The Day After Tomorrow

This dissertation argues that the operating temporal logic at the core of the state sanctioned models of forgiveness and reconciliation is a view of the past as apocalyptic in the future. The past as an apocalyptic imaginary hovers over the present like a ghost threatening repetition. In this political conception of the past, it is not simply a matter of chronology i.e. genocide and its aftermath. Rather, in the injunction to overcome the past through continuous remembrance, the past is made agentive in the present. This animation of the past in the present renders it continually dangerous les…