The monstruous and the miscount: a radical theory of accountability

Abstract

ABSTRACT Can public inquiries and truth commissions provide a space for political transformation? This article investigates the field of transitional justice to address this question, focusing on pessimistic accounts of the persistent failure of truth-telling practices. It identifies three main narratives on why truth commissions fail to promote change, namely the failure of implementation, failure of design and failure by design narratives. This article contends that none of these narratives satisfactorily answer the question raised by this special issue due to their attachment to a referentialist ontology and a linear temporality of truth-seeking. Combining Rancière’s critique of political philosophy with insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article advances a radical theory of accountability capable of circumventing these limitations and elucidating the links between truth-telling and political transformation. Based on an anti-foundationalist approach, this theory sees the work of truth commissions as situated in struggles that constitute the after-maths; the process of counting the parts of a conflict (victims, perpetrators, collaborators) and making suffering count (as violence) by attaching it to an object source (a cause). Seen in a radical light, truth-telling appears trespassed by two organizing principles: the management of monstrosity (as a regime of visibility that formalizes suffering and apportions blame and culpability) and the inevitable miscount of the identities that populate the victim-perpetrators spectrum. The article argues that investigative commissions are doomed to fail, but it is thanks to this failure that they can offer a space for political transformation.