Abstract
The question ‘what does coming to terms with the past mean?’ is one of the most puzzling questions in the social sciences. For some, like Theodor W. Adorno, the matter of coming to terms with the past is ‘essentially … a matter of the way in which the past is called up and made present: whether one stops at sheer reproach, or whether one endures the horror through a certain strength that comprehends even the incomprehensible’ (1986, p. 126, emphasis in original). For others, it is a matter of justice (Teitel 2000), a process of ‘overcoming the past’ at the heart of political transition (Habermas and Michnik 1994), or accountability based on historical ‘truth’ that paves the way for democratic consolidation (Tismăneanu 2008).
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Notes
- 1.
I showed elsewhere, in my work on extreme prejudice (see Tileagă 2015), how this principle is a sine qua non of a very productive way of analyzing social issues and social problems.
- 2.
So the question then becomes what considerations do people ‘make relevant to their actions, and to other people’s actions’ (cf. Edwards 1997, p. 17). Things like norms, rules of conduct, things that you are supposed to do or say or not supposed to do or say, are, as Edwards put it, ‘grist to the mill for their role as participants’ resources’ (Edwards 1997, p. 18).
- 3.
This does not mean that the analyst does not adhere to a particular (political) version of reality or is uncommitted to a critical agenda—doing discursive psychology does not invite cold distancing from injustice, oppression, prejudice, and similar concerns. Quite the contrary, doing discursive psychology means ‘becoming participants in event construction, offering our own versions of things, choosing amongst accounts … and inevitably to provide further materials for analysis’ (Edwards 1997, p. 16).
- 4.
See Tileagă (2015) for the relevance of ‘social repression’ in the analysis of extreme prejudice against ethnic minorities.
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Tileagă, C. (2018). Introduction: what does coming to terms with the past mean?. In: Representing Communism After the Fall. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97394-4_1
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