Democracy and the Political Unconscious

A surprising fact gradually emerges: the work of the phantom coincides in every respect with Freud’s description of the death instinct. First of all, it has no energy of its own; it cannot be “abreacted,” merely designated. Second, it pursues its work of disarray in silence. Let us note that the phantom is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression. Finally, it gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalization.

In general, “phantamogenic” words become travesties and can be acted out or expressed in phobias of all kinds (such as impulse phobia), obsessions, restricted phantasmagorias or ones that take over the entire field of the subject’s mental activities . . . [while the phantom effect may fade over generations] this is not at all the case when shared or complementary phantoms find a way of being established as social practices along the lines of staged words. . . . We must not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word—whether metaphorically, as an alloseme, or as a cryptonym—constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm.

I have been arguing for understanding the public sphere as a space that people create as they use semiotic modes to participate in a world with others, to coordinate action and produce outcomes; a space in which public employments of semiotic structures, discursive and otherwise, construct meaning, identity, purpose, and political direction. By “public” I mean what John Dewey meant in The Public and Its Problems: an array of people who are related by common interests or concerns. As Dewey put it, “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.” As I discussed in chapter 1, members of a public need not share the same views on these things, but they find themselves to be a public when they see that they are affected by the same things. The public sphere is a res publica created through the semiotic investments of members of political communities. It can be unmade through the work of oppressive regimes that try to excommunicate some swaths of society from membership in the political community.

There can also be a res publica internationally, something that can be a resource more powerful than liberal reason. This international public sphere is created through the semiotic investments that peoples make in fathoming shared concerns and possible courses of coordinated action. As of this writing, this process is currently at work in the area of climate change. For example, The New York Times’s op-ed page of March 4, 2007, carried pieces from around the world offering perspectives on the consequences of global warming. These were the perspectives of individuals. An international public sphere really begins to form when peoples, not just people, begin to see how they are jointly affected by common problems.

But the promise of an international public sphere is undermined when some nations fail to take part, or are barred from taking part, in this space-. Countries that have sunk into civil war psychosis are states that John Rawls would call, in a most understated way, non-well-ordered (Rawls 1999:89). In their external relations, they are likely to become threats to international peace and stability. But even if externally they behave appropriately, internally non-well-ordered states can violate the minimum standards of decency and exact injustices and social evils upon their own people to the point that well-ordered societies, especially liberal ones, are loathe to tolerate them, for they violate a fundamental principle of a law of peoples: to honor human rights (Rawls 1999:37).

Rawls holds out hope that forums for international reasoning and talk can persuade non-well-ordered peoples to change their ways. “For well-ordered peoples to achieve this long-run aim,” he writes, “they should establish new institutions and practices to serve as a kind of confederative center and public forum for their common opinion and policy toward non-well-ordered regimes.” Through the United Nations or other international alliances, confederations of well-ordered states can formulate and express their views about “the unjust and cruel institutions of oppressive and expansionist regimes and their violations of human rights” (Rawls 1999:93), and in exposing them help to bring these wrongs to an end. Now, shame is indeed a powerful weapon against barbarism, but barbarous regimes can still be impervious, especially, I’d add, when they have been traumatized and lost their foothold in the sociosymbolic realm. When shaming doesn’t work, sanctions may, especially sanctions that deprive such states of the benefits of membership in an “international society of cooperation” (ibid.).

That there is or can be an international society of cooperation is a central feature of Rawls’s practically utopian ideal. The members are not states but peoples, he argues, because peoples, not states, have these two moral powers: “a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good” (Rawls 1999:92). Political doctrines that think of states as the prime international actors, namely international realism, hold that what motivates international action is crass self-interest that is impervious to moral reasoning. But states are instruments of peoples, Rawls argues, not the other way around. Their authority emanates from their peoples and can be stripped just the same.

Though Rawls’s language and mine differ, we share a common picture of an ideal international realm. As I would put it, this ideal is not just a not-yet-realized utopia; it is also a regulative ideal that can prompt and guide action. Internationally, peoples have an imago of a space of relationship, of connections, indebtedness, obligation, friendship with others. This international space of cooperation is constructed imaginatively, but being an imago makes it no less powerful than anything concrete. It is even more powerful, for it is both a self- and a collective understanding of connections and obligations. Moreover, it is not confined to the actions of states and official governments; as the world becomes more globally connected through new media, technologies, transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and economic relations, we are developing an international public sphere, a sociosymbolic realm of peoples’ sublimations in which peoples strive to participate, to “see themselves.”

Rawls’s language and framework, steeped in abstract reason, pay short shrift to the power of the imaginary, the limits of reason, the causes of barbarity, and, to an extent, the ways supposedly reasonable and well-ordered peoples (or at least their leaders) can dissemble and rationalize their actions. Insofar as an international society of peoples is constituted psychically and imaginatively, international political relations can be driven by fundamental psychological factors. That a people can be well ordered all the way down is highly unlikely, especially given the fact that most peoples have not worked through their traumas or properly grieved their losses. Most peoples (and I mean here qua peoples, not individuals) are still acting out, not working through, their troubles, so even if seemingly well ordered, they can be driven by a will to power (or security or vengeance) that they cloak in innocent garb. Their relations with others may be less than benevolent. Their actions toward those they deem threats may have as much to do with annihilating the other’s identity internationally as with self-defense.

International policy formed under some given rationale may be driven by underground motivations to harm or make politically invisible other peoples, along the same lines as the kind of political harm done to individuals by oppressive or barbaric regimes. Recall Rajeev Bhargava’s powerful discussion:

The act of violence transmits an unambiguous, unequivocal message, that their views on the common good—on matters of public significance–do not count, that their side of the argument has no worth and will not be heard, that they will not be recognized as participants in any debate, and, finally, that to negotiate, or even reach a compromise with them, is worthless. In effect, it signals their disappearance from the public domain. (Bhargava 2000:47)

Bhargava is referring to political crimes within barbaric regimes, but the same phenomenon is at work internationally when parties are at war. Those on whom war is waged are effectively stripped of their title and standing in an ideal international realm of cooperation. In an era of globalization, the public domain is not just a national phenomenon but a global one. The violence of war and even the harshness of sanctions are signs, to say the least, that other options have either been exhausted or will not be considered. War is a way of making the other politically disappear from the civilized global public domain. Ironically, though, it also signals that the one waging it has given up on politics and is resorting to coercion or violence.

At the heart of this book are two questions: Is it possible for people with few, if any areas of agreement on fundamental questions to find a way to live together peacefully? Can political solutions be found in matters where what counts as properly political is itself in question? I have been arguing that the rational framework is now inadequate and a new one is needed. A new framework involves seeing the vital role of an imago of an international realm of cooperation to which peoples want to belong. Differences that are not resolved often lead to war, but we cannot understand this if we focus on reasons and ignore traumas and how they are, in the Freudian sense, acted out rather than worked through. This is not a novel idea. As Shoshana Felman argues in her book, The Juridical Unconscious, the whole of the twentieth century used trials and the judicial system, often imperfectly, as means for peoples to work through their traumas. As I discuss in later chapters, other forms of engagement are needed, such as long-term unofficial dialogue and truth commissions. But for the moment, I want to show the consequences of failing to work through trauma, of getting mired in a repetition compulsion.

To see an example, we don’t have to go any farther than the morning paper. The remainder of this chapter takes up the example of the U.S. war on terror to make a case that seems all too obvious: war is not the answer. To the contrary, it is a way of acting out, a repetition compulsion, stemming from unresolved trauma and the common occurrence of non-well-ordered peoples. The end of the Cold War was an opportunity for the United States to participate in creating a more peaceful and stable global order. But instead, the first Bush administration set about, in the words of Colin Powell, being “the bully on the block.” During the end of that Republican administration, Dick Cheney, with the help of Paul Wolfowitz and other then mid-level national security strategists, devised a defense planning guide designed to keep the military at Cold War levels, with a strategy that advocated preemption and unbridled U.S. global power. As David Armstrong writes,

In January 1993, in his very last days in office, Cheney released [the] Defense Strategy for the 1990s. . . . The goal [was] to preclude “hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests” and preventing the rise of a new super-power. Although it expressed a “preference” for collective responses in meeting such challenges, it made clear that the United States would play the lead role in any alliance. Moreover, it noted that collective action would “not always be timely.” Therefore, the United States needed to retain the ability to “act independently, if necessary.” To do so would require that the United States maintain its massive military superiority. Others were not encouraged to follow suit. (Armstrong 2002)

The plan was put in place just before the Clinton administration took over, but was tacitly scuttled as soon as Clinton came into power (Armstrong 2002). However, Clinton did little to create a multilateral global order; he barely paid any mind to foreign affairs at all. When the next Bush administration came in, so too did the crew that had devised the earlier defense planning strategy. Here was an administration with a defense plan that would ensure U.S. sole superpower status, but no plausible rationale for why the American people should pay for it or the world should tolerate it.

But matters changed on September 11, 2001, in a way that psychoanalysis is able to explain better than political theory. Eli Zaretsky describes that moment:

We call an event like that of September 11 a trauma. A trauma is an event whose impact does not occur at the level of consciousness and which therefore tears open the fabric of everyday existence in a way that consciously experienced acts do not. The confusion, the self-questioning, the civility and even vulnerability of New York City street life, however temporary, the constant replaying of images of the towers in flames, the towers collapsing, the compulsive visits to “ground zero”—these can all be understood as response to trauma. The mind was unprepared for the event. The upset and rupture took place at a different level of the psyche from the one on which the mind normally functions. Afterward, the mind goes back to the event, reliving it as if preparing to encounter it again. The driving force is the effort to master the event that mastered it, to master it by incorporating it back into an ordinary, everyday consciousness. (Zaretsky 2002:99)

The trauma of 9/11 called for a response. Under the cover of this collective trauma, the Bush administration unveiled a supposedly “new” policy of preemption. The post–9/11 Defense Planning Guide (DPG) was a thinly revised version of the old one: “Signed by Wolfowitz’s new boss, Donald Rumsfeld, in May and leaked to the Los Angeles Times in July,” Armstrong writes, “it contains all the key elements of the original Plan and adds several complementary features. The preemptive strikes envisioned in the original draft DPG are now ‘unwarned attacks.’ The old Powell-Cheney notion of military ‘forward presence’ is now ‘forwarded deterrence.’ The use of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy called for in the Powell Doctrine is now labeled an ‘effects based’ approach.” In short, it was a policy of unilateral U.S. action that violated most of the norms of just war theory. Granted, some of the more sober just war theorists supported the U.S. use of force following 9/11, but not because they favored preemption; they thought that Afghanistan and then Iraq presented imminent threats, against which just war theory can condone military action. But the “new” U.S. doctrine itself stretched the definition of “imminent” beyond recognition.

One cannot say for sure whether the second Bush administration was acting out from trauma or just being calculating about this opportunity to enact its plan. Regardless, the United States as a people was stopped short in the process of working through the trauma. This allowed the country to take the course of a repetition compulsion or, in other words, an endless war on terror. In the following section I point to some signs that this was what in fact occurred.

In the case of 9/11 and the war on terror waged in its name, there is a complex array of motivations, of ressentiments, at work that drive U.S. policies. Even the naming of the event, with the seeming certitude of “9/11,” is a complex result of what was both unexpected despite being expectable (in the sense, as Derrida noted just weeks afterward, the United States had already experienced, in Oklahoma, the bombing of a federal building and that only a few years earlier, the Twin Towers had been bombed) and experienced yet still incomprehensible: “The telegram of this metonymy [9/11]—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize, that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about” (Derrida, in Borradori 2003:86). What made 9/11 so momentous and devastating was its incomprehensibility. In Derrida’s view, to be an event in the strongest sense of the word, something must happen in a way that is not quite experiencable: “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that I do not comprehend. . . . [It is] my incomprehension” (ibid. 90).

It is hard to see how the Rawlsian “practical” fiction of a well-ordered society and international arena is of any help when policies issue from, that is, are (dis)ordered by, traumatic events. Even the naming of the thing that happened is a form of distancing or numbing:

We repeat this [“9/11”], we must repeat it, and it is all the more necessary to repeat it insofar as we do not really know what is being named in this way, as if to exorcise two times at one go: on the one hand, to conjure away, as if by magic, the “thing” itself, the fear or the terror it inspires (for repetition always protects by neutralizing, deadening, distancing a traumatism, and this is true for the repetition of the televised images . . .), and, on the other hand, to deny, as close as possible to this act of language and this enunciation, our powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion, to characterize, to think the thing in question, to get beyond the mere deictic of the date: something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don’t know what. (ibid. 87)

In Derrida’s view, even just the naming of the whole of that event with the date, “September 11,” or the abbreviation, “9/11,” is defense against its traumas, and in the course of the interview from which I’m quoting, he argues that the meaning of the event surpasses the number of the dead, the violation of borders, the method of attack. “I believe always in the necessity of being attentive first of all to this phenomenon of language, naming, and dating,” Derrida says, “to this repetition compulsion (at once rhetorical, magical, and poetic). To what this compulsion signifies, translates, or betrays . . . to try to understand what is going on precisely beyond language and what is pushing us to repeat endlessly and without knowing what we are talking about, precisely there where language and the concept come up against their limits: ‘September 11, September 11, le 11 septembre, 9/11’” (ibid. 87–88).

Beyond the overwhelming calamity of that particular day, what wound does this repetition compulsion signify? What trauma does it betray? And what does the significance of this trauma say about the repetition compulsion that has gone on in the intervening years since the interview occurred—the compulsion to react against the trauma itself?

What makes the events of September 11 so overwhelming is not just the sheer number of deaths, though Derrida does not deny the singularity of each of the thousands of lives lost. Beyond these quantitative measures, qualitatively, there is a belief about the United States and its place in a post–Cold War order. “The obvious fact is that since the ‘end of the Cold War’ what can be called the world order, in its relative and precarious stability, depends largely on the solidity and reliability, on the credit, of American power” (ibid. 92–93). This is the case on many levels at once: “economic, technical, military, in the media, even on the level of discursive logic, of the axiomatic that supports juridical and diplomatic rhetoric worldwide, and this international law” (ibid. 93). The attacks of September 11 violated more than borders, buildings, and lives; they violated the discursive and rhetorical power (which is more than economic and military, though these aspects are formidable) that holds the global system in place:

What is legitimated by the prevailing system (a combination of public opinion, the media, the rhetoric of politicians and the presumed authority of all those who, through various mechanisms, speak or are allowed to speak in the public space) are thus the norms inscribed in every apparently meaningful phrase that can be constructed with the lexicon of violence, aggression, crime, war, and terrorism, with the supposed differences between war and terrorism, national and international terrorism, state and nonstate terrorism, with the respect for sovereignty, national territory, and so on. (ibid.)

U.S. hegemony underlies U.S. authority to make all such distinctions. (And note that the relationship between hegemony and authority is circular; there is a kind of positivism driven underground beginning with the Enlightenment: by having global power, the United States is “authorized” to deem who is powerful and what is legitimate.) U.S. hegemony underlies notions of what kinds of actors and operations are credible and what are not. Hence, with 9/11’s traumatic wound to U.S. power, what was “touched, wounded, or traumatized by this double crash” was not just the immediate casualties but even more the “hermeneutic apparatus that might have allowed one to see coming, to comprehend, interpret, describe, speak of, and name ‘September 11’—and in so doing to neutralize the traumatism and come to terms with it through a ‘work of mourning’” (ibid.).

There is a destructive autoimmunity at work in these phenomena. Derrida compares it to a response that can befall a biological organism: the defenses it musters to fight off a foreign agent turn back upon the organism itself. He identifies three overlapping autoimmune reactions. First is the manner in which the attacks came: not from without but from within. The hijackers were trained in the United States to use technologies developed in the United States; they hijacked U.S. planes that departed from U.S. cities; and they aimed them at vulnerable but powerful U.S. symbols. Moreover, the hijackers came from networks that the United States had helped create. In the last throes of the Cold War, in its attempt to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan (or even earlier, to dupe the Soviet Union into going into Afghanistan in the first place), the United States teamed up with its royal allies in the Middle East, the Saudis, to develop networks to fund the mujahadeen who would fight against the Soviets (Armstrong and Trento 2007). These networks remained in place long after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, and they funded the next generation of militant Islamic fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda.

Second, the suicidal autoimmunity at work issues from the nature of a powerfully traumatic event. Departing from the classical notion of trauma, rooted in its historicity as an event in the past that one cannot assimilate in the present, Derrida identifies the salient feature of trauma as the haunting sense that there might be something worse still to come. To be sure, the classical account notes that trauma becomes a problem when it causes anxiety, and anxiety is surely a forward-looking, forward-fearing symptom. But Derrida argues more that what is traumatic is the thought of what might yet happen “worse than anything that has ever taken place” (Derrida, in Borradori 2003:97). Were it possible to be assured that nothing as terrible as or more terrible than 9/11 would ever happen again, Derrida argues, the wound would not be so debilitating. We could do the “work of mourning” and move on. But this is not at all the case. There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when traumatism is produced by the future, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is “over and done with” (ibid. 97).

What might come and is so terrible and fearful are again things that the United States helped wreak: the biotechnology that can unleash deadly nerve agents and organisms; the nuclear technology developed during the Cold War, because of the Cold War; and, with its triumph in winning the Cold War, enemies that are shadowy and elusive. When the United States became the global superpower, it became the sole “protector” of the world order. When no other state could counter it, a rival power began to form in nonstate actors, many of which, as just noted, the United States helped create and fortify in the first place. David Armstrong and Joe Trento describe how the U.S. government under Carter lured the Soviets into Afghanistan, knowing this would be the Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, and did all it could to get assistance in this project from Pakistan, despite knowing that Pakistan had developed and was circulating nuclear technology. Fixated on winning the Cold War, the United States began to seed a new threat. Defending U.S. secret operations in Afghanistan that gave rise to Taliban control, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski asked in a 1998 interview, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” (Armstrong and Trento 2007). Looking back, it is painfully clear that these defensive measures against a known threat were doomed to fuel a worse one.

That this is a terror of what might come, what might issue from some unknown place and unidentifiable enemy, leads to the third aspect of suicidal autoimmunity: repression. As a terror that can hardly be formally recognized, named, or fought, it is both hard to grasp and easy to deny. Paradoxically, “even if this terror is the very worst, even if it touches the geopolitical unconscious of every living being and leaves there indelible traces,” because it is so unidentifiable and fleeting, it can easily be “denied, repressed, indeed forgotten” (Derrida, in Borradori 2003:99). But attempts to “attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism . . . are but so many desperate attempts . . . which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome” (ibid.). Describing this vicious circle of repression, Derrida says:

It cannot be said that humanity is defenseless against the threat of this evil. But we must recognize that defenses and all the forms of what is called, with two equally problematic words, the “war on terrorism” work to regenerate, in the short or long term, the causes of the evil they claim to eradicate. Whether we are talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Palestine, the “bombs” will never be “smart” enough to prevent the victims . . . from responding, either in person or by proxy, with what it will then be easy for them to present as legitimate reprisals or as counterterrorism. And so on ad infinitum. (ibid. 100)

This [United States] once rejected “unwarned” attacks such as Pearl Harbor as barbarous and unworthy of a civilized nation. Today many cheer the prospect of conducting sneak attacks—potentially with nuclear weapons—on piddling powers run by tin-pot despots.

We also once denounced those who tried to rule the world. Our primary objection (at least officially) to the Soviet Union was its quest for global domination. Through the successful employment of the tools of containment, deterrence, collective security, and diplomacy—the very methods we now reject—we rid ourselves and the world of the Evil Empire. Having done so, we now pursue the very thing for which we opposed it. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, there appears to be no one left to stop us.

Perhaps, however, there is. The Bush Administration and its loyal opposition seem not to grasp that the quests for dominance generate backlash. Those threatened with pre-emption may themselves launch pre-emptory strikes. And even those who are successfully “pre-empted” or dominated may object and find means to strike back. Pursuing such strategies may, paradoxically, result in greater factionalism and rivalry, precisely the things we seek to end. (Armstrong 2002)

Since the above-quoted pieces were published, the fallout of the U.S. response to 9/11 has become even more suicidal and toxic. The war in Iraq has been disastrous, creating a situation on the verge of civil war that breeds more animosity to the United States and more opportunities for the likes of Al Qaeda to multiply and pose even worse threats. Derrida noted the repetition compulsion at work in the coining of the name 9/11. Certainly it is also at work in how the United States has waged war on a country that clearly had nothing to do with 9/11.

Surely the United States is not alone in the folly of suicidal autoimmunity, in trying to deal with unresolved traumas by acting out, rather than working through, what it has experienced. But at this point in time it stands alone as the world’s only superpower, authorizing itself as the world’s policeman. As of this writing, I am beginning to hear rumblings from the White House about “grave” threats to democracy posed by new socialist governments in South America. How long until the world’s policeman heads south?

The past century has seen many wars waged in the name of freedom and democracy. Sometimes force may be necessary to end repression, but war prima facie cannot bring about democracy. Even if the force is used to install ballot boxes and other apparatus of democratization, transitioning to democracy will succeed only to the extent that old wounds are healed. Desire for justice needs to be tempered with a desire for creating a new and inclusive political community. Wherever there is a need to stop perpetrators and hold them accountable, there is also a need for recovery and reconciliation. Absent means of recovering from trauma, a political community will doubtless continue its repetition compulsions, whether by repressing seemingly dangerous and abject members or by going after seeming enemies abroad.

The acting out and concomitant repetition compulsions also figure into criminal tribunals. Even when they follow the rule of law, tribunals and criminal proceedings may be masks for vengeance and retribution, not just ways of achieving accountability and deterrence. Certainly sometimes such trials are warranted; despots do need to be called to account. But as means of helping a people work through, as catharses, they are severely limited. To answer the question, as David Crocker puts it, “How should a fledgling democracy reckon with severe human rights abuses that earlier authoritarian regimes, their opponents, or combatants in an internal armed conflict have committed?” many are developing the idea of transitional justice. “Sometimes the term ‘transitional justice’ is used to refer exclusively to penal justice and even to retributive interpretations of trials and punishment,” Crocker notes. But he and most others involved in the field are usually more interested in the kind of justice that can compensate those who have been wronged and restore the community to a more sound footing. “The challenge for new democracy is to respond appropriately to past evils without undermining the new democracy or jeopardizing prospects for future development” (Crocker 2000:99).

In embarking on a path of transitional justice, a people can ask what they are seeking and then consider what measures are most conducive to their project. Those engaged in transitional justice tend to lean in one of two directions: upholding human rights through international criminal tribunals and the rule of international law or working for reconciliation, healing, and even forgiveness that might pave the way for a new society. (In fact, the title of a book on which I am drawing takes a cue from this division: Truth v. Justice, edited by Robert Rothberg and Dennis Thompson.) These options are not mutually exclusive. The South African truth and reconciliation process, for example, retained the right to deny amnesty to perpetrators who were then still subject to criminal prosecution. And perpetrators can be held accountable even as a people goes through the process of working through and recovering from trauma. My point is that any single-minded focus on prosecuting human rights violations may stall or deflect attention from the need to work through. It may even be a subconscious repetition compulsion. (Who beside Bosnian Serbs did not feel some pleasure at the trial of Slobodan Milošević?)

And even though criminal proceedings involve public testimony, the format does not allow such testimony to have much, if any mending power. As Martha Minow writes,

The trial as a form of response to injustice has its own internal limitations. Litigation is not an ideal form of social action. . . . Victims and other witnesses undergo the ordeals of testifying and facing cross-examination. Usually they are given no simple opportunity to convey directly the narrative of their experience. Evidentiary rules and ruling limit the factual material that can be included. Trial procedure makes for laborious and even boring sessions that risk anesthetizing even the most avid listener and dulling sensibilities even in the face of recounted horrors. The simplistic questions of guilt or innocence framed by the criminal trial can never capture the multiple sources of mass violence. If the social goals include gaining public acknowledgment and producing a complete account of what happened, the trial process is at best an imperfect means. (Minow 2000:238)

Countries recovering from brutality do indeed need to restore basic political justice. But this alone is not enough to heal a nation or restore a sociosymbolic field. Wounds to the polis can outlast a regime. I saw this phenomenon first hand as a teenager visiting family in Greece. Three years after the fall of the authoritarian regime known as “the colonels,” Greek citizens still would not even whisper in public about political matters. Although they were putting political structures back in place, the restoration of a dis cursive public sphere was long in coming. With much struggle, opposition movements sometimes can remove old regimes and install new ones. But democratic change has little chance unless old traumas are brought to light and some measure of restoration occurs—restoration simultaneously to citizens of their title as citizens and to the nation of its public sphere.

These last few chapters have visited the complicated and many-layered process by which communities attempt to found themselves. The process misfires when they attempt to build commonality on the backs of some or when a trauma provides cohesion while maintaining a constant “threat level.” Such communities are easily destroyed. Even when they are maintained, the happiness and welfare of those whose backs are made to suffer, of those who are silenced, are destroyed. The trauma is doubled because, it seems, human beings and peoples thrive in community and suffer when banished or outcast. The suffering can be so extreme it renders the survivor less than human.

Recovering from this condition, as I will begin to argue now, calls for recovering or reconstituting community. This takes place performatively and discursively, in the process of claiming membership in something public. It cannot be done alone. If no one is present to hear and to respond to the claim, only further suffering ensues.