Introducing the ‘implicated subject’ who helps propagate the legacies of historical violence

Among the keynote speakers at a conference hosted by Stellenbosch University last week titled, Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation – The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma, was Dr Michael Rothberg, an expert in Holocaust studies and literature based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Rothberg’s lecture, The Implicated Subject: Rethinking Political Responsibility, raised uncomfortable realities about responsibility and redress that many South Africans in the democratic era have sought to tiptoe around.

To begin with, he said, although no forms of restitution were commensurate with the brute facts of injury, death and dispossession, and that questions of responsibility tended to grow more tenuous and tangled over time, “redress remains imperative in cases where ‘irrevocable’ traumatic pasts continue to echo in, imprint, and interrupt the present”.

“To the extent that a negotiated form of restitution is not achieved, an injustice persists across time, even across generations,” he said.

But if there was to be redress for violent histories and actualities, he argued, framing the transaction as one between victims and perpetrators was subjective and simplistic.

Defining the term, he said: “Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in a social formation in which the positions of victim and perpetrator are possible — even likely — and, yet, in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less ‘actively’ involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the ‘passive’ bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mark the present.

Similarly, most citizens of the Global North were not exactly perpetrators of climate change, but certainly contributed disproportionately to current and future climate-based catastrophes and benefit in the here and now from the geographically and temporally uneven distribution of their catastrophic effects, Rothberg said.

In his book on implicated subjects, Rothberg said, he raised the example of diasporic Jewish support for Israel, which can take ideological and material forms. Such diasporic subjects were not so much “perpetrators” of occupation as what he termed “perpetuators of a settler colonial project”.

Turning his implicated subject lens on his native US, he raised the case of the 2012 killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin by a neighbourhood watch vigilante. “A year and a half later, the killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted on all charges in the death of the 17-year-old high school student on the grounds that he was acting in self-defence. Together with an unfathomably long list of Black Americans killed by police officers, vigilantes, and white supremacists, the murder of Martin helped spark a major political movement — Black Lives Matter. That long list of murders should also inspire thinking about collective responsibility among those of us positioned as implicated subjects — that is, those who occupy the histories and structures of racial privilege and white supremacy,” he said.

Roger Friedman is a writer and media consultant who reported on the conference for the conference's Organising Committee.