Magdalena Zolkos

Struggles for postcolonial restitution of heritage objects held in museums and other knowledge institutions in the west have challenged the legal and regulatory frameworks securing the collections’ integrity and unseizability and they have oppugned the epistemological power dynamics that manifest through the re-semanticization of the acquisitioned and confiscated objects as ‘mere things’. Drawing attention to the contrast between the international legal discourse of cultural property and what I call ‘refractory speech acts’ deployed by activists, artists and spokespersons from Indigenous communities within restitutive justice movements, I turn to political theories of Roberto Esposito and of Achille Mbembe to outline the critique of the epistemological power of western museums through the conceptual rubric of the ‘dispositif of a thing’ and to explore the possibilities for counter-action and alternative (non-Eurocentric and non-anthropocentric) understandings emerging through restitutive struggles today. Ultimately, I argue that the language, art and political action instantiated by these struggles are decolonizing practices that challenge the binary separation between persons and things, which offer a richer, and more politically radical, understanding of restitution beyond property relations and transfer of ownership.

In her writings on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt regards the manifestation of traumatic hysteria and the breakdown of narrative language among some of the witnesses as a disturbance of the juridical process that primarily serves the national spectacle of suffering. Arendt’s intransigent position on what belongs in the courtroom contrasts with Jacques Derrida’s point about the irreducible difference between juridical testimony and ethical witnessing. For Derrida, the ethical witness cannot ever authenticate or validate their testimony by providing conclusive evidence; in contrast to the courtroom witness, their speech is interwoven with uncertainty and hence inseparable from the call to the listener to believe them. While it might seem, then, that Derrida’s and Arendt’s writings on witnessing have no common ground, I suggest that a more productive philosophical juxtaposition of their approaches needs to look beyond Arendt’s canonical trial report and include her ‘notes on the margins’ such as her letters and essays from the 1940s, the preface she wrote for the English edition of the Frankfurt Trial, and her texts on imagination. This essay develops a reading of Derrida’s and Arendt’s ideas on witnessing, facilitated by the former’s poetic (and political) idiom of ‘unsealing,’ in the hope of foregrounding resonances and connections between them.

In her writings on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt regards the manifestation of traumatic hysteria and the breakdown of narrative language among some of the witnesses as a disturbance of the juridical process that primarily serves the national spectacle of suffering. Arendt’s intransigent position on what belongs in the courtroom contrasts with Jacques Derrida’s point about the irreducible difference between juridical testimony and ethical witnessing. For Derrida, the ethical witness cannot ever authenticate or validate their testimony by providing conclusive evidence; in contrast to the courtroom witness, their speech is interwoven with uncertainty and hence inseparable from the call to the listener to believe them. While it might seem, then, that Derrida’s and Arendt’s writings on witnessing have no common ground, I suggest that a more productive philosophical juxtaposition of their approaches needs to look beyond Arendt’s canonical trial report and include her ‘notes on the margins’ such as her letters and essays from the 1940s, the preface she wrote for the English edition of the Frankfurt Trial, and her texts on imagination. This essay develops a reading of Derrida’s and Arendt’s ideas on witnessing, facilitated by the former’s poetic (and political) idiom of ‘unsealing,’ in the hope of foregrounding resonances and connections between them.

In her writings on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt regards the manifestation of traumatic hysteria and the breakdown of narrative language among some of the witnesses as a disturbance of the juridical process that primarily serves the national spectacle of suffering. Arendt’s intransigent position on what belongs in the courtroom contrasts with Jacques Derrida’s point about the irreducible difference between juridical testimony and ethical witnessing. For Derrida, the ethical witness cannot ever authenticate or validate their testimony by providing conclusive evidence; in contrast to the courtroom witness, their speech is interwoven with uncertainty and hence inseparable from the call to the listener to believe them. While it might seem, then, that Derrida’s and Arendt’s writings on witnessing have no common ground, I suggest that a more productive philosophical juxtaposition of their approaches needs to look beyond Arendt’s canonical trial report and include her ‘notes on the margins’ such as her letters and essays from the 1940s, the preface she wrote for the English edition of the Frankfurt Trial, and her texts on imagination. This essay develops a reading of Derrida’s and Arendt’s ideas on witnessing, facilitated by the former’s poetic (and political) idiom of ‘unsealing,’ in the hope of foregrounding resonances and connections between them.

In her writings on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt regards the manifestation of traumatic hysteria and the breakdown of narrative language among some of the witnesses as a disturbance of the juridical process that primarily serves the national spectacle of suffering. Arendt’s intransigent position on what belongs in the courtroom contrasts with Jacques Derrida’s point about the irreducible difference between juridical testimony and ethical witnessing. For Derrida, the ethical witness cannot ever authenticate or validate their testimony by providing conclusive evidence; in contrast to the courtroom witness, their speech is interwoven with uncertainty and hence inseparable from the call to the listener to believe them. While it might seem, then, that Derrida’s and Arendt’s writings on witnessing have no common ground, I suggest that a more productive philosophical juxtaposition of their approaches needs to look beyond Arendt’s canonical trial report and include her ‘notes on the margins’ such as her letters and essays from the 1940s, the preface she wrote for the English edition of the Frankfurt Trial, and her texts on imagination. This essay develops a reading of Derrida’s and Arendt’s ideas on witnessing, facilitated by the former’s poetic (and political) idiom of ‘unsealing,’ in the hope of foregrounding resonances and connections between them.

Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life explores the ethical and political problem of refusal as an act and utterance of “not doing” violence and injustice that is expected. The film offers a nuanced and poetic depiction of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who refused to give an oath of loyalty to Hitler ( Führereid), and was subsequently imprisoned and executed under the Nazi laws criminalizing conscientious objection as an “offence of sedition.” We argue that Malick complicates the question of what it means to rise in defiance against power by locating Jägerstätter’s refusal not in religious dogma or a position of righteousness, but depicting it as a lived experience infused with affect, hesitation and doubt. We analyze the ethics and politics of refusal in A Hidden Life, focusing on the ways in which Malick depicts the possibility of leading an ethical life in an authoritarian state. This possibility concerns, first, the question of what alternatives emerge from the negative gestures of noncompliance, withdrawal or refusal and the question of enduring and, second, undergoing suffering, rather than imposing it on others. Situating our reading of Malick’s film in a philosophical dialogue with Michel Foucault’s writings on revolt and with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility in a dictatorship, we argue that Malick’s philosophy of refusal encompasses both the negative registers of refusal and articulates its affirmative, relational and testimonial dimensions in relation to history. This is because Malick's Jägerstätter undertook a very specific act of refusal – that of refusing to “make others suffer” (and chose instead to suffer himself). We conclude by drawing attention to three key presences in the film; nature, children and the wife, Fani, who turn the negative power of refusal into an affirmative gesture of companionship, co-presence and witnessing.

Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched performs a cross-disciplinary theoretical analysis of the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. An international group of contributors, including both established and emerging scholars, engage with his writings from diverse disciplinary angles and consider his importance for contemporary political and cultural contexts. Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos, the collection provides a holistic and multi-perspectival approach to Jankélévitch’s writings, one that illuminates nuanced and complex connections across the five sub-fields of philosophy to which Jankélévitch contributed: moral philosophy, virtue theory, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and philosophy of religion. The book addresses different aspects of and problems in Jankélévitch’s philosophy, with all chapters unified by a preoccupation with the motif of intangibility—that which cannot be touched.

The Didi-Huberman Dictionary is a specialized introduction to the thought of contemporary French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, best known for his path-breaking philosophy of image and for his impact on the 'visual turn' in theoretical humanities. With over 150 entries, including 125 main entries, the dictionary is a useful research tool for students coming to Didi-Huberman's work for the first time. Entries range from Theodor Adorno and Anthropology through to Materiality and Memory and on to Aby Warburg and Witnessing. Researchers already familiar with his work, but who want to develop a multi-faceted and more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical and cultural references woven into his thought, will gain deeper knowledge of the nuances of his conceptual apparatus, given the interreferential and intertextual aspects of his work. The dictionary identifies and explains his key figures, inspirations and philosophical metaphors as well as introduces Didi-Huberman's polemics with other contemporary philosophers, including Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière. Entries on concepts and motifs from Didi-Huberman's major texts that are (as of yet) not translated into English - Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992), and Ninfa moderna (2002) - are also included. This is your one-stop, go-to resource for learning more about the innovative, exciting work of Georges Didi-Huberman.

Didi-Huberman conceptualizes images as unstable and incongruent events in disagreement with the art historiographic discourses that reduce visuality to the contents of representation. I analyze the link between Freud’s dream-theory and Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of images, focusing on the notion of dreams and images as instance of (up)rising against repression and erasure. Didi-Huberman does not simply “apply” psychoanalysis to disrupt the dominant art historiography; his interpretation of the dream book speaks to his originality as a reader of Freud who brings to the fore the importance of visual categories in psychoanalysis. Viewing images as disunified and “rent” has also political implications. The name of this power in Didi-Huberman’s project is anadyomene (“she that rises”); the imaginal rhythm of pendular dialectical movement between appearance and disappearance. I discuss Didi-Huberman’s analyses of photographs of camps and ghettos, and of uprisings, which highlight the link between the imaginal unconscious and aesthetics of anadyomene, and political subjectivization and resistance.

Analyses the social imaginary of undoing, repair and return underpinning the international norm of restitution-makingApproaches restitution not just as a legal norm of property return, but as a social imaginary and a cultural-psychoanalytic 'scene' of undoing, repair and returnBrings together philosophic-political, socio-legal and cultural-psychoanalytic approaches to the study of restitutionOutlines a heterogeneous and multifaceted idea of restitution emergent in modernity, and looks at the peripheries of the modern restitutive tradition in the search for alternatives and counter-traditionsThis book takes a unique approach grounded in political and cultural discourse to develop a political theory of restitution. Challenging assumptions about restitution in the Western legal and political tradition, where it has become nearly synonymous with reacquisition and where legal studies focus on material objects and claims to their ownership, Zolkos argues that the development of restitutive norms has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty, and excavates the restitutive tradition's mythical-religious substrate. Bringing together texts from within and outwith the Western canon of political theory and philosophy, including the writings of Grotius, Durkheim, Freud, and Klein, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book undertakes a dual task: reading literary texts as a political theorising of restitution, and reading political or sociological texts as literary narratives with distinctive 'restitutive tropes' of repair, undoing and return.

The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice. Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning the humanitarian restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It locates the genealogy of restitution in Émile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour, individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss.

This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1920?1970), a Jewish-Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor, proposing a reading of his work that connects aspects of the poetic, the traumatic and the peripheral that are relevant to political theories of reconciliation and justice. Celan's work is shown to problematize the dominant understandings of communal temporality that are encoded in the reconciliatory transitional project. This temporality approximates a linear and progressive motion: the transitional community (a) leaves behind the legacies of the ?violent past? and (b) imagines (and moves towards) its future as an emancipative movement positioned beyond the constraints of the historical violence and injustice. In Celan's work, however, the traumatized subject's experience of temporality is understood metaphorically as an impossible passage. In contrast to the linear and progressive unfolding of the collective imaginary, the movement within a passage is repetitive, elliptical and, quite literally, aporetic (impassible). There is no guarantee of a successful passing through; instead, within the passage, Celan's traumatic and poetic subject encounters the abysmal. This basic contrast suggests that a critical theory of reconciliation should not only account for the fragility of human life in relation to historical violence, but respond to the constant proximity of violence within the reconciliatory project itself

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.

The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nature by introducing and discussing Jean Améry's concept of resentment. Central to Améry's view of resentment is the restoration of the victim's social status and dignity, the validation of the experience of victimhood; his view therefore contrasts with the Nietzschean derogative view of ressentiment. On the basis of Améry's conceptualizations and with reference to Derrida's notions of “hiatus” and “forgiveness as impossibility,” the article problematizes the relation of ethics and politics—which the “transitional justice” project takes as given. It suggests that to theorize on justice, one needs to parenthesize the moral imagery of forgiveness and bring thirdness to the fore as the space where the identities of “victims” and “perpetrators” are established and played out.

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing.

Han Kang's 2007 novel The Vegetarian, published in English translation in 2015, tells a story of one woman's refusal to eat meat. Yeong-hye's refusal comes from her desire to eschew the intersecting violence of patriarchy and carnism, which gradually reveals an underlying psychosis and drive towards self-attrition. Because of the central motifs of bodily transgression and self-abnegation in the novel, critics have compered Han Kang's Yeong-hye to Frantz Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the hunger artist. Just as the hunger artist seeks seclusion from human sociality in the space of his vacuous interiority, so does Yeong-hye sequester herself from the gaze of others in her visions of...