Reparations and the human.

• Author: Eng, David L.

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.

--Judith Butler (1)

1. necessary grief

   I would like to begin by returning to Antigone's Claim insofar as it traces a particular strain of thought in Judith Butler's writings about the relationship between social difference and the problem of the human. (2) Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy has been subject to a myriad of interpretations in philosophy, classics, literature, and political theory. Butler's reading of Antigone, the third installment of the Oedipus cycle, is singular, however, insofar as it reconceptualizes conventional understandings of the relations among the incest taboo, kinship, the state, and the possibilities for social change and belonging. (3) If the incest taboo might be reconceived outside of its normative Oedipal resolutions, Butler asks, what new forms of kinship and sociality might emerge outside of conventional heterosexual arrangements to challenge as well as incite state recognition of non-normative sexualities and communities? In the eyes of the law, what today counts as a livable and grievable life today, and what does not? These questions have consequential implications for war, violence, and mourning, as Butler shows us with increasing urgency in her more recent works, and for contemporary legal notions of reparations, the human, and human rights, as I hope to suggest in this article.

   To remind us: in Sophocles' drama, Antigone not only buries her brother Polyneices in defiance of the King's command, but also refuses to disavow her act of disobedience, even in the face of death. (4) In so doing, she figures a crisis in kinship and politics--indeed, a crisis between kinship and politics--in a state of war. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel reads Antigone as a figure who represents the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal rule. For Hegel, she represents the pre-political sphere of kinship that conditions but is ultimately foreclosed from the domain of the political proper, from the state and its ethical order. (5) Yet Antigone is not so compliant a figure. Her defiance of Creon's sovereign ban on mourning Polyneices, as Butler observes, "transgresses both gender and kinship norms ... exposing] the socially contingent character of kinship, only to become the repeated occasion in the critical literature for a rewriting of that contingency as immutable necessity." (6)

   Antigone throws us into both gender and kinship trouble, with substantial implications for contemporary political struggles ranging from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage to the evolving constitution of the family of nations (a process occurring in large part today through the exclusion of Muslim societies, whose cultures are pathologized as irremediably misogynist and homophobic). (7) In a post-Oedipal tragedy in which the father is the brother, the sisters are the daughters, and the brothers are the sons, Antigone finds herself confounded by the terms of kinship. She is, in Butler's words:

   [C]aught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking, outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. Her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror. Kinship is not simply a situation she is in but a set of practices that she also performs, relations that are reinstituted in time precisely through the practice of their repetition. When she buries her brother, it is not simply that she acts from kinship, as if kinship furnishes a principle for action, but that her action is the action of kinship, the performative repetition that reinstates kinship as a public scandal. (8) By insisting on her right to bury Polyneices, Antigone enacts kinship not just as a repeated "public scandal" on the edges of social and cultural intelligibility but, equally important, as the condition for care--as the precondition of being human in a state of violence. Creon's interdiction on mourning raises the critical question of how kinship is mobilized to secure the conditions by which certain lives become livable and recognizable or, alternately, repudiated and foreclosed. It does so by constituting a social sphere in which the differential production and allocation of grief and grievability operates, as Butler writes in Precarious Life, "to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as livable life and a grievable death?" (9)

   Creon's interdiction on mourning consigns Polyneices to the far side of being human, but insofar as it prohibits grief and care on the part of his survivors, they too are rendered less than human, cast outside the bonds of family and kinship. In acting out, then, Antigone performs kinship, upsetting its normative structures, and she does so precisely by attempting to constitute and produce a new form of being human against the dictates of the state. Antigone exhibits a willingness to become undone--indeed, she is undone--but her extravagant act is the risk, the excessive gamble constituting her chance of becoming human, as the epigraph from Giving an Account of Oneself, with which I begin this article, so proposes. (10) In this regard, if kinship is the precondition of the human--rather than the human a precondition for kinship--we might describe Antigone's claim, in Butler's words, as the "occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws." (11)

   Antigone's necessary grief might be considered, then, not just as an act of mourning the loss of the human, but simultaneously as an act of repairing the human, an act of reparation. Antigone's claim becomes the occasion to redress the social violence that constitutes the human's political boundaries and psychic limits in order to create another field, a new field, for the human. By drawing attention to the ways in which the "human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are...refused the possibility of cultural articulation," (12) Antigone raises the question of what kind of social world might emerge when the borders of kinship and social belonging--when the limits to their representations and representability--are rent and exposed. If Antigone's acts of defiance might from this perspective be characterized as the anguished process of becoming human, then the human cannot be considered ontologically pre-given, a universal entity, or a singular subject or form. Rather, the human must be thought of as an achievement in the making. (13) Such a process asks us, in Butler's words, "to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness." (14) In its call, it urges us to reconsider a genealogy of reparations and the human across political as well as psychoanalytic registers. Ultimately, as 1 hope to demonstrate, those to whom reparation can be offered become the very sign of the human.

2. the loop of enlightenment

   Let me turn in this section, for a moment, to the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation, before returning to Butler and the figure of the human as it is conceived today in legal configurations of reparations and discourses of universal human rights. I will rethink these configurations by exploring how political and psychic genealogies of reparation trace an uneven history of the figure of the human in both its classical incarnations and its contemporary forms.

   Reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis, specifically object relations theory, yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. (15) As a political concept, reparations have a long history, dating back at least to the first Punic War in third century BCE, with Rome's imposition of monetary payments on a defeated Carthage. (16) In its classical definition, reparations concern an interstate relationship: a defeated state is compelled to indemnify a victorious one for the costs of war. (17)

   Reparations experienced a second life in political theory and international relations after World War II. (18) Under the long shadow of total war and genocide, the postwar rise of discourses of international human rights has broadened the focus of reparations from purely an interstate relationship to consider, as well, questions of individual harm. (19) For the first time, that is, the spread of ideas of human rights has empowered individuals to make legal, moral, and monetary claims on states for redress, apology, and compensation. (20) Great evils of past and present, as Martha Minow observes, are nothing new. (21) However, "mounting waves of objections and calls for collective responses to mass violence" (22) are decidedly new, with individuals and groups turning to the language and instruments of law for adjudication and relief. This significant postwar shift in international politics and morality has opened up a host of new legal strategies for the repair of previous wrongs in the context of state-sponsored violence, injury, and harm--especially violence, injury, and harm done by a state to its own citizens and civilian populations. Indeed, this remarkable postwar political shift...