Reckoning with the Past. On some Aporias of Monetary Reparations

Abstract

The essay aims to reconstruct and discuss the main lines of the debate that has been produced in recent years on the topic of ‘reparative justice’ for mass violence, focusing on monetary reparations as an instrument of pacification and justice. The different judgments and multiple issues concerning the procedures of monetization of reparations are framed within the broader field of ‘politics of memory’. Special attention is devoted to the forms of agency and the specific temporality that emerge in the context of this mode of justice.