Multilayered temporalities underlying transitional justice: rethinking resentment and melancholia from Jean Améry and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

After the collective violence of the twentieth century, political debates on how to deal with historical debts stemming from such dreadful events have become the ground upon which ethical categories engage with sociohistorical processes. Due to events such as the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, the Apartheid, or colonial warfare, notions of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and political forgiveness were brought to the fore in public discourse and ethical debates. Owing to the legacies of such violence within post-conflict societies, there is a growing sense that the unsettling past persists in the present demanding recognition and accountability. Obviously, the victims who had suffered systematic and state-sponsored violence have become a prism through which unsettling historical debts haunt the present. Dealing with the voices of victims demanding justice and reparation is considered the most important goal of the juridical and political processes defined as “transitional justice,” which provides priceless resources for ensuring both stability and legitimacy of new democracies, after violent political transformations. At the end of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world—South America, Eastern and Southern Europe, South Africa—new democratic regimes emerged from authoritarian dictatorships. The new democracies not only had to deal with the tasks of reconstructing and modernizing their societies to avoid falling back into struggles but they also had to prosecute the crimes committed by those who had previously held power....