Overview

Analyses the social imaginary of undoing, repair and return underpinning the international norm of restitution-making Approaches restitution not just as a legal norm of property return, but as a social imaginary and a cultural-psychoanalytic 'scene' of undoing, repair and returnBrings together philosophic-political, socio-legal and cultural-psychoanalytic approaches to the study of restitutionOutlines a heterogeneous and multifaceted idea of restitution emergent in modernity, and looks at the peripheries of the modern restitutive tradition in the search for alternatives and counter-traditionsThis book takes a unique approach grounded in political and cultural discourse to develop a political theory of restitution. Challenging assumptions about restitution in the Western legal and political tradition, where it has become nearly synonymous with reacquisition and where legal studies focus on material objects and claims to their ownership, Zolkos argues that the development of restitutive norms has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty, and excavates the restitutive tradition's mythical-religious substrate. Bringing together texts from within and outwith the Western canon of political theory and philosophy, including the writings of Grotius, Durkheim, Freud, and Klein, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book undertakes a dual task: reading literary texts as a political theorising of restitution, and reading political or sociological texts as literary narratives with distinctive 'restitutive tropes' of repair, undoing and return.

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9781474453097

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Reviews

This lucid, beautifully written and carefully argued new book offers something new to the field of political theory: a deepening of the language of restitution in the realm of the political. The problem of recovering what was lost – the ordinary language definition of restitution – is here given new language, new imaginings and a fascinating new set of texts. This is a must read for critical political theorists, those interested in cultural, memory and trauma studies. -- Catherine Kellogg, University of Alberta

This lucid, beautifully written and carefully argued new book offers something new to the field of political theory: a deepening of the language of restitution in the realm of the political. The problem of recovering what was lost - the ordinary language definition of restitution - is here given new language, new imaginings and a fascinating new set of texts. This is a must read for critical political theorists, those interested in cultural, memory and trauma studies.--Catherine Kellogg, University of Alberta

Author Information

Magdalena Zolkos is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at University of Jyvskyl and, previously, Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University in the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. She is the author of Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankelevitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Lexington Press, 2019) and co-editor of a special issue of Angelaki on Witnessing After the Human (2022).

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