light on discussions about the importance of building trust in transitional societies. The result is a richly textured and complex work of political philosophy. Alongside the subtle exegesis of the work of these authors, the book examines concrete cases to inform its claims. They range from the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath or the Nazi occupation of France to post-colonial Australia or the abuses in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. The cases are very diverse, as the author herself admits. This diversity helps La Caze drive home the point that ethical responses to past atrocity must be sensitive to social and political circumstances, a point she is right to underscore. ( Contemporary Political Theory) This book offers to political philosophy a coherent, previously under-appreciated, argument for ethical constraints on political projects of rebuilding fractured communities. Taken as a contribution to a range of interdisciplinary discourses in social and political philosophy, peace studies, sociology, and psychology, the book is notable for its careful analysis of the overlapping concepts of forgiveness, atonement and reconciliation. Its focus on community restoration as necessarily ethical is a distinctive addition to this set of discourses, in which social and political restructuring is often too abstractly theorized to even allow this book’s compelling ethical questions to emerge. (Tracey Nicholls, Soka University) For a long time, Marguerite La Caze has been at the forefront of efforts to interrogate the nature of ethical restoration in post-conflict situations. In her new book, she takes this timely project to a new level, both in terms of analytical rigour and of interpretive commitments. Analyzing such diverse phenomena as the death penalty, gacaca courts and crimes against humanity, Ethical Restoration After Communal Violence makes a highly original contribution to ongoing discussions around responses to violence and injustice. La Caze masterfully weaves together close readings of some of the stalwarts of contemporary European philosophy (amongst others, Améry, Arendt, Beauvoir, Camus, Derrida and Sartre) with investigations into the moral complexity of punishment, trust, forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement and self-forgiveness. This book is exemplary both in style and substance, elegantly written and full of illuminating observations. Political philosophers as well as scholars of transitional justice will have much to learn from it. (