Reparation Beyond Responsibility

This chapter argues that reparative politics must be thought beyond the framework of legal responsibilization. Instead of limiting reparations to the language of victim and perpetrator, this chapter proposes a focus on how semantic frameworks shape the production of violence and reproduction of exclusion in modern society. Drawing on the systems social theory, this contribution proposes an understanding of social memory as an operative function of communication that manages the ways in which society remembers and forgets. Social reparation of past experiences of trauma can be achieved not only through legal responsibilization but through the alteration of the current structures of operation of social systems. So, by shifting social semantics – whether in the economy, education, or personal relations – society may alter the conditions under which traumatic experiences were produced. This approach is more coherent than those which make a confusion of post-structuralist understandings of social communication and the tradition of subjective responsibilization.