ABSTRACT
Political reconciliation is initiated, as we saw in Chapter 6, by the invocation of a ‘we’ that is not yet. By interpreting the present as a moment in which this ‘we’ might one day be understood to have originated, constitution conditions an awareness of the frailty and contingency of community. Because the disclosure of a world in common depends on engaging in collective action, reconciliation unavoidably entails the risk of politics. Yet this risk cannot be dispensed with by the institutional guarantees of a formal constitution. Rather, as Arendt insists, there is ultimately nothing to guard against the risks of action but the practices of promising and forgiving. By establishing shared expectations for the future, promising allows political conflict to be cast as potentially resolvable. A willingness to forgive sustains a reconciliatory politics, as we saw in Chapter 7, by refusing to allow history to determine our relation to others in the present. Insofar as frailty and natality provide grounds for forgiveness in politics, the possibility of reconciliation does not depend on first establishing a consensus about the moral significance of past wrongs. Rather, the will to forgive opens the way for those implicated in state wrongs to assume responsibility. If constitution establishes a space for a reconciliatory politics in terms of which it is possible to countenance forgiving one’s enemy, a willingness to forgive provides an opportunity for the acknowledgement of past wrongs and the assumption of political responsibility.
