The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. By Adam Sitze. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 392 pp. $70 hardcover.

• Published date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12222
• Date: 01 September 2016

Book Reviews

Jinee Lokaneeta, Editor

The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Commission. By Adam Sitze. Michigan: University

of Michigan Press, 2013. 392 pp. $70 hardcover.

Reviewed by Suren Pillay, Centre for Humanities Research,

University of the Western Cape, South Africa

SouthAfrica’sTruthandReconciliationCommissionhasbeenagener-

ative exercise at multiple levels particularly in the ways it has given rise

to what Adam Sitze notes with some consternation, a “truth industry.”

By that he refers not only to the political settlement or institutional lives

it has cultivated, but we might also add the voluminous output it has

encouraged in scholarly reflection. Sitze is of course adding here to

this literature, but has managed to do so by offering a distinctive work

of meticulously argued criticism that is both deeply and sharply chal-

lenging as well as nuanced and fundamentally thoughtful.

Self-consciously, the Impossible Machine sets aside much of the exist-

ing terms of evaluating the legacy of the TRC from within Transitional

Justice. Sitze seeks neither to laud the miracle that has been celebrated

and transformed into a modular form of post-Cold War conflict resolu-

tion nor trounce its ineffectiveness in dealing with larger social and eco-

nomic structural challenges as some Left critiques have tended to do

(see Meister, 2011). Instead, drawing on what he refers repeatedly to as

a genealogical method—distinctive from history (“history consoles”ashe

tells us, while “genealogy disturbs”), Sitze locates the TRC in a longer polit-

ical and conceptual history of jurisprudence, and one that is decidedly

less marvelous than the story of law as the highest form of civilization.

For Sitze, the central feature that distinguished the TRC from Nurem-

burg, its formulation of amnesty in exchange for “truth,” or more accu-

rately, truth defined as political motive, looks much less savory when

considered from within the genealogy of a prior jurisprudence on

“indemnity.” A substantive part the book is devoted to a rich and expan-

sive parsing out of indemnity through a consideration of its colonial

career in the last nineteenth century. While indemnity was invoked in

England to resolve the Civil War in the late 1600s, Sitze reminds us that

by the late nineteenth century it was really only deployed in its Diceyan

formulation in the colonies and hardly ever in Europe by then. The

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