The Potential of Reconciliation's Beginning: A Reply

The question of reconciliation remains. In the name of a beginning, it offers if not waits for a reply, a reply within which there appears time to begin (again). As such, reconciliation's reply is less a response in kind than a tenuous and frequently asymmetrical (ex)change in the midst of an incomplete aftermath, an unstable and frequently violent moment that holds the question of what to do (now) with history's future. In this transition, the reconciling reply endeavors to constitute (itself) in the midst of absence if not far worse. Confronting betrayal and atrocity, it performs and advocates a struggle to make do, or better, a fragile attempt to make the grounds for doing. The potential of such a reply is ambiguous. It is a response that has not yet (been) made, an attentiveness to an invitation that can (yet) be refused, a movement between the times that risks repetition for (trans)formation, a folding-back for the promise of a (new) difference. Thus, reconciliation's reply is tasked to figure the terms of becoming from within the limit of being, an operation that requires the reply to compose with words on which it cannot depend. Exceeding form, reconciliation makes a reply that cannot say that it is doing the right thing. Addressed to the question of how to make "unity in difference," reconciliation's reply is a praxis that hinges on the potential of the word's (re)turn, a poiesis that begins without the assumption or perhaps even the aspiration of a definitive answer.¹

The question of reconciliation is never far from the potential (dumanis) of its reply. Admitting to better and worse forms, such power does not fate the good faith that it claims to create and serve. With(in) the "intermediate phenomenon" of the letter, Paul's reply to the Corinthians fashioned the potential for reconciliation with an indirect call, an appeal to the gift of that Word that could make words capable of a peace-building in which the weaker would be(come) the stronger.² To its critics, the South African Dutch Reformed Church replied that reconciliation (in the next life) was a compelling "reason" for separate development. Against the violence of this endless promise if not heresy, Nelson Mandela replied to P. W. Botha's offer of conditional release in a time of near civil war by claiming that reconciliation held the potential for constitutive dialogue. Neither "always already" nor "not yet born," reconciliation's potential cuts both ways, sometimes deeply. When is there time for the potential of reconciliation's reply? If provoked by violence, what is reconciliation's potential to exceed its "founding" referent, its capacity to turn conflict toward understanding or to bridge deep division with words that constitute a unifying difference? What is the potency of this "making" reply, a mode of creativity that appears to enable the activity of beginning?

With a "call to rhetoric(ians)" that aims to "help prepare the way for principled practices and constructive critiques," John B. Hatch comes to the question of "racial reconciliation in the United States" through the language and language game of its potential. In partial reply to McPhail, Hatch's case for "discovering, managing, and synthesizing" the realities of race relations appears to depend on a claim that works both from and toward a sense of reconciliation's potentiality:

Coherent forgiveness and apology succumb neither to tragic determinism nor comic avoidance with regard to guilt. Rather, they open participants to reconciliation's inventional potential to reconstruct the relationship through speech. Appropriating that potential is not without sacrifice: participants come out from behind their defenses, lay down their arms, and surrender their stable, conflict-habituated identities to the greater (but unproven) good of cooperative reconstruction.³

This position is important and provocative. Over the course of a rich essay, Hatch gathers reconciliation's "inventional potential" in order to demonstrate that reconciliation is a "tragicomic praxis." Here...