Accountability, affect, and the political unconscious: A dialogue

Abstract

AbstractThis dialogue between John Borneman and Richard Ashby Wilson examines several of the key questions for law and politics that have come to the fore since the end of the Cold War. Beginning with Borneman's contributions over the last three decades, in which he elaborates the concepts of accountability, care, and affect, both authors then engage with how these issues emerge in their own research in different locales. They argue for the global relevance of these concepts for the recent authoritarian turn and increasingly vocal demands for justice. Drawing on the history of anthropological study of kinship and law, they ask how psychoanalytic understandings of violence and the domestic sphere might pose new questions in contemporary debates. They assess, in turn, the place of retribution in transitional justice strategies such as criminal trials and truth commissions, the productivity of care in querying relationality after political violence, the relation of affect and revenge to justice, the changing gender of the public sphere, the significance of reciprocity in both violence and care, the role of aggression and the death drive in producing and redressing violence, and the significance of law to trauma work.