Leebaw, Bronwyn Anne. “The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation, pariah humour, and haunting laughter”

In this article, political scientist Bronwyn Anne Leebaw examines the problem of emotional indifference and desensitization as forms of complicity which empower abusive authorities and result in unproductive forms of reconciliation with past and ongoing forms of political violence. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour, the article examines strategies for “confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist” (Leebaw, 524). Leebaw argues for the ability of these “arts of refusal” to invite sensitivity, responsiveness and solidarity, effecting an unreconciliation with political injustice and its violent legacies. Three problematic forms of reconciliation are outlined – reconciliation to one’s own positionality as bystander or participant to abusive power, reconciliation as “self-abnegating assimilation”, and reconciliation based on scapegoating, denial and compromise (524). 

The first section of the paper problematises forms of reconciliation which impede active engagement and acknowledgement of one’s entanglement with political violence and its ongoing legacies. Leebaw channels Arendt’s “tragic approach to unreconciliation” (529) as a strategy to confront the “deadening” of emotions that leads people to resign to realities they should resist. Arendt discusses reconciliation with systematic violence as resulting from an inability to think or imagine alternatives. An example of such resignation is found in the memoir of Peter Bamm, a German physician who served on the Russian Front. His assurance that any type of protest against the killing unit would have resulted in one’s murder or disappearance reiterates the belief that resistance would not only have been useless, but also buried in “wholes of oblivion” from the public officials (Bamm qtd. in Leebaw, 528). Narratives of tragic accounts of resistance, however, can counter despair and resignation by showcasing alternative accounts of agency and responsibility which can mobilize self-reflection and engagement. Such an example is seen in the testimony shared during the Eichmann trial regarding Anton Schmidt – an Austrian officer who helped the resistance. According to Arendt, his story was “‘like a sudden burst of light’ in the midst of ‘impenetrable darkness’” (Arendt qtd in Leebaw, 528). Tragic unreconciliation effects a critical re-thinking of our conformity with systems of violence which we neither created, nor controlled, but are nevertheless complicit in passively reproducing.

The second part of the paper is concerned with Arendt’s writings on pariah humour (“The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”) and its ability to refuse reconciliation with practices of repression, exclusion and assimilation. Leebaw discusses the function of humour in relation to Arendt’s analysis of Heine and Charlie Chaplin as pariah figures, exemplifying the positive potential of humour to mediate an empathic, affective relationality in exposing the injustice, cruelty and hypocrisy of different forms of political oppression. While acknowledging theoretical approaches to humour as reinforcing and reproducing inequality and injustice (such as Sarah Ahmed’s “Killjoy Manifesto”), Leebaw highlights the ability of pariah humour to expose the absurdity of assimilationist aspirations and to reaffirm oppressed identities as opposed to denouncing them. 

The third section of Leebaw’s paper is concerned with strategies of affective unsettlement, which aim to confront audiences with the material realities of systematic violence. Leebaw focuses on events organized by the veteran anti-war activist groups Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and Iraq Veterans Against the War, where accounts of transgressive laughter during the war play a central role. Through relaying stories of jokes exchanged between soldiers while carrying out atrocities, as well as “acts of violence carried out ‘for laughs’” (535), the anti-war veterans use their traumatically haunting accounts of transgressive laughter to produce an encounter with the everyday violence that defines the war reality. In addition to channelling their own shame into an expression of resistance, the veterans’ stories challenge practices of reconciliation with the reality of war and dismantle romantic conceptions of war heroism, reproduced in social discourse.

Leebaw’s article articulates tragic reconciliation and pariah humour as forms of resistance that can productively unsettle problematic practices of reconciliation through moving audiences affectively in an array of inspirational, critical, empathic, humorous or unsettling ways. Lebaw’s analysis of the role of sensitivity and affective responsiveness in countering passive resignation contributes to the larger discursive context of affect and complicity in the field of perpetrator studies, underscoring the role of narrative forms in effecting a self-reflexive, productive confrontation with realities of political violence and systematic injustice.

Author of this entry: Bilyana Manolova

Leebaw, Bronwyn Anne. “The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation, pariah humour, and haunting laughter”. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 22 no. 5, 2019, pp. 523-541