PREFACE

1. New York City Press Office, “Mayor de Blasio Holds Media Availability at Mt. Sinai United Christian Church on Staten Island,” transcript, December 3, 2014.

2. Alicia Garza and L. A. Kauffman, “A Love Note to Our Folks: Alicia Garza on the Organizing of #BlackLivesMatter,” n+1 Magazine, January 20, 2015.

3. Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” New York Times, June 22, 2015.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).

7. Claudia Rankine, “Blackness as the Second Person: Meara Sharma Interviews Claudia Rankine,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, November 17, 2014.

8. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Colcaud, and Niklaus Steiner, eds., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). See also Imani Michelle Scott, ed., Crimes against Humanity in the Land of the Free: Can a Truth and Reconciliation Process Heal Racial Conflict in America? (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014.)

9. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2011); Ronald Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); “Beyond the Mandate: Continuing the Conversation,” Report of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Hermon, ME, June 14, 2015.

10. James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” New York Times, January 14, 1962.

11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).

12. Bob Dylan, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Bringing It All Back Home (Warner Bros., 1965).

13. James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” in The Fire Next Time (London: Vintage, 1992), 5.

14. James Baldwin, “Interview with Malcolm Presten,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 26.

1. THE POLITICS OF MOURNING IN AMERICA

1. For this and other documents related to the CWP and the Greensboro Massacre, see the online repository of the Civil Rights Greensboro Project, http://library.uncg.edu/dp/crg.

2. The marchers had agreed, in tense negotiations with the police, to leave the shotguns unloaded. See Spoma Jovanovic, Democracy, Dialogue and Community Action: Truth and Reconciliation in Greensboro (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012).

3. Signe Waller, Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

4. Quoted in Jovanovic, Democracy, Dialogue, and Community Action, 18, 18–19, 11–13.

5. Ibid., 7.

6. Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

7. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.

8. As Chafe points out, civility often served an ideological function insofar as it offered a thin veneer of racial moderation that obscured the radical disparities and disagreements in Greensboro and elsewhere in the South. It is notable, for instance, that despite being one of the first cities to announce compliance with Brown v. Board, Greensboro still had over twenty schools in 1970 that were over 99 percent black or white. See the North Carolina State Advisory Commission on Civil Rights, “Trouble in Greensboro: A Report of the Open Meeting Concerning the Disturbances at Dudley High School and NCA&T State University,” Raleigh, North Carolina, March 1970.

9. Edward Rothstein, “Four Men, A Counter and Soon, Revolution,” New York Times January 31, 2010.

10. M. Kent Jennings, “Political Responses to Pain and Loss,” American Political Science Review 93 (March 1999): 1–13.

11. “Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP,” documentary, directed by James Wentzy, April 4, 2004 (ACT UP–DIVA TV, 2002), DVD; Scott Malone, “Michael Brown Protesters Stage “Die-in” in Missouri,” Reuters news release, November 17, 2015, accessed December 31, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/16/michael-brown-protesters-louis_n_6167714.html; Sara Helman and Tamar Rapoport, “Women in Black: Challenging Israel’s Gender and Socio-political Orders,” British Journal of Sociology 48 (December 1997): 681–700.

12. Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 219.

13. On the question of shared agency and the commemoration of sacrifice, see Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

14. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 34; see also Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010).

15. Wendy Brown, “Political Idealization and Its Discontents,” Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

16. Libby Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

17. See David S. Gutterman and Andrew R. Murphy, “The ‘Ground Zero mosque’: Sacred Space and the Boundaries of American Identity,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2, no. 3 (2014): 368–85.

18. Butler, Precarious Life, xix.

19. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (New York: SR Books, 1994). Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi, “The State, Classes and Modes of Mobilization in the Iranian Revolution,” State, Culture, and Society 1, no. 3 (1985): 3–40.

20. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 103. See also Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception,” Political Theory 37 (February 2009).

21. See Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. (London: Polity Press, 2001). On commemoration and forgetting, see Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). See also Jeffrey Olick, ed., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

22. Lisa Magarrell and Joya Wesley, Learning from Greensboro: Truth and Reconciliation in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 212.

23. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Colcaud, and Niklaus Steiner, eds., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

24. Louis Bickford, “Memoryworks/Memory Works,” in Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society: Beyond Outreach, ed. Clara Ramirez-Barat, 491–528 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2014). See also Stephen Winter, Transitional Justice in Established Democracies: A Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

25. Jean Axelrod Cahan, “Reconciliation or Reconstruction? Further Thoughts on Political Forgiveness,” Polity 45 (April 2013): 174–97.

26. Axel Honneth, The Right to Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 66.

27. Ibid., 46.

28. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 5

29. Honneth, Right to Freedom, 63–67; see also Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

30. Young, Responsibility for Justice.

31. Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence,” New Yorker, January 5, 2015. See also Gesine Schwan, Politics and Guilt: The Destructive Power of Silence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

32. Vamik Volkan, Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997).

33. Boltanski, Love and Justice as Competences (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 42.

34. As Lawrie Balfour argues, law “does not reach as far” as social norms, meaning that patterns and habits of misrecognition cannot be legislated out of existence or approached primarily through juridical mechanisms. Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 79–80.

35. Along similar lines, Patchen Markell has argued that justice frameworks need to be supplemented by the idea “acknowledgment,” in which the orientation is less toward the settlement of political controversies than toward a means of “aspect change” in which our awareness of plurality and nonsovereignty can be expanded. Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). For a similar use of acknowledgment in the context of racial injustice, see Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

36. See Eddie Glaude, who discusses the “daunting challenge of work[ing] through the reality of our dead,” in a country marked by legacies of chattel slavery, forced displacement of native peoples, and legal segregation. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

37. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Of course there have been many other interpretations and appropriations of Antigone within contemporary political theory. Jean Elshtain has offered a reading of Antigone in support of her theory of social feminism, although both Honig and Butler critique Elshtain for essentializing gender norms (Butler) or for a “mortalist humanism” that avoids the hard questions of politics (Honig). See Elshtain, “The Mothers of the Disappeared: An Encounter with Antigone’s Daughters,” in Finding a New Feminism, ed. Pamela Grande Jensen (Boulder, CO: Roman and Littlefield, l996), l29–48. In a different vein, neo-Leninists such as Slavoj Zizek follow Jacques Lacan and valorize Antigone because she rejects the symbolic order and stays true to her (transgressive or revolutionary) desire. For Zizek, Antigone provides an example of a purely positive act of assertion, and as such she is a model for radical ethico-political action in the teeth of communicative capitalism. Slavoj Zizek, “From Antigone to Joan of Arc,” Helios 31, no. 1 (2004): 51–62. See also Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). In describing Antigone in terms of an agonistic, activist politics of resistance, I am not claiming that every interpretation of the play fits into this mold, but rather that agonism has styled its vision of politics in part beneath the shadow of Antigone’s agon with Creon. On this point, see Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 13.

38. In Plato’s Menexenus, Socrates sarcastically details the powerful narcotic effects of funeral oratory, saying that such speeches made him feel that he was living in the “Isles of the Blessed” rather than within an imperfect polis. Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Hackett, 1997).

39. Simon Stow, “Pericles at Ground Zero: Tragedy, Patriotism, and Public Mourning,” American Political Science Review 101 (May 2007): 195–208.

40. Simon Stow, “From Upper Canal to Lower Manhattan: Memorialization and the Politics of Loss,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (September 2012): 687–700.

41. Simon Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing: Frederick Douglass, Joseph Lowery, and the Democratic Value of African American Public Mourning,” American Political Science Review 104 (November 2010): 681–97.

42. Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical Greek City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 252.

43. Ibid., 252.

44. On the intersections between memory and justice, see W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).

45. Discourses of reconciliation can serve as mechanisms of denial or as ideological displacements of political conflicts onto ethical terrain of “forgiveness.” See George Shulman, “Acknowledgement and Disavowal as an Idiom for Theorizing Politics,” Theory and Event 14, no. 1 (2011). By contrast, Hannah Arendt described forgiveness as a key political virtue and as a necessary complement to human action because it “releases us and others from the chain and pattern of consequences that all action engenders.” Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

46. Erin B. Mee and Helene P. Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

47. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Compare Libby Anker’s treatment of melodrama as a narrative genre through which citizens become affectively attached to an (impossible) ideal of sovereign freedom that only serves to intensify their experiences of unfreedom. Anker, Orgies of Feeling.

48. Meister’s second chapter, “Ways of Winning,” expresses the difficulty of this position sharply: “For me, the salient question would be how to reconcile the moral attitudes that make it possible (and legitimate) to engage in revolutionary struggle with the moral attitudes that make it possible (and legitimate) to stop.” After Evil, 70. I return to this difficult question in chapter 5.

49. On this latter point, Meister quotes Reinhart Koselleck: “While revolution … was initially induced by its opponents as well as its proponents, once established in its legitimacy, it proceeded to continually reproduce its foe as a means through which it could remain permanent.” Koselleck, “The Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

50. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73.

51. Wendy Brown, “The Desire to Be Punished: Freud’s ‘A Child Is Being Beaten,’ ” in Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 54.

52. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamn Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 229–31. For a counterweight to this argument, see W. James Booth, “ ‘From This Far Place’: On Justice and Absence,” American Political Science Review 105 (November 2011): 750–64.

53. See Douglas Crimp, who argued that the militancy of AIDS activists was both a justified form of resistance and potentially a “means of dangerous denial.” Crimp was concerned about a heroic posture of activist politics that obscured the complex sources of suffering with the gay community. Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 3–18. See also Tina Takemoto, “The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Art Journal 62 (Winter 2003): 80–90. I return to Crimp’s arguments in chapter 2.

54. For a counterpoint, see the work of Joel Olson, who argued that fanaticism’s vigor to “draw lines” can be democratically generative. Olson, “Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory,” Journal of Politics 71 (January 2009): 82–95.

55. See Meister, After Evil. Meister argues that the discourse of truth and reconciliation attempts to supplant the struggle for social justice with an ethical struggle for social harmony. I discuss the broader discourse of truth and reconciliation in chapter 5.

56. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 32–46.

57. Pamela Conover, “The Politics of Recognition: A Social Psychological Perspective,” in The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship, ed. Eugene Borgida, Christopher M. Federico, and John L. Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 176.

58. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For a useful critique of the politics of recognition, see Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

59. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 103.

60. Axel Honneth, “Anxiety and Politics: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Franz Neuman’s Diagnosis of a Social Pathology,” Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

61. For an argument that the well-being of psyche and socius are inseparable from each other (and that both are inseparable from a flourishing ecology), see Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008).

62. Nancy Luxon, Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52.

63. Axel Honneth, “On Becoming Things: An Interview with Axel Honneth,” Platypus Review 59 (September 2013).

64. Dominick LaCapra talks about working through as a “regulative ideal” that should govern processes of confronting social trauma, intended as a way of overcoming both social silence/denial and an endless fixation on the past. For LaCapra, mourning represents neither an “optimistic scenario of transcending the past” nor the idea of a “valorized” past operating as the “sole horizon of life.” LaCapra, “Psychoanalysis, Memory and the Ethical Turn,” in History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). See also Seth Moglen, “On Mourning Social Injury,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 10 (2005), 151–67.

65. On the idea of public work, see Harry Boyte, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996).

66. See Bonnie Honig’s argument about a style of political agonism “between decision and deliberation.” Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101 (February 2007): 1–17.

67. Antigone has been recently appropriated and performed in a wide variety of politically charged contexts, ranging from Argentina in the wake of its dirty war (1974–1983) to the Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine to Northern Ireland, India, Taiwan, Turkey, and Poland. See Mee and Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage.

68. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking Politics Agonistically (London: Verso, 2013).

69. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 13.

70. Gail Holst-Warhaft, The Cue for Passion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 9, 197.

71. Ibid., 197.

72. Ibid., 16. Vamik Volkan sees this shared rage as part of a developmental need to “identify some people as allies and others as enemies,” which itself grows from the individual’s “efforts to protect his sense of self.” Volkan, “The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: A Developmental Approach,” Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (1985): 231–36.

73. On mourning’s capacity to reconfigure political identity by widening the boundaries of a community, see Heather Pool, “The Politics of Mourning: The Triangle Fire and Political Belonging,” Polity 44 (2012): 182–211. Pool describes the double-edged nature of this reconfiguration—the circle of community is often expanded only by the production of additional exclusions based on ethnicity, regional background, or other social markers.

74. Rose McDermott, “Emotional Manipulation of Political Identity,” in Manipulating Democracy, ed. Wayne Le Chaminant and John Parrish (New York: Routledge, 2010), 130. See also Samantha Reis and Brian Martin, “Psychological Dynamics of Outrage against Injustice,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 40, no. 1 (2008): 5–23.

75. Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, “Constructing the Enemy-Other: Anxiety, Trauma, and Mourning in the Narratives of Political Conflict,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 109–30. Agonists such as William Connolly seek ways around this problem by advancing political virtues such as “agonistic respect.” Chantal Mouffe also talks about the need to morph antagonism into a more respectful agonism, but she remains convinced that the friend/enemy distinction and the struggle for hegemony are unavoidable. Mouffe, Agonistics; William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

76. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudlez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

77. On victim psychology and the slide toward eliminationist violence, see Mahmoud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

78. Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 183.

79. Committee to Avenge the CWP 5, “DCHS—Secret Supporters of the Klan,” Blanche M. Boyd Papers, Duke University, http://library.uncg.edu/dp/crg/item.aspx?i=1192.

80. Compare with Michael Rogin’s arguments about conservative (but not only conservative) “countersubversive demonology,” which involves a conspiratorial, paranoid politics in which social subversives were disavowed or “lopped off” from the pure, virtuous center of American public life. Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie; And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). What the case of the CWP demonstrates is that “subversives” can also practice a paranoid politics, even if sometimes—according to a quote often attributed to Woody Allen—“paranoia is knowing all the facts.”

81. See Joel Olson, “Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 1 (January 2009): 82–95.

82. Meister, After Evil, 50.

83. Waller, Love and Revolution, 479, 476, 477.

84. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 252.

85. In Mothers in Mourning, Loraux argues that “the promotion of lethe (forgetting) [is] the basis of life in the city.” Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 92.

86. On how the Lincoln funeral turned the assassinated president from an object of almost unanimous consternation into an idealized object of admiration, see Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces 70 (December 1991): 343–64.

87. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

88. Peter Dreier, “Rosa Parks: Angry, Not Tired,” Huffington Post, February 2, 2013, accessed December 21, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/rosa-parks-civil-rights_b_2608964.html.

89. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

90. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63.

91. Diane McWhorter, “Civil Rights Justice on the Cheap,” New York Times, September 14, 2013.

92. For a sophisticated treatment of the themes of sacrifice and trust in the context of civil rights and American democracy, see Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers.

93. On this lived struggle, see Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting.

94. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Barbara Misztal, “The Sacralization of Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2004).

95. On the question of grievable life, see Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

96. See John Bodnar’s distinction between “national” and “vernacular” mourning. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Bodnar’s distinction is discussed and utilized by Simon Stow in the context of public memorialization following September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. Stow, “From Upper Canal to Lower Manhattan.”

97. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing.”

98. Ibid., 692

99. Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination, Testimony, and Trust: A Dialogue with Paul Ricoeur,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1999). See also Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

100. Compare with the recuperation of “melancholia” as an insistent antidote to social amnesia. See D. L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); D. L. Eng, “The Value of Silence, Theatre Journal 54 (March 2002): 85–94; Marc Nichanian, “Between Genocide and Catastrophe,” in Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 99–124; Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For a critique of this melancholia turn, see Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Harold Weilnbock, “The Trauma Must Remain Inaccessible to Memory,” Mittelweg 36, no. 2 (2007); Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 26, no. 3 (1999); Dominick Lacapra, “Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’: Here There Is No Why,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997), 231–69; Dominick Lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

101. My turn to Klein is heavily indebted to the work of Fred Alford, who was one of the first political theorists to demonstrate that Klein’s theory has political implications, despite the view that many of Klein’s categories were not obviously or immediately social. Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

102. Alford, Melanie Klein, 11.

103. See Jürgen Habermas, who argued that naturalistic sciences of explanation had to be joined to the interpretive social sciences and to the “depth hermeneutics” of psychoanalysis in order to adequately understand social and political life. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. S. W. Nicholsen and J. A. Stark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

104. Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7.

105. Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xiii.

106. Meister, After Evil, 35.

107. For the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal (a student of Klein), there is a constant interaction between the dramas of the psyche and the polis. Political and social realities are suffused with projective identifications “imbued with deadly hostilities,” and the conflicts with the psyche receive outlet and succor with the fantasies circulating social and political relations. Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ed. Nicola Abel-Hirsch (London: Routledge, 2007). In a similar vein, Noelle McAfee has argued that there can be no final, bright line between psychic and social spaces because, following the work of Kristeva, “the public sphere is also a semiotic space.” McAfee, Democracy and the Political Unconscious (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

108. Melanie Klein, “On the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1929–1946 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 288; Melanie Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” in Envy and Gratitude: And Other Works 1946–1963 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 188.

109. Thomas Ogden refers to Klein’s theory of the positions in terms of inborn, organizing codes “by which perception is organized and meanings are attached to experience.” Ogden, Matrix of the Mind (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), 4.

110. Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude, 4.

111. Ibid., 4.

112. The formation of the first superego takes place through what Klein calls “projective identification.” See Klein, “Some Theoretical Conclusions regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude, 61–93.

113. Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London: Continuum, 2001).

114. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 14

115. Likierman, Melanie Klein, 106.

116. Klein, “The Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude, 74.

117. Ibid., 74.

118. Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 34.

119. Thomas Ogden refers to the “massive negation of the history of shared experience” within the paranoid-schizoid position, which amounts to “a continual rewriting of history in the service of maintaining discontinuities.” Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 63, 65.

120. Ogden calls the paranoid-schizoid position an “entrapment in the manifest” because “interpretation and perception are treated as identical processes.” Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 65.

121. Klein, “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, 362.

122. Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 6.

123. Klein, “The Theory of Anxiety and Guilt,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 35.

124. Klein, “On the Sense of Loneliness,” in Envy and Gratitude, 310.

125. Ibid., 301–2.

126. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” 193.

127. See Simon Clarke, “Projective Identification: From Attack to Empathy?” Kleinian Studies Ejournal, http://www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com/human_nature/ksej/clarkeempathy.html.

128. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” 232.

129. On this point, see the interview with Klein’s student Hanna Segal, “Memories of Melanie Klein,” pt. 1,” http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/domains/melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/local/media/downloads/Memories_of_Melanie_Klein_Hanna_Segal.pdf.

130. Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” 360.

131. Lior Barshack, Passions and Convictions in Matters Political: Explorations in Moral Psychology (New York: University Press of America, 2000).

132. Gal Gerson, “Object Relations Psychoanalysis as Political Theory,” Political Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 769–94.

133. Eve Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (Summer 2007): 631.

134. Ibid., 633.

135. “Ambivalence” comes from the Latin ambi (on both sides) and valentia (for capacity or strength). See Kenneth Weisbrode, On Ambivalence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

136. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 631–32. Or, as Thomas Ogden puts it, “In the depressive position, phantasies of omnipotently annihilating one’s rival no longer provide a satisfactory solution to a problem in a human relationship.” Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 91.

137. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 632.

138. D. W. Winnicott, “Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy,’ ” in Home Is Where We Start From (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 244.

139. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.”

140. Winnicott, “The Value of Depression,” in Home Is Where We Start From, 82.

141. Winnicott, “Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy,’ ” 243.

142. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 7.

143. Ibid., 203.

144. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 67–68, 70.

145. Ibid., 70.

146. See Marilyn Brewer, “Social Identity and Citizenship in a Pluralistic Society,” Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship, 163.

147. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 213. The literatures on deliberative minipublics and collaborative public work are promising sites for thinking about democratic potential spaces. See Simon Niemeyer, “The Emancipatory Effects of Deliberation: Empirical Lessons from Mini-Publics, Politics and Society 39 (March 2011): 103–40. Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

148. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 205. See also D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 71–87.

149. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 207.

150. C. Fred Alford argues that politics is largely a paranoid-schizoid affair and that “psychoanalytic politics, if there is such a thing, is generally about who can best exploit the primitive terrors of the population.” While I admire Alford’s work greatly, I am convinced (or at least hopeful) that there are other possibilities available to democratic citizens. See Alford, “The Possibility of Rational Outcomes from Democratic Discourse and Procedures: Comment,” Journal of Politics 58, no. 3 (1996): 757–59.

151. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From, 253.

152. David Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

153. See Kenneth Weisbrode, On Ambivalence.

154. Elliott Jacques, “On the Dynamics of Social Structure: A Contribution to the Psychoanalytical Study of Social Phenomena Deriving from the Views of Melanie Klein,” Human Relations 6 (1953): 3–24.

155. Clarke, “Projective Identification.” See also Michael Rustin, The Good Society and the Inner World (London: Verso, 1991).

156. The work of Judith Herman has become a touchstone for reflections on social trauma. See her Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Cathy Caruth has described traumas as “unclaimed experience” that require a witness in order to be claimed. See her Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a sharp critique of Caruth that is informed by object relations psychoanalysis, see Fred Alford, Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For a social constructivist perspective on trauma, see Jeffrey Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (New York: Polity Press, 2012). See also Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth Butler Breese, Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013).

157. See Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics. See also Patrick Hayes and Jim Campbell, Bloody Sunday: Trauma, Pain, and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Antonius Robben and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, eds., Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

158. Herman, Trauma and Recovery.

159. On the politics of recognition, the most widely cited argument is that of Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). My use of recognition owes a heavier debt to Axel Honneth than to Taylor, however. See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. For important critiques of the concept of recognition, see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.

160. Recognition is not an uncontroversial concept. For instance, Nancy Fraser has argued that discourses of recognition unjustly marginalize struggles for redistribution. The latter, perhaps, more accurately describes the CWP’s organizing efforts. However, I follow Axel Honneth in conceptualizing a struggle for redistribution as part of a broader struggle for social recognition and standing. See the debate between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2004).

161. Ervin Staub, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Alexandria Gubin, and Athanase Hagengimana, “Healing, Reconciliation, Forgiving and the Prevention of Violence after Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and Its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24, no. 3 (2005): 297–334; Staub, “The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 5, no. 4 (1999): 303–36.

162. Vamik Volkan, “Tree Model: Psychopolitical Dialogues and the Promotion of Coexistence,” in The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence, ed. E. Weiner (New York: Continuum, 1998); Ervin Staub, “Breaking the Cycle of Genocidal Violence: Healing and Reconciliation,” in Perspectives on Loss, ed. J. Harvey (Washington, DC: Taylor and Francis, 1998).

163. In this vein, Stow discusses the New Orleans Katrina Memorial as an instance of local, “vernacular” mourning that “enacts … a more productive form of remembering—one which looks forwards, not backwards by situating the body in its proper place as a precursor to social and political engagement.” Stow, “From Upper Canal to Lower Manhattan,” 692. On the value of joint projects and public action for eroding stereotypes and promoting values of social pluralism, see Staub, “Origins and Prevention of Genocide,” 326.

164. Jovanovic, Democracy, Dialogue and Community Action, 152–54.

165. See David W. McIvor, “The Cunning of Recognition: Melanie Klein and Contemporary Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory (October 2015), doi: 10.1057/cpt.2015.47.

166. Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context.

2. TO JOIN IN HATE

1. For instance, the politics of mourning rove freely across well-worn distinction between “the public” and “the private.” Moreover, while mourning rites are often associated with group boundaries, claims for grief can also erase previously rigid boundaries of identity. See Heather Pool, “The Politics of Mourning.”

2. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Marguerite Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood; Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against Aids (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

3. Andres Fabian Henao Castro, “Antigone Claimed: ‘I Am a Stranger!’ Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger,” Hypatia 28 (Spring 2013): 308. On stigma, see Erving Goffman, Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). On stigma and race, see Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). On the struggle for recognition as a means of overcoming stigma, see Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 164.

4. “A Theatre of Protest,” The Economist, April 8, 2013.

5. Mee and Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage.

6. Mouffe, Agonistics; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005); William Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

7. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 13.

8. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 632.

9. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 8.

10. Elshtain, “The Mothers of the Disappeared”; Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief”; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Peter Burian, “Gender and the City: Antigone from Hegel to Butler and Back,” in When Worlds Elide, ed. Peter Euben and Karen Bassi (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 255–99.

11. See Nancy Kason Poulson, “In Defense of the Dead: Antigona Furiosa, by Griselda Gambaro,” Romance Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2012): 48–54.

12. Crimp “Mourning and Militancy.”

13. Ibid., 8.

14. Sophocles, I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). All references to this text are to the line number, not the page number.

15. Ibid., 10.

16. Carol J. C. Maxwell, “Coping with Bereavement through Activism: Real Grief Imagined Death, and Pseudo-Mourning among Pro-Life Direct Activists,” Ethos 23 (December 1995): 437–52.

17. Ibid., 446.

18. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 9, 197.

19. See Antonius Robben, “Death and Anthropology: An Introduction,” in Death, Mourning, and Ritual: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

20. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 197.

21. Ibid., 16. Vamik Volkan sees this shared rage as part of a developmental need to “identify some people as allies and others as enemies,” which itself grows from the individual’s “efforts to protect his sense of self.” Volkan, “The Need to Have Enemies and Allies.”

22. Matilde Mellibovsky, Circle of Love over Death (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Books, 1996).

23. Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, 60.

24. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 44.

25. Ibid., 11.

26. See Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

27. Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough, trans. John Dryden, vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001), 106–29.

28. For Nicole Loraux, the passion of grief claims eternity as its temporality, which amounts to a perpetual repetition of the loss. Electra embodies a permanent and excessive lamentation, which is expressed “in terms of ‘forever.’ ” Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 209.

29. See Samantha Reis and Brian Martin, “Psychological Dynamics of Outrage against Injustice,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 40, no. 1 (2008): 5–23.

30. Loraux, Mourning Voice, 82.

31. Ibid., 23. See also Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism,” New Literary History 41 (Winter 2010): 1–33. In distinction to Honig, who reads Loraux as an embodiment of “mortalist humanism,” I see Loraux as an agonist who in certain moments edges toward a Lacanian antihumanism. Loraux’s emphasis on an “apolitical” membership for humans in the “race of mortals” (which Honig sees as an antipolitical claim redolent of mortalist humanism) has to be read alongside her emphasis on the bond of division, which shows that membership in the race of mortals is less a source of apolitical commonality than a constitutive outside to both the civic and noncivic “always.” As I read it, Loraux’s claim about the race of mortals is less a claim for substantive membership than a dissolvent of all community bonds, which are, according to her, internally conflicted and incomplete. In this way she comes closer to Lacan than to Elshtain or to the Butler of Giving an Account of Oneself and Precarious Life.

32. Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 97.

33. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 1.

34. Loraux, “Reflections of the Greek City on Unity and Division,” in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 48.

35. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.

36. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 18.

37. bell hooks, Killing Rage, Ending Racism (New York: Holt, 1995), 17. See also Niza Yanay, The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), 21.

38. hooks, Killing Rage, Ending Racism, 17.

39. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 83.

40. Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 18.

41. Ibid., 18.

42. Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, 268.

43. Ibid., 268.

44. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 638.

45. Brown, States of Injury, 50.

46. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 635.

47. Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 268.

48. Klein, “The Origins of Transference,” in Envy and Gratitude, 52.

49. Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 18.

50. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 634.

51. The more common charge against Klein—that she reduces external experiences to the internal play of conscious and unconscious fantasy—is a red herring. While Klein does describe the power of conscious and unconscious fantasies to shape perception of reality, her theory is clearly concerned with the interaction between internal and external worlds, which mutually shape and influence each other.

52. Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” 359.

53. As Eric Santner puts it, “mourning without solidarity is the beginning of madness.” This also implies the obverse: the social recognition of loss is the precondition for sanity or health. Santner also sounds a Kleinian note when he argues that the “task of integrating damage, loss, disorientation, decentered-ness into a transformed structure of identity … is one of the central tasks of … the work of mourning.” Santner, Stranded Objects, xiii.

54. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 2.

55. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 45.

56. Ibid., 45.

57. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 147..

58. Butler, Gender Trouble, 81.

59. Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

60. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 28.

61. Butler, Precarious Life, 4.

62. Ibid., 4. See also Raymond Geuss, “The Politics of Managing Decline,” Theoria 108, no. 52 (2005): 1–12.

63. Thomas Dumm, “Giving Away, Giving Over: A Conversation with Judith Butler,” Massachusetts Review (June 2008), 98.

64. Ibid., 98. See also Anker, Orgies of Feeling.

65. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 29.

66. Ibid., 29.

67. Ibid., 24

68. Ibid., 5.

69. Ibid., 2.

70. Butler, Frames of War, 4.

71. In making her argument, Butler expressly rejects the reading of Antigone given by Jacques Lacan, who sees Antigone as a source of pure desire that resists its illegitimate channeling through the symbolic. However it is an open question whether or not Butler really distinguishes her approach fully from Lacan’s. See Peter Burian, “Gender and the City.” See also Heather Love, “Dwelling in Ambivalence,” Women’s Review of Books, 22, no. 2 (2004): 18–19.

72. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 99.

73. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 79.

74. Ibid., 82.

75. Ibid., 80.

76. See Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

77. Compare Moya Lloyd, “Radical Democratic Activism and the Politics of Resignification,” Constellations 14 (March 2007), 129–46. Lloyd argues that Butler has perpetually understated the political and historical conditions necessary for successful acts of resignification or subversion. See also Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

78. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 3

79. Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief,” 17, 19.

80. Ibid., 7. See also Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation,” American Political Science Review 101 (February 2007): 1–15.

81. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 40.

82. Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief,” 31.

83. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 46.

84. Ibid., 45.

85. Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws.”

86. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005), 227.

87. Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws,” 4.

88. Ibid., 10.

89. Ibid., 4.

90. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 61.

91. Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws,” 10.

92. Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 60.

93. Ibid., 61.

94. Ibid., 61.

95. Ibid., 62.

96. Takemoto, “Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp,” 87.

97. Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 17.

98. Ibid., 17.

99. Honig now reads Freud slightly differently than Crimp, emphasizing the pleasure in life that “interrupts” mourning in a generative and productive (nonmelancholic) way. Yet this places a strong opposition between mourning and action that I think Crimp is refusing with his text.

100. Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan.

101. Klein, Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 268.

102. Ibid., 268.

103. Ibid., 268.

104. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 637.

105. Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1975), 466.

106. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 91.

107. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 67–68, 70.

108. Ibid., 70.

3. THE IMAGINARY CITY

1. On articulation (its dangers and its inevitability), see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 97.

2. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; John E. Bodnar, Remaking America.

3. Loraux, Invention of Athens.

4. See also Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

5. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19. See also Lawrie Balfour, Evidence of Things Not Said.

6. For similar critiques of Rawlsian theory, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics; William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Sheldon Wolin, “The Liberal Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24, no. 1 (1996): 91–119.

7. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing,” 682.

8. Alford, Melanie Klein, 182–83.

9. Nicole Loraux, The Divided City, 101

10. Ricoeur, “Imagination, Testimony, and Trust.”

11. On wholeness as a guiding democratic ideal, see Allen, Talking to Strangers. On the need for a superordinate identity in order to work through racial discrimination and inequality, see Anderson, The Imperative of Integration.

12. James Baldwin, Interview on Faces (television show). 1980. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_NbdeE2zU.

13. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen, 1964).

14. Antonius C. G. M. Robben, ed., Death Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004).

15. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 291–92.

16. Ibid., 297.

17. In this respect, I disagree slightly with Bonnie Honig in her interpretation of mourning as a reflection on “mere life.” Mourning rituals are Janus-faced; they are concerned with “mere” and “more” life. Honig, Antigone Interrupted.

18. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 298.

19. Ibid., 299.

20. Ibid., 299.

21. Simon Stow, “Pericles at Gettysburg and Ground Zero: Tragedy, Patriotism, and Public Mourning,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 2 (2010): 195.

22. Sara Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” Political Theory 26 (August 1998): 505.

23. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. M. I. Finley (New York: Penguin, 1972), bk. 2, sec. 35.

24. Ibid.

25. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 297.

26. Thucydides, History, bk. 2, sec. 37.

27. Ibid., bk. 2, sec. 43.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., bk. 2, sec. 41.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., bk. 2, sec. 42.

32. “Menexenus,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). References are to line number.

33. Socrates actually claims that the speech was written by Aspasia, the metic wife of Pericles, in what is likely another dig at the Athenian leader. Ibid., 188.

34. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 36.

35. See Joseph P. Forgas and Kipling D. Williams, eds., The Social Self: Cognitive, Interpersonal and Intergroup Perspectives, Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology Series (New York: Psychology Press / Taylor & Francis, 2003). See also Brewer, “Social Identity and Citizenship in a Pluralistic Society.”

36. See Monoson, “Remembering Pericles,” 505.

37. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 312.

38. Loraux, Mourning Voice, 19.

39. See Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol,” 343–64.

40. Stow, “Pericles at Gettysburg,” 682.

41. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010).

42. On the difference between moral stages and moral schemas, see the research done by James R. Rest, Darcia Narvaez, Muriel Bebeau, and Stephen Thoma, “A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach to Morality Research,” Journal of Moral Education 29, no. 4 (2000): 381–95.

43. Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” 350.

44. Klein, “On Mental Health,” Envy and Gratitude, 270.

45. Mills, The Racial Contract, 14.

46. Ibid., 16.

47. Ibid., 18.

48. Ibid., 19.

49. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

50. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 17.

51. Ibid., 149.

52. Mills, Racial Contract, 14.

53. Jody David Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); David B. Wilkins, “On Being Good and Black,” Harvard Law Review 1924 (1999); Charles R. Lawrence III, “Two Views of the River: A Critique of the Liberal Defense of Affirmative Action,” Columbia Law Review 101, no. 4 (2001): 928–75; Susan Storm and Lani Guinier, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review 84, no. 953 (1996).

54. Mills, Racial Contract, i.

55. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 251.

56. See Bill Galston, “Moral Personality and Liberal Theory: John Rawls’s Dewey Lectures,” Political Theory 10 (November 1982): 492–519; Raymond Geuss, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Political Theory 30 (June 2002): 320–38; Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

57. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing,” 682, 692.

58. Derek Barker makes a similar argument when he notes that Rawls did not specify how individuals develop a sense of injustice. Barker, Tragedy and Citizenship (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009).

59. Thomas McCarthy, “Political Philosophy and Racial Injustice: From Normative to Critical Theory,” in Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 165. See also Laura Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 3 (2009): 332–55; Mary Tjattas, “Psychoanalysis, Public Reason, and Reconstruction in the ‘New’ South Africa,” American Imago 55, no.1 (1998): 51–75. On ideal theory more generally, see A. John Simmons, “Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38 (2010): 5–36; Zofia Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal about Ideal Theory?” Social Theory and Practice 34 (July 2008): 319–40.

60. In related fashion, Laura Valentini has argued that “keeping facts in sight” is essential in order to produce a theory that is both “critical and action-guiding.” Valentini, “Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory.” Compare also Jane Flax’s argument that rationalistic approaches to justice split off the activity of thinking from the rest of subjectivity. Flax, “The Play of Justice: Justice as a Transitional Space,” in Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993).

61. Rawls, Theory, 17.

62. Ibid., 399.

63. Ibid., 404.

64. Ibid., 433.

65. Ibid., 430, 433.

66. Ibid., 402–3.

67. Ibid., 408.

68. Ibid., 409.

69. Ibid., 412.

70. Ibid., 415, 414.

71. Ibid., 417.

72. See John Deigh, The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58.

73. Rawls, Theory, 473. See also Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton, 1990); John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

74. Rawls, Theory, 467.

75. Ibid., 467.

76. Ibid., 466.

77. Ibid., 427, 433.

78. Freud’s trajectory is not the only one that could be followed, of course. Habermas’s dialogical updating of Kant’s categorical imperative is one viable alternative. In fact, Habermas’s dialogical theory of ethics is more compelling from a perspective of Kleinian psychoanalysis, because it emphasizes the importance of a dialogical, intersubjective process of self- and social-formation, as opposed to Rawls’s more monological original reasoning position. Also see Elizabeth Anderson’s argument that racial integration is necessary because abstract principles of equality cannot, by themselves, overcome entrenched biases and inequalities. Anderson, Imperative of Integration, chap. 9.

79. Rawls, Theory, 120.

80. Ibid., 120.

81. Compare Rawls’s published lectures on Joseph Butler, in which Rawls focuses his attention on Butler’s principle of conscience. Conscience, on Rawls’s reading, provides judgments from which “there is no further appeal” and which form the basis of self-condemnation. The appeal to conscience—or the “supreme principle of reflection—is “final; it settles the matter.” Conscience is the supreme governing principle or faculty that allows the self to conquer its fractious passions and interests. This interpretation of conscience is strikingly similar to Rawls’s description of the original position in Theory (and also, in Liberalism, to his concept of public reason, as I argue later chapter 3). John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

82. Rawls, Theory, 514.

83. For more on purity as a form of border drawing, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

84. Alford, Melanie Klein, 182.

85. John Rawls, Lectures on Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 17.

86. Loraux, The Divided City, 101,

87. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

88. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xvii.

89. Ibid., xviii.

90. Ibid., xxvi.

91. Ibid., 10.

92. Ibid., 233.

93. Ibid., 87.

94. Ibid., 375.

95. Ibid., 87.

96. Freud, Ego and the Id.

97. Rawls, Liberalism, lx.

98. Rawls, Lectures on Political Philosophy, 8.

99. Ibid., 8.

100. Rawls, Liberalism, 243.

101. Ibid., 88.

102. Ibid., 133.

103. Freud, Ego and the Id, 57.

104. Rawls, Liberalism, 454.

105. Bonnie Honig argues that Rawls’s approach reflects a vision of the responsible subject as one who is perpetually “anxious to distance himself from whatever pushes, pulls, attracts, or impels him from inside or outside.” Hence, well-ordered subjects must be “comfortable in (and not also resistant to) their subscription to practices of self-containment and self-concealment.” Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 155. Thomas McCarthy also suggests that Rawls constructs his theory around a Kantian vision of “self-abnegation.” McCarthy, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism,” Ethics 105 (October 1994): 44–63. See also Ed Wingenbach, “Unjust Context: The Priority of Stability in Rawls’s Contextualized Theory of Justice,” American Journal of Political Science 43 (January 1999): 225.

106. Rawls, Liberalism, 385–95.

107. Ibid., 247.

108. Ibid., 9.

109. In a similar fashion, Seyla Benhabib has criticized Rawls’s approach for both its overrestricted social agenda and its theory of public discourse. See Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 74–77.

110. Jonathan Lear, Freud, Routledge Philosophers Series (New York: Routledge, 2005), 186.

111. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

112. Shanto Iyengar, Solomon Messing, and Kyu S. Hahan, “Implicit Racial Attitudes: A Test of Their Convergent and Predictive Validity,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2011, Seattle; Anthony G. Greenwald, “Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations,” California Law Review 94, no. 954 (July 2006).

113. T. D. Wilson, S. Lindsey, and T. Y. Schooler, “A Model of Dual Attitudes,” Psychological Review 107 (2000): 101–26; David M. Amodio and Saaid A. Mendoza, “Implicit Intergroup Bias: Cognitive, Affective, and Motivational Underpinnings,” in Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition, ed. B. Gawronski and B. K. Payne (New York: Guilford Press, 2010); Richard R. Lau and Caroline Heldman, “Self-Interest, Symbolic Attitudes, and Support for Public Policy: A Multilevel Analysis,” Political Psychology 30, no. 4 (2009): 513–37.

114. Jim Sidanius, Felicia Pratto, Colette Van Laar, and Shana Levin, “Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method,” Political Psychology 25 (December 2004): 845–80; Serge Guimond, Social Comparison and Social Psychology: Understanding Cognition, Intergroup Relations, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

115. Christina Suthammanont, David A. M. Peterson, Christ T. Owens, and Jan E. Leighley, “Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice, Principle, and Attitudes toward Racial Policies,” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (2010): 231–53.

116. Simon Clarke, “Projective Identification”; Anne Anlin Cheng, Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

117. On social institutions as a defense against paranoid-schizoid anxiety, see Elliott Jacques, “On the Dynamics of Social Structure: A Contribution to the Psychoanalytical Study of Social Phenomena Deriving from the Views of Melanie Klein,” Human Relations 6 (1953): 3–24.

118. James Baldwin, “Interview with Studs Terkel,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 8.

119. Ibid., 8.

120. Baldwin, “Interview with Kenneth Clark,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 44.

121. Baldwin, “Interview with Kalamu ya Salaam,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 183.

122. Baldwin, “Interview with Henry Louis Gates,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 269.

123. Baldwin, “Interview with Kalamu ya Salaam,” 179.

124. Baldwin, “Interview with David Estes,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 280.

125. Baldwin, “Interview with John Hall,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 100.

126. Baldwin, “Interview with Wolfgang Binder,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 208.

127. Baldwin, “Interview with John Hall,” 108.

128. Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

129. Baldwin, “Interview with Kenneth Clark,” 45.

130. James Baldwin, “The World I Never Made,” remarks at DC Press Club, http://www.c-span.org/video/?150875-1/world-never-made.

131. Baldwin, “Interview with Studs Terkel,” 6.

132. Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 78. See also George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

133. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing,” 682.

134. Ibid., 682.

135. Ibid., 683.

136. Richard Seaford, “Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena,” in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Greek Drama, ed. B. Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 202.

137. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing,” 681.

138. Ibid., 688.

139. Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” in From Many, One: Readings in American Political and Social Thought, ed. Richard C. Sinopoli (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 271.

140. Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing,” 667.

141. Ibid., 687.

142. Ibid., 687.

143. Likierman, Melanie Klein, 109.

144. Ibid., 114–15.

145. Ibid., 78.

146. Ibid., 121.

147. See the support for Rawlsian liberalism by Susan Okin and Drucilla Cornell on (somewhat) similar terms. As Okin puts it, reasoning from the original position “in which the parties do not know their sex can yield important insights.” Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender,” Ethics 105 (1994): 38; Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York; Basic Books, 1991), 174–86. Cornell argues that Rawlsian liberalism permits individuals to passionately invest in an overlapping political consensus while allowing us to keep some of our selves outside the terms of this agreement. In other words, Rawls’s theory seems to leave more room for the unconscious and for our negotiations with this inexhaustible layer of being. “Response to Thomas McCarthy: The Political Alliance Between Ethical Feminism and Rawls’s Kantian Constructivism,” Constellations 2, no. 2 (1995): 189–206. For an imaginative repurposing of Rawls’s original position within a nonideal theory context, see Glenn Loury, “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?” Boston Review (July/August 2007).

148. Rawls, Lectures on Political Philosophy, 420.

149. Ibid., 423.

150. Ibid., 430.

151. Hannah Arendt wrote about conscience as a similar dialogical “two-in-one,” although Arendt would have resisted the claim that this was a psychoanalytic insight. See Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Mariner Books, 1981).

152. Klein, “The Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude, 73.

153. Isaac Balbus, Mourning and Modernity (New York: Other Press, 2005), 66.

154. Segal, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, 49.

155. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Wolin’s reading of the tradition of liberalism is, of course, not the consensus view. However, one does not have to agree with the extremes of Wolin’s argument in order to acknowledge that liberalism has historically sought means of controlling or containing the dangerous passions supposedly let loose in any form of participatory politics. Recall Madison’s famous dismissal of Athenian democracy: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” In addition to this Madisonian strain in the liberal tradition, liberalism is also predominantly a view that seeks to limit the scope of what politics, as a domain, can include or address. Rights-based liberal theories describe a zone of inviolability that ought to be secure from political interference (originally by an encroaching government, but also by one’s fellow citizens). And the laissez faire-cum-capitalist strand of liberal ideology also favors a contraction of the political sphere, on the grounds that markets are superior to political decisions in efficiently allocating resources. Thus, to the fear of raucousness, we can add the fear of predation and the fear of waste as paradigmatic liberal anxieties.

156. For a similar argument about the necessity of actual social integration to promote racial equality and nondiscrimination, see Anderson, The Imperative of Integration.

157. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 220.

158. Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

159. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 193.

160. Alexander, New Jim Crow, 118.

161. Ibid., 141.

162. Ibid.,124.

163. For instance, evidence from public deliberation shows that when citizens deliberate about prison policies they shift markedly against the idea that incarceration reduces crime and they become more protective of defendants’ rights. See James S. Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 215–16.

164. Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 78.

165. Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin (1973),” in Conversations with James Baldwin, 155.

166. Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups (London: Routledge, 1991).

4. “THERE IS TROUBLE HERE. THERE IS MORE TO COME”

1. On conditions of loss becoming conditions for action, see George Shulman, “Interpreting Occupy,” Possible Futures, December 20, 2011. On the challenge of accepting vulnerability and overcoming penchants for misrecognition, see Markell, Bound by Recognition.

2. Thomas McCarthy, “Coming to Terms with Our past, Part 2: On the Morality and Politics of Reparation for Slavery,” Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 9.

3. Rosemary Nagy, “Reconciliation in Post-Commission South Africa: Thick and Thin Accounts of Solidarity,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 35, no. 2 (2002): 330.

4. On “wholeness” rather than fantastical “oneness” as a driving ideal of democratic politics, see Allen, Talking To Strangers. On the importance of the social recognition of difference and heterogeneity along with a superordinate idea of the public, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

5. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954); Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (May 2006): 751–83. On dialogue and interactive problem solving, see H. C. Kelman and R. J. Fisher, “Conflict Analysis and Resolution,” in Political Psychology, ed. D. Sears, L. Huddy, and R. Jervis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Marc Howard Ross and Joy Rathman, eds., Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management: Theorizing Success and Failure (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

6. On the Oresteia as a drama of reconciliation, see Markell, Bound by Recognition, 96. On relational power and civic agency, see Stout, Blessed Are the Organized.

7. For the idea that tragedy and psychoanalysis can speak to each other on the topos of mourning, see Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). I should make it clear at the outset that I am not interested in tracing the representations of mourning in the extant tragedies or in seeing the origin of the tragic festival in the sublimation of banned affect following Solon’s edicts outlawing certain practices of lament in the polis. There is, however, a rich literature on these two themes. For the former, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition; Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); for the latter, see Robert Garland, “The Well-Ordered Corpse: An Investigation into the Motives behind Greek Funerary Legislation,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 36, no. 1 (1990): 1–15; Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning.

8. Christian Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (New York: Polity Press, 1993).

9. Josiah Ober, Athenian Legacies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 129.

10. For the development of Athenian democracy (which provided the context for tragedy’s own development), see Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Kurt Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert Wallace, eds., Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

11. Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (Manchester, UK: John Murray, 2004), 227.

12. As Helene Foley sees it, the tragic genre “permits excessive behavior that was seemingly discouraged in the practice of the [Athenian] society.” Foley, “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation,” in Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, ed. Alan H. Sommerstein (Bari, IT: Levante Editori, 1993). Froma Zeitlin sees the predominance of female representations in the tragedies in a similar light. By “playing the other,” Athenian males were able to question, explore, and (ultimately) reinforce and patrol the boundaries of civic/masculine identity. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

13. For a (sympathetic) review of the literature in this vein, see Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 88. For a critical view of this developing consensus, see Jasper Griffin, “The Social Function of Tragedy,” Classical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1998): 39–61; P. J. Rhodes, “Nothing to Do with Democracy: Athenian Drama and the Polis,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 123 (2003): 104–19.

14. Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 89.

15. Josh Beer, Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy: Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), xii.

16. J. Peter Euben, introduction to Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 22–23.

17. Helene Foley, “Tragedy and Democratic Ideology,” in Goff, History, Tragedy, Theory.

18. That is, until acting became more professionalized at the close of the fifth century. See Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, eds.,, Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

19. Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

20. Monoson, Democratic Entanglements, 88. Yet see David Kawalko Roselli’s Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), which cautions against a reading of the Athenian audience that elides the multiple perspectives and contested group boundaries within the audience. As Roselli puts it, “The citizen body was not homogenous, and many noncitizens resided in Athens and were active in the theater,” 9.

21. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

22. Euben, introduction, 23. Euben cites William Arrowsmith, who wrote that tragedy was “a democratic paideia [or education] complete in itself.” Arrowsmith, “A Greek Theater of Ideas,” Arion 2 (Autumn 1963): 33.

23. Christian Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (New York: Polity Press, 1993), 18.

24. Goldhill, Love, Sex, and Tragedy, 179. See also P. E. Easterling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

25. Goldhill, Love, Sex, and Tragedy, 214.

26. Ibid., 273.

27. Euben, introduction, 23.

28. Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 88–90.

29. Mark Griffith, “Families and Inter-City Relations,” in Why Athens: A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics, ed. D. M. Carter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17.

30. Ibid., 177. For differences within the audience of spectators, see also Roselli, Theater of the People.

31. Josiah Ober and Barry Strauss, “Drama, Political Rhetoric and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, Nothing to Do with Dionysus. See also Ober, Democracy and Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

32. Ober, Athenian Legacies, 129.

33. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober, eds., introduction to Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 17.

34. Bruce Heiden, “Emotion, Acting, and the Athenian Ethos,” in Sommerstein, Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis.

35. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, 31. See also Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens.

36. Ober refers to this capacity as “a sort of political expertise … in the operations of self-government.” Democracy and Knowledge, 121.

37. Ober, Athenian Legacies, 129.

38. Michael Rustin, Good Society and the Inner World; Georgina Born, “Anthropology, Kleinian Psychoanalysis, and the Subject in Culture,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 2 (1998): 373–86.

39. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

40. Wilfred Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” in Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice, vol. 1, Mainly Theory, ed. Elizabeth Bott Spillius (London: Routledge, 1988).

41. C. Fred Alford, “Hanna Segal—A Memorial Appreciation,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 17 (2012): 322.

42. Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” 362. See also Likierman, Melanie Klein, 109.

43. Rustin, Good Society and the Inner World, 66. On melodrama as a political syndrome, see Libby Anker, Orgies of Feeling.

44. Foley, “Tragedy and Democratic Ideology,” 144.

45. Goldhill, “Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” 74.

46. “Misrecognition” is, of course, one possible translation of Lacan’s concept of méconnaissance. But Lacan’s misrecognition is quite different from the psychological experience to which I refer here. Whereas Lacan’s méconnaissance is the formation of the ego through a displacement or misrecognition of the symbolic determinants of subjectivity (including discourse), the misrecognition that gets exposed in tragedy (and Kleinian analysis) is how our fantasies and fears have been projected onto the other and kept us from knowing him or her better. For Lacan, the subject comes into being through méconnaissance; for Klein, the subject comes into (depressive) being through recognition of its misrecognitions—through avowal of its disavowals.

47. Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis, 120.

48. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6.

49. Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 267.

50. Ibid., 121. Nussbaum’s example is Achilles’s (momentary) reconciliation with Priam in Homer’s Iliad. Elsewhere Nussbaum argues that it is appreciation of imperfection in the tragic hero that allows us to face and accept our own imperfections. Identification, on this understanding, is not taking the hero as an exemplary model for action but as the means of better acknowledging our own faults and lacks. Martha Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 387.

51. Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis, 120.

52. Freud likened the analytic procedure to Sophocles’s skillful telling of Oedipus’s discovery of his origins. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 279.

53. Aristotle, Poetics, bk. 11.

54. Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis, 28.

55. Ibid., 99.

56. Klein, “Love, Guilt, and Reparation,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 350.

57. The chorus, on seeing the blinded Oedipus, says, “Indeed I pity you, but I cannot look at you … I shudder at the sight of you.” Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), lines1302–5.

58. All lines are from The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

59. The phrase is Lacan’s. See Slavoj Zizek, “The Act and its Vicissitudes,” http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/zizek.html. Zizek notes the connection between the passage a l’acte and suicide, that is, that the aggressive action toward the others is actually intended against the self.

60. “Denial … is a potent defense against the persecutory anxiety and guilt which result from destructive impulses never being completely controlled … denial … may stifle feelings of love and guilt, undermine sympathy and consideration both with the internal and external objects, and disturb the capacity for judgment and the sense of reality.” Melanie Klein, “Some Reflections on the Oresteia,” Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, 293. This description fits well with Aeschylus’s portrayal of both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

61. Whether or not the imputation of guilt to Orestes is an anachronism depends on how much we share the thesis that Greek culture was a “shame” culture that only later developed a category of emotion consonant with “guilt.” Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

62. Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis, 28.

63. It is true that Orestes still clings to Apollo (“he declared I could do this and not be charged with wrong”) and imagines that the god will provide sanctuary and absolution through which Orestes might “escape this blood that is my own” (1032). Yet this comes after Orestes has acknowledged the impurity of his action. Even the language used, “the blood that is my own,” implies that Orestes’ hoped-for absolution will not be redemptive.

64. Seaford, “Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence,” 208.

65. Ibid., 208.

66. Christopher Rocco, Tragedy and Enlightenment: Athenian Political Thought and the Dilemmas of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

67. Ibid., 25. Whether or not Rocco has constructed a “rationalist” straw man is another story. His identification of this narrative with Habermas is a problematic leveling of the latter’s understanding of enlightenment.

68. Ibid., 25.

69. Ibid., 26.

70. Rocco is carrying forward William Connolly’s emphasis on disruption and disturbance. For a critique of Connolly that develops the given argument, see McIvor, “The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity,” Polity 43, no. 1 (2011): 58–83.

71. As Helene Foley puts it, tragedy “holds up to view contradictions in polis ideology.” Foley, “Tragedy and Democratic Ideology,” 144.

72. There are, of course, countless other interpretations of the Oresteia that could be discussed. Seaford’s and Rocco’s map the central tension between ritual closure and anomic disturbance (forgetting/fixation), but onto this schema other powerful readings could be mapped. For instance, there is similar tension between Christian Meier’s view that the Oresteia is paradigmatic for education into democratic citizenship and Nicole Loraux’s view that the trilogy is more representative of the (patriarchal) containment of excess through the incorporation of female mourning affect into a civic ritual that “forgets” the conflicts at the root of the polis. Meier, Political Art of Greek Tragedy; Loraux, Voice of Mourning and Mothers in Mourning. Yet neither Meier nor Loraux acknowledge the ambiguity of collective suffering (Meier sees it as costless; Loraux sees it as pure ideology). Peter Euben is an exemplary figure in a middle position. For Euben, the image of justice that emerges from the Oresteia has four crucial components: reconciliation of diversities, reciprocity, recognition, and judgment. These elements exist in tense balance with one another. As Euben puts it, “by making the tensions and sheer formlessness of human life lucid and thus intelligible without slighting the contingency of politics, the permeability of human constructs, the irony of action, or the duality of passion, Aeschylus seconds the prodigious integration of life his trilogy commends.” Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 91.

73. Goldhill, “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference,” 49.

74. Klein, “Some Reflections on the Oresteia,” 298.

75. Murer, “Constructing the Enemy-Other”; Staub, “Reconciliation after Genocide, Mass Killing, or Intractable Conflict: Understanding the Roots of Violence, Psychological Recovery, and Steps toward a General Theory,” Political Psychology 27, no. 6 (2006): 867–94.

76. Meira Likierman sees the tragic and the moral as “simultaneous narratives” that “work on two levels within the Kleinian texts.” In effect, the moral is not a response to or redemption of the tragic because the moral needs the tragic in order to retain “its sense”—“for morality must assume the possibility of irrevocable loss all the time.” Likierman, Melanie Klein, 121.

77. D. W. Winnicott, “Concept of a Healthy Individual,” in Home Is Where We Start From, 21–34.

78. The quote is from Peter Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 90. C. Fred Alford ties the Athenians’ willingness to share one another’s pain to Pericles’ paean to the Athenian public spiritedness toward self-government in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War: “Since a state can support individuals in their suffering, but no one person by himself can bear the load that rests on the state, is it not right for us all to rally to her defense?” (Thucydides, History, bk. 2, sec. 60); C. Fred Alford, Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 150.

79. Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 213.

80. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 71–87.

81. Oddone Longo, “The Theater of the Polis,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, Nothing to Do with Dionysus.

82. Ibid., 19.

83. Goldhill, Love, Sex, Tragedy, 231.

84. Jonathan Lear, “An Interpretation of Transference,” in Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 70.

85. Ibid., 72.

86. Winnicott, “Concept of a Healthy Individual,” 36.

87. For Fred Alford, Klein’s emphasis on depressive integration and whole-object relations implies—above all else—the political and subjective acceptance of pollution: “Whole object relations refer to the self’s ability to avoid splitting its objects into all good and all bad part-objects. Such relations require the toleration of ambivalent feelings toward others.” Alford, Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy, 18.

88. Ibid., 7.

89. Mark Griffith has argued that Greek tragedy is best approached through a series of paradoxes or “contradictory principles” of interpretation. For instance, Griffith argues that the tragedies were both part of a “polis-organized Dionysian ritual” and “theatrical entertainment,” received as both a kind of “instruction (moral, civic, aesthetic, existential) about how to live” in the world and “a kind of fantasy … and temporary escape from (and distortion of) mundane reality.” The second of Griffith’s contradictory principles, however—that the plays provided both “(a) individual psychological/mental stimulus for each viewer and (b) a collective psycho-social behavioral impact on the mass audiences in the theater”—while framed as a paradox, could also be seen as an accurate description of the intertwinement between the psychological and political dramas of reconciliation. Griffin, introduction to Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics, ed. D. M. Carter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

90. Herodotus, Histories, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 6, sec. 21.

91. Ibid.

92. P. J. Wilson, “Tragic Rhetoric: The Use of Tragedy and the Tragic in the Fourth Century,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 311.

93. As Thornton Lockwood has usefully reminded me, Aeschylus’s Persians also dealt with an episode of Athens’ recent memory insofar as it depicted the consequences of the Greek victory over the invading Persian army in 479 BCE. However, Persians seems to focus less on the polis’s misfortunes than on a celebration (if also reflective and perhaps self-critical) of Athenian success and daring. With this emphasis, it is a very different play than Phrynichos’s Capture of Miletos.

94. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.

95. Lear, “Interpretation of Transference,” 57.

96. Ibid. Lear thinks that Socrates’s great mistake was to ignore transference; he “acted as though the meaning of his activity would be transparent to others, and he thus provoked a transference storm.” This argument does seem to comport with the evidence that Socrates was influential mainly among the Athenian youth because those who are coming of age often have a more fluid psychic structure and, as a result, fewer resistances tied to transference.

97. Klein, “Emotional Life of the Infant,” 91.

98. Ibid., 91.

99. Lear, Freud, 36.

100. See Lear, “Catharsis,” in Open Minded.

101. See Lear, “An Interpretation of Transference,” where he compares the early Freud with Socrates: “Socrates, like Freud, began with an essentially cathartic method … overcoming conflict could, for him, only be a matter of eliciting and expelling false belief,” 58.

102. For a review of this literature, see Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency.”

103. Leon Golden, “Catharsis,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 93 (1962); Leon Golden, “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31, (Summer 1973): 473–79; Leon Golden, “Epic, Tragedy, and Catharsis,” Classical Philology 71 (January 1976): 77–85.

104. Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency.”

105. Steven Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos: Aristotle’s Response to Plato,” in Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory.

106. See Lear, “Catharsis,” 202. Lear does not entirely reject this account, but sees cognitive pleasure as a “step which occurs en route to the production of the proper pleasure of tragedy,” which Lear associates with the recognition of “certain emotional possibilities which in ordinary life we ignore,” 216.

107. Amelie Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics.

108. Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos.”

109. Ibid., 300.

110. Goldhill, Love, Sex, and Tragedy, 222. Emphasis added.

111. Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 90.

112. James Gibson, “The Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 3 (2006): 409–32. See also James Gibson, “Truth, Reconciliation, and the Creation of a Human Rights Culture in South Africa,” Law and Society Review 38, no. 1 (2004): 5–40.

113. Eric Doxtader and Fanie du Toit, introduction to In the Balance: South Africans Debate Reconciliation (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Press, 2010), xii, 1.

114. Yael Farber, Molora (London: Oberon Books, 2008), 48.

115. Ibid., 12.

116. Ibid., 83.

117. Ibid., 83.

118. Ibid., 86.

119. Ibid., 87.

120. Glenn A. Odom, “South African Truth and Tragedy: Yael Farber’s Molora and Reconciliation Aesthetics,” Comparative Literature 63, no. 1 (2011): 47–63.

121. Compare with Hannah Arendt’s famous description of the public “world” as an “in-between” space that “relates and separates men at the same time.” Arendt, Human Condition, 52.

5. A SPLINTERING AND SHATTERING ACTIVITY

1. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 1. On the justice cascade, see Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). On the age of apology, see Mark Gibney, ed., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

2. The TRC method, inspired by the South African experience, has in many ways displaced the previously hegemonic Nuremberg method, which focused on the prosecution of perpetrators by the new ruling party or by occupying forces. See Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (London: Routledge, 2010).

3. Quoted in Andre du Toit, “Experiences with Truth and Justice in South Africa: Stockenstrom, Gandhi, and the TRC,” Journal of Southern African Affairs 31, no. 2 (2005): 419–48.

4. See Claire Moon, Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

5. For a treatment of the various meanings of reconciliation as used by the TRC’s advocates, critics, and participants, see Nagy, “Reconciliation in Post-Commission South Africa.” See also Marek Kaminski, “Judging Transitional Justice: A New Criterion for Evaluating Truth Revelation Procedures,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 3 (2006): 383–408.

6. Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 165.

7. Meister, After Evil, v. Lauren Berlant similarly argues the human rights discourses “over-identify” social justice with the eradication of pain rather than structural social changes, reflecting (and feeding) a liberalism of fear. Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49–84. See also Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

8. Meister, After Evil, 53.

9. As Meister puts it, “Those of us who are troubled by this assumption [that an evil such as apartheid can be dead while beneficiaries continue to prosper] will find it natural to respond by reverting to the revolutionary logic of justice-as-struggle … ‘The evil still lives,’ we will say, ‘the struggle continues.’ ” After Evil, 54.

10. Aletta Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

11. Heidi Grunebaum, Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011).

12. Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, 40.

13. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (May 25, 2006). Available online at www.greensborotrc.org.

14. Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” 355.

15. Ibid., 362.

16. Ibid., 348.

17. International Center for Transitional Justice, “Truth and Memory,” May 2014, accessed May 5, 2015, https://www.ictj.org/our-work/transitional-justice-issues/truth-and-memory.

18. Ricoeur, “Imagination, Testimony, and Trust.”

19. Martha Minow, Breaking the Cycles of Hatred (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

20. Thomas McCarthy, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30, no. 5 (2002): 623–48.

21. Jürgen Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” New German Critique 44 (1988), 44.

22. Ibid., 44.

23. Ibid., 45.

24. Quoted in Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro, 163.

25. Elizabeth Kiss, “Moral Ambition within and beyond Political Constraints,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79.

26. Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, 97.

27. Nagy, “Reconciliation in Post-Commission South Africa.” See also Rosemary Nagy, “After the TRC: Citizenship, Memory, and Reconciliation,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 636–53.

28. Quoted in Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 230.

29. Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54.

30. Nancy Potter, ed. Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation: Healing Damaged Relationships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.

31. Jay A. Vora and Erika Vora, “The Effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Perceptions of Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English South Africans,” Journal of Black Studies 34 (January 2004): 301–22.

32. Mahmoud Mamdani, “Reconciliation without Justice,” Southern African Review of Books 10 (November–December 1997), 4.

33. Elizabeth Stanley, “Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 3 (2001): 543.

34. Johan Galtung, “After Violence, Reconstruction, Reconciliation and Resolution: Coping with Visible and Invisible Effects of War and Violence,” in Reconciliation, Justice and Coexistence, ed. Mohammad Abu-Nimer (New York: Lexington Books, 2001).

35. On the struggle for recognition as a “moral grammar” for social conflicts, see Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. On the idea that the struggle for recognition has to countenance human capacities for and interest in misrecognition, see David W. McIvor, “The Cunning of Recognition: Melanie Klein and Contemporary Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory (online publication October 27, 2015), doi: 10.1057/cpt.2015.47.

36. Meister, After Evil, 5.

37. Sonali Chakravarti, Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

38. Ibid., 19.

39. Norval, Aversive Democracy, 197.

40. Ibid., 198.

41. Ibid., 205.

42. Ibid., 207.

43. Ibid., 205.

44. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

45. Grunebaum, Memorializing the Past, 9.

46. Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 42.

47. Alexander Keller Hirsch, introduction to Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution, and Repair, ed. Alexander Keller Hirsch (London: Routledge, 2012), 3. On the search for common ground and the value of mutual respect, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

48. Stanley, “Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 527.

49. Grunebaum, Memorializing the Past, 40.

50. Ibid., 40–41.

51. Ibid., 8.

52. Ibid., 8.

53. Leigh Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

54. Ibid., 12.

55. Doxtader and Du Toit, introduction, xii.

56. Ibid., xii.

57. Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, “Confounded by Recognition,” in Hirsch, Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation, 182. See also Adrian Little, “Between Disagreement and Consent: Unraveling the Democratic Paradox,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 1 (2007): 143–59.

58. Jonathan Allen, “Balancing Justice and Social Unity: Political Theory and the Idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” University of Toronto Law Journal 49 (Summer 1999): 320.

59. See David Mendeloff, “Truth-Seeking, Truth-Telling, and Postconflict Peacebuilding: Curb the Enthusiasm?” International Studies Review 6, no. 3 (2004): 355–80.

60. LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah.’ ”

61. Minow, “Breaking the Cycles of Hatred.”

62. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds., Looking Back, Reaching Forward (London: Zed Books, 2000).

63. Michael Ignatieff, quoted in Audrey R. Chapman and Patrick Ball, “The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala,” Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2001): 1–43.

64. Brandon Hamber and Richard Wilson, “Symbolic Closure through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in Post-Conflict Societies,” Research Papers, Paper no. 5, University of Connecticut, accessed December 25, 2015, http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/hri_papers/5.

65. Meister, After Evil, x.

66. Ibid., 8.

67. Ibid., 60. See also Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

68. Meister, After Evil, 62.

69. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” 19–27.

70. Meister, After Evil, 70.

71. Ibid., 344n76.

72. See James L. Gibson, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).

73. David K. Androff, “Reconciliation in a Community-Based Restorative Justice Intervention,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 39 (December 2012); Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 415.

74. Pablo de Grieff, “On Making the Invisible Visible: The Role of Cultural Interventions in Transitional Justice Processes,” in Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society: Beyond Outreach, ed. Clara Ramirez-Barat (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2014).

75. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 14.

76. Paul Gready, The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2011), 12.

77. Quoted in Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 186.

78. Geoffrey Yor, “South African Winery Owner Uncorks Long-hidden History of Slavery,” Globe and Mail, August 19, 2011.

79. Ibid.

80. Matt Goulding, “The Long Harvest,” December 2012, accessed May 5, 2015, http://roadsandkingdoms.com/author/mdgoulding.

81. Ibid., 10.

82. Ibid., 8.

83. Ibid., 7.

84. Yor, “South African Winery Owner,” 2.

85. Ibid., 2.

86. Louis Bickford, “Memoryworks/Memory Works,” in Ramirez-Barat, Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society, 497.

87. Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 412; James Gibson, “Truth, Reconciliation, and the Creation of a Human Rights Culture in South Africa,” Law and Society Review 38, no. 1 (2004): 5–40.

88. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1997); Gibson, Overcoming Apartheid.

89. Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 429.

90. Ibid., 412.

91. Eric Doxtader, “The Potential of Reconciliation’s Beginning: A Reply,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7 (Fall 2004): 387.

92. Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro, 1.

93. Louis Bickford, “Unofficial Truth Projects,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007): 994–1035.

94. David Cunningham, Colleen Nugent, and Caitlin Slodden, “The Durability of Collective Memory: Reconciling the Greensboro Massacre,” Social Forces 88 (June 2010): 1–26.

95. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report. This point was drive home by a Freudian slip committed by the former mayor of Greensboro, Jim Melvin, who was in office during the period of the Greensboro Massacre and its aftermath. When Melvin was interviewed for a documentary film about the GTRC, he described the process as a “waste of time” and went on to say, “We don’t have much time for these people … I don’t care what the civil right, er, truth and reconciliation commission people say. They didn’t sit through the trial, they didn’t hear all the evidence.” The transposition in Melvin’s mind between civil rights advocates and the Greensboro TRC is powerful testimony to the subterranean struggles over race in the South and elsewhere. Adam Zucker, “Greensboro: Closer to the Truth,” documentary film, 2007, http://www.greensborothemovie.com.

96. Recently the phrase “City of Civil Rights” was an entry in a contest to select a new slogan for Greensboro. Eric Ginsburg, “Lacking Cohesive Marketing, Greensboro Seeks Plan,” Triad City Beat, March 18, 2015.

97. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights.

98. Quoted in Zucker, “Greensboro: Closer to the Truth.”

99. Jill Williams, “Legitimacy and Effectiveness of a Grassroots Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Law and Contemporary Problems 72 (Spring 2009): 148.

100. Ibid., 148.

101. Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro, 183–84.

102. Ibid., 205.

103. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 45.

104. Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro, 30.

105. Ibid., 30.

106. On framing, see Michael Ignatieff, “Articles of Faith,” Index on Censorship 25 (September 1996): 110–22.

107. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 82.

108. See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63.

109. Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 415; Daniel Bar-Tal, “A Socio-Psychological Conception of Collective Identity,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 13 (2009): 356.

110. Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude, 6.

111. See Clarke, “Projective Identification.”

112. Ed Whitfield, quoted in Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro, 28.

113. Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 417.

114. Deanna Wylie Mayer, “From Fear to Truth,” Sojourners, February 2006.

115. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 15.

116. Cunningham, Nugent, and Slodden, “The Durability of Collective Memory.” 1.

117. David K. Androff, “Reconciliation in a Community-Based Restorative Justice Intervention,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 39 (December 2012): 84.

118. Ibid., 87.

119. Ibid., 85.

120. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 13.

121. Jovanovic, Democracy, Dialogue and Community Action, 153.

122. Dismantling Racism: A Resource Book for Social Change Groups, http://www.westernstatescenter.org/tools-and-resources/Tools/Dismantling%20Racism. Accessed November 15, 2015.

123. On the unpredictability of action, see Arendt, The Human Condition.

124. Jill Williams, “Truth and Reconciliation Comes to the South: Lessons from Greensboro,” Public Eyes Magazine 21 (Spring 2007). http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v21n2/reconciliation.html.

125. Cynthia Brown, quoted in Zucker, “Greensboro: Closer to the Truth.”

126. Gibson, “Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation,” 415; Daniel Bar-Tal, Intractable Conflicts: Socio-Psychological Foundations and Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

127. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton, 1989).

128. On “contentious coexistence” in the context of truth commissions, see Payne, Unsettling Accounts.

AFTERWORD

1. Will Greenberg, “Leaked Autopsy Report Finds Freddie Gray Suffered ‘High-Energy’ Injury,” Washington Post, June 24, 2015.

2. Joel Anderson, “Baltimore Erupts after Funeral for Man Who Died in Police Custody,” Buzzfeed News, April 27, 2015.

3. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “After Thousands Rally in Baltimore, Police Make Some Arrests as Curfew Takes Hold,” New York Times, May 2, 2015.

4. Ron Nixon, “Amid Violence, Factions and Messages Converge in a Weary and Unsettled Baltimore,” New York Times, April 27, 2015.

5. J. David Goodman and Al Baker, “Wave of Protests after Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Officer in Eric Garner Chokehold Case,” New York Times, December 3, 2014.

6. According to #BlackLivesMatter activist Alicia Garza, the social media campaign was initiated partly in response to expressions of cynicism after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. As Garcia put it, “I [wasn’t] satisfied with the ‘I told you so’ and I [wasn’t] satisfied with the nihilistic ‘it’ll never happen’ kind of thing.” Garza and Kauffman, “Love Note to Our Folks.”

7. Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” New York Times, June 22, 2015.

8. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 10.

9. Ibid., 11.

10. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 120.

11. Ibid., 121.

12. Ibid., 110.

13. Ibid., 121.

14. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 65.

15. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 139.

16. Ibid., 139–40.

17. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 604.

18. Alisa Ames, Mark Evans, Laura Fox, Adam Milam, Ryan Petteway, and Regina Rutledge, 2011 Neighborhood Health Profile: Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park, Baltimore City Health Department, December 2011.

19. Darryl Pinckney, “In Ferguson,” New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015.

20. Yohura Williams, “You’re Nobody ’Till Somebody Kills You: Baltimore, Freddie Gray and the Problem of History,” Huffington Post, April 29, 2015.

21. Monica Potts, “The Freddie Gray’s of West Baltimore Who Can’t Vote,” Daily Beast, May 5, 2015.

22. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 103–4.

23. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, 2015. http://www.eji.org/lynchinginamerica.

24. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014; Alexander, New Jim Crow.

25. Coates, Between the World and Me, 79.

26. Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 151. Emphasis added.

27. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); George M. Fredrickson, “The Historical Construction of Race and Citizenship in the United States,” in Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

28. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

29. Ibid., 2.

30. Ibid., 2.

31. Ibid., 5.

32. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).

33. Ibid., 66.

34. Ibid., 120.

35. Ibid., 65.

36. Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003), 17.

37. Coates, Between the World and Me, 6.

38. Ibid., 6.

39. Ibid., 79.

40. Ibid., 11.

41. Ibid., 11.

42. Ibid., 8.

43. Ibid., 7.

44. Ibid., 28.

45. Ibid., 11.

46. Ibid., 11–12.

47. Ibid., 12.

48. Ibid., 108.

49. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 141.

50. Ibid., 141.

51. Coates, Between the World and Me, 52.

52. Ibid., 30.

53. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 631–32. Or, as Thomas Ogden puts it, “in the depressive position, phantasies of omnipotently annihilating one’s rival no longer provide a satisfactory solution to a problem in a human relationship.” Ogden, Matrix of the Mind, 91.

54. Coates, Between the World and Me, 143.

55. Sedgwick, “Difference Affect Makes,” 637.

56. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 259.

57. Ibid., 259.

58. Ibid., 49.

59. Rankine, Citizen, 7.

60. Ibid., 47.

61. Ibid., 55.

62. Ibid., 24.

63. Ibid., 24.

64. Ibid., 30.

65. Ibid., 35.

66. Ibid., 159.

67. Butler, Frames of War, 182.

68. Rankine, Citizen, 59.

69. Ibid., 66.

70. Ibid., 28.

71. Ibid., 72.

72. Ibid., 151.

73. Claudia Rankine, “Blackness as the Second Person.” https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/blackness-as-the-second-person/.

74. Rankine, Citizen, 142.

75. Ibid., 156.

76. This view that the struggle for recognition exceeds the struggle for material well-being offers a challenge to many voices on the right who claim that poverty in the United States is an illusion because even the poor have televisions, refrigerators, etc. See Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in the United States Today,” Heritage Foundation, July 18, 2011.

77. Rankine, Citizen, 151.

78. Ibid., 156.

79. Rankine, “Blackness as the Second Person.”

80. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 83.

81. Rankine, Citizen, 14.

82. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 83.

83. Rankine, “Blackness as the Second Person.”

84. Ibid.

85. See Jack Turner, Awakening to Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Turner uses the work of Stanley Cavell to argue that white Americans’ failure to recognize racial inequality is a problem of acknowledgment; that is, it is not a question of knowledge but of what is done with that knowledge. For Turner, the failure to acknowledge racial inequality constitutes a failure of democratic individualist virtue.

86. Rankine, “Condition of Black Life.”

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid.

90. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 326.

91. Ibid., 327.

92. Ibid., 66.

93. Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

94. Ibid., 15.

95. Rankine, Citizen, 54.

96. Lichterman’s study extends the literature on social capital while challenging some of this literature’s assumptions about how social capital forms and how it can be effective. Other, similar studies show that the density of associational life is less important than bridges or connections between associational nodes. See, for instance, Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

97. Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness, 256.

98. Ibid., 256–57.

99. Sedgwick, “Difference Affect Makes,” 637.

100. Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness, 15.

101. Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

102. Nina Eliasoph, Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

103. Ibid., 87.

104. Cunningham, Nugent, and Slodden, “The Durability of Collective Memory.”

105. Mark Solms, “Land Ownership in South Africa: Turning Neuropsychoanalysis into Wine,” TEDxObserver, April 1, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/tedx/mark-solms-south-africa-neuropsychoanalysis-wine.

106. Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 251.

107. Ibid., 41.

108. Hanna Segal, “From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and After: Socio-political Expressions of Ambivalence,” in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War (London: Routledge, 1995), 167.

109. Garza and Kauffman, “Love Note to Our Folks.”

110. Ibid.