At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages a struggle between two foundational tragedies: the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba. The contending ways in which both events are commemorated is a known feature of the conflict. Less known are marginal attempts to jointly deliberate on them. This article draws on such attempts to theorize a postnational conception of memory. Deliberating on the Holocaust and the Nakba, it argues, challenges the way nationalism structures ‘our’ and ‘their’ relationship to the past. (...) While nationalism seeks the congruence of memory and territory, postnationalism challenges this congruence. Doing so entails extending the communicative bounds of memory beyond national members, disrupting the territorialization of memory along national lines, and critically revising national narratives in light of a cosmopolitan memory. The article explores these three dimensions and offers a typology that differentiates the way nationalism and postnationalism mediate our relationship to the past. (shrink)

In deeply divided societies (DDS) – those having experienced episodes of ethnic or religious mass violence – thousands of survivors must confront the challenge of reconstructing their public identity, split between their tragic human experience as victims and their political obligations as citizens. They are required to cooperate precisely with those who are, in their eyes, responsible for the crimes perpetrated against them. Is liberal democratic theory able to respond to such deep divisions? Is democracy, even, compatible with the reconciliation (...) that in these societies is a priority? Building on the idea that certain cultural conditions are important for securing the stability of liberal democracy, this paper presents an account of deliberative reconciliation appropriate to the context of DDS and which provides guidance in such circumstances of unmitigated pluralism. Deliberative reconciliation works with those elements of background culture that disclose some forms of civility within society. This is the culture of civility: a deliberative consensus, which enables former enemies to become part of a community of equals and to reciprocate on the basis of some shared political values, thus displaying support for liberal democratic institutions. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 882-903, July 2022. Indigenous conservation through patrimonialization is the product of political and legal decisions made by a non-indigenous agent: the liberal state, using the law to retain a form of bios. We propose that patrimonialization is the device by which liberal states have processed and integrated indigenous claims into a form of bios ultimately designed to safeguard state legal structures. We argue that, to uphold the rule of law in contexts (...) of struggle and resistance that challenge the very understanding of the law, states respond by wielding the law in the form of the rule by law, that is, pushing the law to the limit to give normative content to the criteria by which the state conducts its affairs, without straying from the individual rights framework. We hold that the rule by law is an operation that defines the patrimonialization of indigenous peoples. It increases their visibility while imposing limits on political action to keep them from becoming sui juris subjects capable of breaching the distinction between zoe and bios. In this article, we try to understand the political–ideological intent of these decisions, the intentions beyond the letter of the law of patrimonialized peoples. (shrink)