Reconciliation as Ideology and Politics

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleAgainst 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 moral community to politicise the terms of political belonging; 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

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

An encyclopedia entry about the political theory of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt and the Philosophical Repression of Politics

For: Jean-Philippe Deranty & Alison Ross (eds) Jacques Rancière in the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality. London: Continuum.Rancière and Arendt are both praxis theorists who want to escape political philosophy’s reduction of political issues to questions of government. For each of them, Plato seems to stand in for their former teacher, exemplifying the philosopher’s antipathy toward politics. Both look beyond the canon of political philosophy to find a more authentic mode of political thought, sometimes highlighting apparently marginal figures as exemplary political actors. For instance, while Arendt valorises Gotthold Lessing for his passionate openness to the world and love of it, Rancière celebrates Joseph Jacotot as the ignorant schoolmaster who presupposes an equality of intelligence between teacher and student. Arendt and Rancière both understand politics as aesthetic in nature, concerning the sensible world of appearances. They are both preoccupied with ‘events’ or exceptional moments of political action through which social worlds are disclosed to the senses. Given these affinities, sympathetic readers of Arendt might be surprised by Rancière’s claim that Arendt’s political thought, in fact, represses politics in a way paradigmatic of the tradition she sought to escape from. On the contrary, it might appear that rather than offering a rival view of politics, Rancière actually amends and extends an Arendtian conception of politics (e.g. Ingram 2006; 2008). I want to caution against such an interpretation. It is true that Arendt is an important influence on Rancière, despite his polemic against her. Yet, as Rancière (2003a, xxviii) observes in a different context, ‘the power of a mode of thinking has to do above all with its capacity to be displaced.’ Arendt’s understanding of praxis seems to resonate within Rancière’s work. However, those apparently Arendtian notions that Rancière make use of are fundamentally transformed when transposed within his broader thematization of dissensus. To develop this argument I first examine Arendt’s own account of the tension between philosophy and politics in order to understand the phenomenological basis of the political theory that she sought to develop. I then consider how persuasive Rancière’s characterization of Arendt as an ‘archipolitical’ thinker is. In the final section, I discuss some key passages in Disagreement in which Rancière alludes to Arendt. These passages highlight how those Arendtian concepts that do seem to find their way into Rancière’s thought are transformed when displaced from her ontology

The absurd proposition of Aboriginal sovereignty

© 'Law and Agonistic Politics', Andrew Schaap (ed.), 2009, Ashgate. Chapter 13 of book. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/978075467314

The politics of need

Copyright © 2010 AshgateIn this chapter, I examine why Hannah Arendt views the satisfaction of human needs as, at best a pre-political concern and, at worst, the basis of an anti-political politics. This requires unpacking how Arendt develops her concept of the political in terms of her critique of Marx’s valorisation of labour. I argue that Arendt’s rejection of the satisfaction of human needs as a properly political concern is premised on a reductive ontological conception of needs, which neglects their historical dimension. I agree with Arendt that the end of politics is the enjoyment of freedom in a community of equals. Against Arendt, however, I take it that politics begins with the articulation of injustice, which often arises from the experience of unmet need. From this perspective, Arendt’s conception of the political has the perverse consequence of potentially depoliticising injustice. Yet Arendt’s understanding of the political in terms of praxis might nonetheless enable a distinction to be drawn between an authentic (political) form of the politics of need and an inauthentic (anti- or a-political) one. In this context, both Marx’s concept of ‘radical need’ (as discussed by Agnes Heller) and the work of Jacques Rancière suggest the possibility of a politics of need that might have the world-disclosing potential that is, for Arendt, the defining feature of the political

Aboriginal sovereignty and the democratic paradox

Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher

Political reconciliation

In this study in political theory I develop a political conception of reconciliation. In the late twentieth century, the concept of reconciliation became prominent in the political discourse of many polities divided by grave state wrongs. Reconciliation is an inherently political aspiration since it invokes a "we" to underwrite the legitimacy of shared public institutions. Yet the logic of reconciliation, which tends toward harmony and closure, also seems at odds with politics, which invariably entails plurality and conflict.The work of Carl Schmitt provides a point of departure for considering the political nature of reconciliation and defining the problem of how a relation of enmity might be transformed into one of civic friendship. In the first half of this thesis I consider the liberal ideal of toleration (as articulated by John Locke) and the communitarian ideal of recognition (as articulated by Charles Taylor) as political ethics that might animate reconciliation. Against toleration and recognition, I turn to Hannah Arendt's ethic of worldliness to develop a theory of political reconciliation. Reconciliation, on this account, entails a difficult mode of interaction between former enemies that seeks to enclose both within a common horizon of understanding while affirming the possibility of calling any such shared horizon into question.In the second half of the thesis, I draw on the interdisciplinary literature surrounding transitional justice to develop this theory of political reconciliation. I consider the implications of Arendt's ethic of worldliness (outlined in the first half of the thesis) for how we should think about four key issues confronting societies divided by past wrongs: the constitution of a political association that might accommodate former enemies; political grounds for forgiveness; the collective responsibility of those implicated in state wrongs and; coming to terms with the past through remembrance of these wrongs.Two central arguments recur throughout the thesis. First, we should affirm reconciliation as an aspiration that sustains politics by framing an encounter between enemies in which they might debate the possibility and terms of their association. Yet, we must also invoke politics to resist the tendency inherent in the logic of reconciliation to bring to a close what should remain open, incomplete, contestable. Second, and following from this, in conceiving reconciliation politically we must reverse the order of our moral thinking. It is a political mistake to presuppose a common moral community that must be restored between those alienated by past wrongs. Political reconciliation would never get off the ground if it required agreement on shared norms and the nature of wrongdoing in order to initiate the 'return' of the wrongdoers to community with those wronged. Rather, it must begin with the constitution of a space for politics through the invocation of a "we" and proceed from this faith in a community that is not yet toward the possibility of a shared understanding of what went before

Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia

Paper submitted to special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Special Issue on Citizenship Without Community, ed. Vicki Squire and Angharad Closs StephensAs a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. The Embassy re-appeared intermittently throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with a demonstration held at the site annually on Australia/Invasion Day. It has maintained a continuous presence in Canberra since it was reinstated on its twentieth anniversary in 1992 to declare Aboriginal sovereignty in opposition to the formal reconciliation process. Reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics within mainstream public discourse in Australia. In this paper, we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non- Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact

Contrasting local and long-range-transported warm ice-nucleating particles during an atmospheric river in coastal California, USA

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) have been found to influence the amount, phase and efficiency of precipitation from winter storms, including atmospheric rivers.Warm INPs, those that initiate freezing at temperatures warmer than -10°C, are thought to be particularly impactful because they can create primary ice in mixed-phase clouds, enhancing precipitation efficiency. The dominant sources of warm INPs during atmospheric rivers, the role of meteorology in modulating transport and injection of warm INPs into atmospheric river clouds, and the impact of warm INPs on mixed-phase cloud properties are not well-understood. In this case study, time-resolved precipitation samples were collected during an atmospheric river in northern California, USA, during winter 2016. Precipitation samples were collected at two sites, one coastal and one inland, which are separated by about 35 km. The sites are sufficiently close that air mass sources during this storm were almost identical, but the inland site was exposed to terrestrial sources of warm INPs while the coastal site was not. Warm INPs were more numerous in precipitation at the inland site by an order of magnitude. Using FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model) dispersion modeling and radar-derived cloud vertical structure, we detected influence from terrestrial INP sources at the inland site but did not find clear evidence of marine warm INPs at either site.We episodically detected warm INPs from long-range-transported sources at both sites. By extending the FLEXPART modeling using a meteorological reanalysis, we demonstrate that long-range-transported warm INPs were observed only when the upper tropospheric jet provided transport to cloud tops. Using radar-derived hydrometeor classifications, we demonstrate that hydrometeors over the terrestrially influenced inland site were more likely to be in the ice phase for cloud temperatures between 0 and -10°C. We thus conclude that terrestrial and long-rangetransported aerosol were important sources of warm INPs during this atmospheric river. Meteorological details such as transport mechanism and cloud structure were important in determining (i) warm INP source and injection temperature and (ii) ultimately the impact of warm INPs on mixed-phase cloud properties