Paul Muldoon, The Penitent State Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing, Oxford University Press, 2023
This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures – especially the gesture of apology – becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised? Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in ‘healing’, such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d’état in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population. The Penitent State seeks to show that the key issue created by the ‘age of apology’ is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere, but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.
- Challenges conventional interpretations of sovereign acts of repentance and redress as ethical gestures
- Situates the ‘age of apology’ within a broader societal movement towards the biopolitical regulation of psychic trauma
- Provides a forensic examination of the way three of the key institutions of restorative justice – public memorials, political apologies, truth commissions – function as instruments of trauma management and national healing
- Explores the political institution of Greek tragedy as an alternative, more critical, vehicle for social catharsis and political truth telling
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