On the Aporetic Borderlines of Forgiveness: Bereavement as a Political Form

Abstract

This article focuses on representations of forgiveness as adopted or assumed by processes of collective amelioration experienced in the aftermath of mass atrocity. It seeks to demonstrate how each representative approach to forgiveness captures some of the torment, pain, and suffering of survivor and successor generations, but also that each fails to accommodate the depths and complexities of personal grief and collective mourning. Too often transnational justice in the aftermath of political evil becomes grounded in assumptions of justice, truth, and apology that are severely delimited. Such strategic and theoretical perspectives are insufficiently attuned to the needs of bereavement as a political form because they fail to promote social solace by means of collective atonement on the part of survivor and successor generations who inherit the legacies of sorrow. If political bereavement conducive to collective amelioration is to occur in any one polity, it should be legitimated by a transnational system of “transnational legacy sites” exclusively devoted to the designation, protection, and intercultural connection of all the many places where political evil may be said to have occurred.