ABSTRACT
If reconciliation is to be conceived politically, it should be conditioned by an awareness of its own impossibility. Consequently, it is a political mistake to think of reconciliation in terms of the restoration of moral community. For, on this account, the transmundane memory of a prepolitical community is posited as an ideal future possibility towards which the existing political association should be brought as close as possible. The telos of a harmonious community (in which politics has been overcome once and for all) provides the rule by which the success of reconciliation in the present is gauged. But positing reconciliation as the ultimate end of politics in this way obscures the political nature of the terms within which it is enacted—the exclusions on which it is predicated. In contrast, attending to the risk that a conflict might turn out to be irreconcilable brings the politics of reconciliation back into view.
