Setting the Stage

Picture this: on a theater stage, a three-headed dog called Brutus nervously awaits his sentence in a criminal trial. The verdict, spoken in a stern voice from high above, establishes an “unequal culpability” for each head. The first head is that of a politician, who the judge asserts cannot be held responsible for how his grand vision of society has been practically realized—he is acquitted and released from detention to enjoy a happy retirement. The second head is that of a military general, who has, according to the judge, not been engaged in any wrongdoing himself, but an “example has to be made”—as punishment, he is condemned to take over the leadership of the state's newly formed army. Finally, the third head belongs to a low-ranking foot soldier of the regime. Now the judge enumerates the heinous crimes committed by this torturer, and convicts him to 212 years in prison. The episode ends with the three heads viciously biting each other, culminating in one terrifying howl: “Amnesty!”Footnote ²

How can we make sense of such an intriguing scene? And why should political theorists devote attention to a theatrical performance like this? This short episode stems from the South African play Ubu and the Truth Commission, first performed in May 1997, while the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was still operational. The three-headed dog Brutus is impersonated by an impressively mobile puppet with a suitcase as belly, containing plenty of evidence to incriminate its owner, the eponymous Ubu, played by a human actor, and the story's central figure. Unusually, the puppet handlers are fully visible to the audience and sometimes even serve as actors themselves. The judge's voice is that of William Kentridge, the director, whose face looms menacingly on a screen behind the stage. And it can surely be no coincidence that the foot soldier's sentence, which triggers the call for an amnesty, is exactly the same as the one handed out to Eugene de Kock (aka “Prime Evil”), one of the Apartheid regime's most notorious killers.Footnote ³

As this vignette hopefully evokes, watching Ubu and the Truth Commission is at the same time stimulating and frustrating, mystifying and thought provoking, anxiety inducing and outrageous.Footnote ⁴ The main reason for the spectator's disconcerting experience is that the play narrates the horrors of Apartheid with the support of a multitude of estrangement devices, from life-sized puppetry to operatic songs, animated films, and verbatim victim accounts. Clearly, Ubu and the Truth Commission stages transitional justice in a way that is completely different from the heavily orchestrated proceedings of the TRC. Whereas the TRC was driven by the determination to heal a broken community, Ubu and the Truth Commission profoundly reconfigures the representations of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims of violence. In the theater, the very process of overcoming Apartheid, and its underlying ideal of reconciliation, is publicly examined and put on trial.

It is one of this essay's key contentions that cultural re-enactments, such as the various plays created in reaction to the TRC, promote a “form of democratic political education, not merely a salve for old wounds.”Footnote ⁵ This pedagogical role can be fulfilled by diverse art forms, from film and theater to poetry and sculpture, but they all aspire to shed new light on the conclusions reached during the transition period.Footnote ⁶

Ubu and the Truth Commission is emblematic of such cultural re-enactments, which is why political theorists should take the play seriously. It has the capacity to assist us in drawing the contours of an alternative type of reconciliation that accepts the continued existence of deep differences in postconflict settings, yet demands a productive rearticulation of identities in transitional moments. By unpacking the complex functions that a particular kind of estrangement (estrangement for, rather than from, the world) may perform in processes of transition, I thus lend credence to an understanding of reconciliation that contrasts with the TRC's restorative conception: what Andrew Schaap calls “agonistic reconciliation.”Footnote ⁷

In the broadest sense, the paper seeks to contribute to a better appreciation of the shifting interface between aesthetics and politics. Building on earlier debates within the tradition of Critical Theory around the place of culture in modern societies,Footnote ⁸ this interface has over the past two decades been illuminated from a great variety of angles, concentrating, for example, on the role of cinematic and novelistic storytelling in coming to terms with evil and on the multiple knowledge practices pertaining to the study of global politics.Footnote ⁹ Strangely, with a few notable exceptions,Footnote ¹⁰ theater—the essay's main focus—has remained at the relative margins of political theory's horizon of problematizations. I hope in this essay to widen this horizon through a dialogue across disciplines, while acknowledging that others have recently taken systematic steps in the same direction.Footnote ¹¹

The argument proceeds as follows: The next section outlines the agonistic view of reconciliation and explains why it is more cogent than the restorative one. I then continue by reconstructing the notion of estrangement within aesthetic theory, proposing a distinction between estrangement for and estrangement from the world. Next I apply this conceptual framework to the interpretation of Ubu and the Truth Commission. In the conclusion, I flesh out some of the wider implications for theorizing political reconciliation.

Before resuming my discussion, a proviso on the paper's goal is required: In this essay, I maintain, by way of an inductive argument grounded in a specific case study, that art works can have a tangible impact on real-world politics, through the employment of estrangement devices that enable world-disclosure. The plausibility of this idea will likely depend on how narrowly we construe “impact.”

To avoid a misunderstanding from the start, my argument does not hinge on the overdrawn assertion that art works on their own and in isolation from other societal instruments can make a significant difference in postconflict settings. The stage play I shall analyze below responds to a specific constellation of power, namely the South African reconciliation process post-Apartheid. Within this empirical setting, it would be vacuous to claim that even the most powerful piece of theater, such as Ubu and the Truth Commission, will have any lasting effect on society at large, unless deeper transformations of material and socioeconomic structures of inequality and oppression are set in motion as well.

So, if art's impact is not to be seen as monocausal, unilinear change, how should we understand it? The background presupposition on which this article rests is inspired by Hannah Arendt's thought that “theatre is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”Footnote ¹² In her theorizing, Arendt assigned theater—more precisely, Greek tragedy—this place of excellence because she was convinced that action itself was possible only when citizens appeared in the public sphere and thereby commenced inter-acting with each other as equals. In other words, on Arendt's view, “democratic politics is itself highly theatrical.”Footnote ¹³

While the reverse conclusion (that theater is intrinsically democratic) undoubtedly seems wrong, political art at its best enables citizens to expand their imaginative vistas by “seeing the world from other points of view … in order to develop a capacity for independent judgment.”Footnote ¹⁴ The claim about theater as a vehicle for world-disclosure is hence at the same time more limited and more ambitious than simply surveying a play's directly observable impact (such as audience numbers, awards, translations, adaptations, etc.):Footnote ¹⁵ it foregrounds the elusive, yet genuine, potential of art works to alter how we envisage ourselves and others, as members of a political community.

From Restorative Justice to Agonistic World-Disclosure

The purpose of this section is to sketch a robust theory of political reconciliation that envisions agonistic relations as catalysts of “unsettlements” in the aftermath of violence. The starting point for this reflection is the widely held assumption that reconciliation is best achieved in moments of closure where a moral community comes together once the wounds of the past have healed. Let us unpack its main features to weigh both its ostensible strengths and its structural weaknesses.Footnote ¹⁶

Numerous political theorists have scrutinized restorative justice's basic tenets, which all revolve around the notion that true reconciliation needs to culminate in a reconstituted community, which has overcome the fierce divisions of the past.Footnote ¹⁷ The process whereby reconciliation in a restorative key proceeds moves from the perpetrators’ acknowledgment of past wrongdoing to the making of amends through reparations or apologies, terminating finally in the victims letting go of resentment and granting forgiveness. On this view, the formerly estranged parties to a conflict successfully forsake their alienation and recognize the unity of the community to which they all belong.

One of the reasons why the notion of reconciliation as restorative justice has held such sway on the public imagination has to do with its frequent invocation during one of the most notorious reconciliation processes of the past thirty years: the South African TRC.Footnote ¹⁸ The TRC was heavily imbued with the Christian rhetoric of atonement and redemption.Footnote ¹⁹ Its chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, made recurrent reference to the need for national healing in the aftermath of the Apartheid period.Footnote ²⁰ Tutu's emphasis on social harmony, associated with ubuntu’s supposition of fundamental human connectedness, further strengthened the TRC's commitment to restorative justice, both on the individual and the collective level.Footnote ²¹ South Africa's transition process was thus governed by a “therapeutic moral order,”Footnote ²² in which the traumas of the past were supposed to be confronted through cathartic truth-telling and through the release of anger and hatred. The wider ramifications of South Africa's restorative justice paradigm have then been traced in a variety of other political contexts.Footnote ²³

Given the prevalence of this framework, one might ask what could be problematic, normatively as well as practically, about this image of reconciliation. Andrew Schaap, along with several authors following his lead, has provided us with the most persuasive answer to that question. Schaap's chief observation is that the restorative model misconstrues what is genuinely political about reconciliation in the aftermath of violence: the agonistic, or conflictual, dimension that is characteristic of all human interactions. On this account, the moral basis on which reconciliation qua restorative justice is founded appears problematic. The following passage summarizes Schaap's approach effectively:

Underpinning this conception of reconciliation is Hannah Arendt's idea that power is exercised “whenever people get together and act in concert” with each other.Footnote ²⁵ This means that power both depends on and is enabling of a common world that is shared by those who collectively engage in politics. When Schaap speaks of the importance of constructing a “common world,” he uses the term in precisely this Arendtian sense: insofar as politics crucially hinges on acting in concert with others, the commonality of the world is never simply given; it constantly needs to be invoked, negotiated, shaped, challenged, and disputed. In other words, the common world in which power thrives is itself the product of struggle and conflict, as much as it is the result of concerted attempts to collaborate and find shared ground. This agonistic dimension, Schaap maintains, needs to be embraced in postconflict moments.

At the heart of this agonistic conception of political reconciliation thus lies a claim about the relationship between the actors who seek to reconcile and the social setting within which reconciliation is pursued. Schaap argues that political reconciliation is predicated on a leap of faith insofar as the “we” that is appealed to in the moment of transition does not yet exist. Rather, the “we” towards which all reconciliatory politics strives is essentially a high-risk wager. The necessary orientation towards a common world, which is never simply “out there,” but must be created through the productive collision of plural standpoints, is called “worldliness” in Arendt's terminology. If this orientation wanes, the common world collapses.

Appeals to restorative justice must then be denounced as implicit disavowals of politics: in order to eschew the hazard of rupture, they present reconciliation as a process beyond struggle and conflict.Footnote ²⁶ In so doing, they postulate a community that ends up being “worldless,” anchored in the intimacy of kindred spirits, yet lacking the plurality that typifies political action. Although it is easy to comprehend why one would desire, in a postconflict setting, to gloss over and minimize the differences that led to violent altercations, it is myopic to invoke the existence of a “we” that merely needs to be restored, without also accounting for the agonistic relations that will necessarily persist in the common world to come.Footnote ²⁷

The agonistic dimension of political reconciliation has received sustained attention from fellow theorists. To give just three recent examples: Mihaela Mihai has shown how negative emotions, such as resentment and indignation, can be appropriated for identifying aspects of reconciliatory politics where victims have not been properly acknowledged and engaged with.Footnote ²⁸ In a similar vein, Danielle Celermajer discards the notion that apologies in the service of political reconciliation merely concede past failings in order for society to “move on”: rather, as collective rituals, they are performative speech acts that go beyond the sincere declaration of misdeeds.Footnote ²⁹ Finally, Lawrie Balfour demonstrates that the language of reparations can become an effective means for social renewal. Drawing on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Balfour conclusively establishes how a reconciliatory politics based solely on equal citizenship strategically erases traces of the violent past.Footnote ³⁰

What these reconstructions of political reconciliation share, despite their obvious differences, is a sober vision of postconflict society defying the ideal of restoration.Footnote ³¹ Attentiveness to negative emotions, apologies, and reparations thus demonstrates how agonistic relations can thrive in postconflict situations without preparing the ground for further violence.

Estrangement as an Aesthetic and Political Category

My objective in this section is to home in on a specific aspect of agonistic reconciliation that has thus far received less attention in the extant debate: the mechanism by which world-disclosure is effectively accomplished. One way of achieving world-disclosure is, counterintuitively, through the experience of estrangement. The concept of estrangement has its origins in literary theory, dating back to the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, but with even deeper roots reaching into Hegel's and Marx's philosophy, if not further.Footnote ³² For the sake of concision, I will take as my starting point Shklovsky's writings from the early twentieth century.Footnote ³³ Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (“defamiliarization,” “estrangement”) was first developed in his 1917 article “Art, as Device.”Footnote ³⁴ Ostranenie describes a specific technique by which things that we habitually consider well-known and common are presented from a new and surprising perspective.Footnote ³⁵ Instead of focusing on the realistic depiction of a scene or character, the estranging technique makes visible the very process by which art works are created. Here is how Shklovsky summarizes this view:

The application of this technique within literature is widespread. For instance, Tolstoy's writings capture that which is normally perceived as familiar with a shocking naivety, “describing it as if seen for the first time, as if happening for the first time.”Footnote ³⁷ Miguel de Cervantes and Lawrence Sterne also frequently employ this technique.Footnote ³⁸ Thus deployed, estrangement is sparked by a stubborn refusal to take settled meanings and conventional understandings for granted.Footnote ³⁹

Estrangement as an artistic device has had an astonishing career. Looking back at his own conceptual innovation fifty years later, Shklovsky noted with amazement how far the idea had traveled.Footnote ⁴⁰ Certainly the most influential adaptation of the idea was through Bertolt Brecht's theory and practice of epic theater.Footnote ⁴¹ What Brecht calls Verfremdung (“estrangement,” “alienation,” or “distanciation”) is closely related to Shklovsky's basic concept.Footnote ⁴² For Brecht, however, the desired effect of Verfremdung exceeds that of “making things strange”: on stage, it unravels an intricate process whereby the audience is supposed to become fully conscious of the distance between its own idiosyncratic, ideologically imbricated standpoints and the scene on stage. Like Shklovsky, Brecht sought to lay bare the mechanisms through which art is being crafted, expecting that the theater visitors would draw their own conclusions from what is being shown.

Importantly, Brecht alleged that epic theater needed to avoid generating “the crudest form of empathy” on the part of the audience.Footnote ⁴³ Politically and artistically, feeling empathy can be a treacherous reaction because it permits the spectators to assimilate the experiences conveyed on stage to their own life-worlds.Footnote ⁴⁴ On Brecht's view, critical thinking can occur only once the viewers become aware of the artificiality of what is being staged. As Fredric Jameson observes with regard to Brecht's method, “the spectacle as a whole should try to demonstrate to the audience that we are all actors, and that acting is an inescapable dimension of social and everyday life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Developing his theatrical vision over a long period of time and in collaboration with a stable group of actors—the famous Berliner Ensemble—allowed Brecht to explore various aspects of the V-Effekt.Footnote ⁴⁶

In view of the discussion below, it is important to note that estrangement on stage is not opposed to affects and passions per se. Rather, Brecht surmised that artistic interventions needed to permanently subvert the audience's tendency to look for catharsis.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Brecht, political art must carefully navigate between the extremes of anodyne hyperrationalism and full emotional immersion.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Darko Suvin poignantly remarks, “Brecht's main orientation … is therefore a refusal of empathy as the be-all and end-all in favor of precisely graded and argued sympathy. Sympathy means, even etymologically, ‘feeling with’ (as opposed to empathy's ‘feeling into’).”Footnote ⁴⁹

This point also matters for Arendt's thoughts on theater as the “political art par excellence.” Even though the V-Effekt was designed to undercut emotional identification, which Brecht associated with the Aristotelian tradition,Footnote ⁵⁰ in practice Greek tragedy seems to have served specific purposes that, in some respects, resembled that of estrangement.Footnote ⁵¹ Geared towards the critical self-interrogation of the polis, tragedy was instrumental in sustaining democracy—through the cultivation of civic judgment. As Peter Euben perceptively notes:

Before investigating the complex machinations of Verfremdung in a concrete drama, I need to further probe the linkages between aesthetics and politics. While it is relatively straightforward to grasp how Brecht conceived of these linkages—his theory and practice of stagecraft were, after all, highly didactical and openly oriented towards emancipationFootnote ⁵³—Shklovsky's case requires a little more unpacking. For it is undoubtedly the case that ostranenie was primarily understood as a literary method, with limited reach beyond the world of novels, at least during the initial phase of the debate. What is more, the formalist movement came from the 1920s onwards under mounting Soviet pressure for its bourgeois “cosmopolitanism,” leading to the dissolution of all literary organizations in 1932.Footnote ⁵⁴ As we have remarked above, the refusal to simply accept things as they appear to be underpins estrangement as an artistic technique, both in Tolstoy and in Shklovsky. In what ways, then, does this attitude also serve as a primer for social critique?

Svetlana Boym's answer to this question is instructive, especially given our main concern here with reconciliation. Boym detects a profound, yet largely unappreciated, resonance between Shklovsky's reflections on estrangement and Hannah Arendt's notion of world-disclosure. Her main claim is that “ostranenie was never an estrangement from the world, but estrangement for the sake of the world's renewal.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It would be a misunderstanding to conceive of estrangement solely in terms of an imaginative turn away from the world. This type of estrangement goes hand in hand with a waning orientation towards the common world, which inevitably triggers apathy, distrust, and anxiety among citizens.

Even though an influential tradition envisages estrangement along these lines, arising notably from the celebration of Stoic withdrawal and Romantic introspection, an alternative kind of reasoning can be unearthed as well. Surprisingly, Hannah Arendt's account of world-disclosure allows us to take a step towards positively valorizing estrangement. On Boym's reading, estrangement for, rather than from, the world is predicated on a passionate commitment to worldly affairs that counteracts the alienating effects of withdrawal and introspection. This is where the nexus between Arendt and Shklovsky emerges most vividly:

We can now sense how the aesthetic dimension of estrangement bears on the political realm. If maintaining freedom hangs on the construction of a common world in which differences are both affirmed, negotiated, and altered, then estrangement can turn into a dynamic stimulus for defending freedom. Refusing to take settled meanings and conventional understandings for granted ensures that the members of the public sphere remain vigilant about any drive towards antipluralistic closure. Arendt called this peculiar ability “thinking without a banister”: a mode of judgment that would not have to rely on the assurances of traditional belief systems.Footnote ⁵⁷

In sum, this section has argued that overcoming estrangement is not a precondition for attaining an ethic of worldliness. On the contrary, making things strange and seeing the world anew can serve as effective bulwarks against the decline of the common world. Distance, of the right kind, is pivotal for grappling with the other in an agonistic fashion. Estrangement may thus support, rather than undermine, collective renewal. As Boym astutely writes, the totalitarian erasure of the public sphere engendered a “combination of extreme scientism and mysticism or conspiratorial thinking.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, estrangement turns suspicious at precisely that moment in time when freedom is obliterated.Footnote ⁵⁹

This remark about the co-implication of estrangement and world-disclosure, found in both Arendt and Shklovsky, is pertinent to the discussion around political reconciliation. Recall how authors who cast doubt on the restorative justice paradigm extol the positive features of continuous contestation in postconflict settings. Although they are considered perilous, appeals to negative emotions, apologies, and reparations manage to disrupt the standard narrative of closure promoted by those who desire to rebuild a broken polity in the image of an organic unity. The peculiar variant of world-disclosing estrangement explored in this section can assist us in shattering that image, opening up a path for political reconciliation in an agonistic key.

The World Disclosed by Ubu and the Truth Commission

Since constructing a common world is contingent on the ability to see the world anew, it becomes imperative to reflect on the cultivation of the most fruitful kind of estrangement, both as an artistic device and as a political technique. This section examines in detail how this goal may be approached—on stage and in the auditorium. My guiding intuition here is that Ubu and the Truth Commission exhibits exactly those qualities that Boym ascribes to estrangement enabling world-disclosure. This is so because the play's depiction of perpetrators and victims simultaneously disallows audience identification and prompts affective engagement: in conjunction, these mechanisms compel the viewers to see themselves and others in a new light.

Ubu and the Truth Commission is a theater piece penned by Jane Taylor and directed by William Kentridge. Kentridge is today one of South Africa's most successful and revered artists, whose oeuvre over the past thirty years spans drawings, animations, films, and dramaturgy.Footnote ⁶⁰ Taylor, a writer and academic, has collaborated extensively with South Africa's famous Handspring Puppet Company.Footnote ⁶¹ The play's development has been described as a “complex weave of happenstance and conscious decision-making.”Footnote ⁶² It premiered at Johannesburg's Market Theatre, whose mission, since 1976, has been to “raise the awareness of its mainly white audiences about the oppression of apartheid and their own social, political, and economic privileges.”Footnote ⁶³

Puppets figure prominently throughout the play, performing the roles of both Apartheid's perpetrators and its victims. The use of puppetry is not the only unconventional element. At various moments, the performance on stage is interrupted by animated films and documentary footage, which either accompany the scene or veer into nightmarish, chaotic sequences of extreme violence.Footnote ⁶⁴

Ubu and the Truth Commission’s story in five acts can be conveyed relatively quickly. Pa and Ma Ubu live together, but Ma is suspicious of her husband's day job. Pa Ubu is in fact employed by the South African police, as the head of a death squad. One of his assistants—Niles, a crocodile-puppet—informs him that a truth commission is being set up to investigate the crimes under Apartheid:

Pa Ubu decides to ignore Niles's admonition and destroys evidence of his criminal misdeeds by feeding papers into the crocodile's mouth. His further entourage includes Brutus, a dog-puppet with three heads, like Cerberus, whom we have already encountered in this article's introduction. Apart from this cast, the other puppets in the play recount the verbatim testimonies of Apartheid's victims, which are transcribed from the TRC's proceedings. These witness accounts are rendered in Xhosa, and then translated into English by a second puppet handler. The victim-puppets often share the stage with Pa and Ma Ubu when they go about their everyday activities.

Pa Ubu struggles with the requirement to speak in front of the truth commission, but at one point we observe the scene with which this article began—Brutus's three heads are sentenced differently during their trial. Sarcastically mimicking the TRC's programmatic tendency to issue amnesties for those holding positions of power, while severely punishing those who had exerted excess violence, the judge's verdict also pinpoints the TRC's failure to address Apartheid's structural violence.Footnote ⁶⁶ Following inquisitions by the truth commission, the play ends rather abruptly, with Pa and Ma sailing off into the sea after being acquitted.

As anybody who has seen the piece either live or on video will probably confirm, the often incoherent and dream-like plot itself is perhaps less intriguing than the multimedia means by which the story is told. Interpreting Ubu and the Truth Commission therefore depends on paying close attention to its formal aspects as well as to its narrative content. I will in the following concentrate on four key motifs: its intertextual web of influences, the creative use of puppetry, the transformative pronouncement of testimony, and the play's acknowledgment of the audience's ambiguous reaction to the suffering represented on stage. Together, these themes validate the intuition that estrangement is fundamental to our understanding of Ubu and the Truth Commission’s power.

Let us start with an obvious remark about the play's historical genesis. The protagonist, Pa Ubu, is fashioned after the main character in Alfred Jarry's 1896 piece Ubu Roi, which was an important launch board for the surrealist movement, the theater of the absurd, and aesthetic modernism in the twentieth century more generally.Footnote ⁶⁷ Jarry's Ubu is a vulgar creature who defies the conventions of bourgeois serenity and moral dictates. His infantile outlook on the world, garnished by grotesque expletives and scatological asides, is taken up in Taylor and Kentridge's play. Taylor and Kentridge were fascinated by the idea of transposing this eccentric and disturbing figure into the milieu of today's South Africa. In locating Pa Ubu in a postconflict setting, however, an adjustment was made:

While Pa Ubu thus appears unmoved by how his deeds play out in the real world, the South African context inevitably modifies the protagonist's self-understanding. The contrast between Pa's vulgar excesses, frequently interspersed by exculpatory lines from Apartheid killers like Dirk Coetzee, and the verbatim testimonies pronounced by the victim-puppets is especially stark. It signals the radical break that the transition period needed to negotiate: those who trusted their criminal deeds would remain beyond accountability were summoned by the TRC to overtly explain how their motivations led to concrete atrocities.

The play hence explores what happens when this enforced injection of conscience is curtailed by the consistent failure of perpetrators to see themselves as sharing a common world with their victims. Just like the actual torturers, Pa Ubu and his accomplices are radically lacking in sympathy for their social environment. This goes so far that we never witness any violence on stage, just its aftermath: Pa Ubu's involvement in the Apartheid death squad is only retrospectively made visible, when he quickly destroys evidence or reeks of the blood spilled in the torture chamber.Footnote ⁶⁹

Secondly, let us inquire into the play's distinctive use of puppetry. Recall that only Ma and Pa Ubu are played by human actors, whereas the rest of the cast are puppets. Jane Taylor elucidates this dramaturgic decision in the following way:

What makes the use of puppetry especially fascinating is that the puppeteers are fully observable when they voice the victim accounts; they also serve as each other's translators when reciting testimonies in Xhosa. As a consequence, the viewers are automatically drawn to the puppet handler's face to follow the translation. At one point in the play, the puppeteers even take over as impromptu actors: one victim-puppet's testimony is interrupted when the handler lets go of the puppet and manipulates it to display where on the victim's head violence was inflicted. In an astonishing exchange, reminiscent of the TRC's inclusion of “comforters” to soothe witnesses in especially harrowing moments, the other puppeteer listens attentively and offers solace to the interim narrator.Footnote ⁷¹

This stepping out of the handler's role provides but one illustration of how the play permanently ruptures expectations on the part of the audience. Watching Ma and Pa Ubu talk to life-sized, stylized puppets, in a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk that fuses together operatic songs and animated films, makes it impossible to directly empathize and identify with what is being shown on stage.Footnote ⁷² The use of puppets, impersonating both perpetrators and victims, is crucial for attaining this effect. As Olga Taxidou observes concerning the avant-garde's fascination with marionettes more generally, “the response it [the puppet] will elicit from its audience will not necessarily be one of empathy and identification; it might be awe and wonder harping back [sic] to the puppets’ religious roots or it might be one of distance and estrangement.”Footnote ⁷³

This point about awe and wonder leads to the third aspect I wish to underscore: how the play deals with the testimonies taken from the TRC's records. Taylor and Kentridge were acutely mindful of the profound ethical dilemmas that any cultural re-enactment of victim accounts faced:

Ubu and the Truth Commission thus starts with the awareness that drawing on the verbatim testimonies of Apartheid victims entails a problematic act of appropriation that decontextualizes traumatic suffering for the sake of stagecraft. Puppetry simultaneously renders this artistic appropriation visible and uncovers a route towards responsibly expressing first-person narratives: precisely because it does not have a body of its own, the puppet manages to enunciate the testimony without distorting its actual content. A portrayal of the victims’ experiences by human performers would, by contrast, be inevitably tarnished by the actors’ physical presence.

To better comprehend the play's complexity, we need to keep in mind that testimony in transitional justice projects consists not only of truth telling akin to a public confession, but also entails a “performative speech act told in a context where its truth-claim can produce a conscious, positive effect.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As observed above, the TRC's ambitious goal was to merge the testimonials’ truth telling with their therapeutic function, such that both the victims themselves and the wider public of bystanders could envisage reconciliation as the culmination of the transition period. Ideally, a single narrative of admitted wrongdoing and generous forgiveness was supposed to materialize from this process of national healing.

Evidently, Ubu and the Truth Commission is not subject to the same logic of telling an overarching, all-encompassing story. On the contrary, the purpose of artistic engagements with transitional justice “has been the problematizing of different perspectives and memories.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Pronouncing the actual victim statements on a theater stage dislocates their performative function such that the audience member is suddenly cast in the “role of active listener, rather than passive spectator.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Since the viewers know about the truth-content of the victim-puppets’ reports, treating the play merely as a series of absurd events is not a meaningful option. More likely, the viewers are thrown into the uncomfortable position of having to issue a judgment on the perpetrators’ and bystanders’ actions. Recovering this ability to think “without a banister” is one of the faculties that scholars of transitional justice have identified as pivotal for coming to terms with a past of violence.Footnote ⁷⁸

The prompting of active involvement through the “second-order” performativity of testimonials brings me to my final point, concerning the way in which ambiguity pervades the play. Jane Taylor thematizes this issue succinctly:

Taylor's argument resonates with Kentridge's assertion, cited in the essay's epigraph, that embracing “ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Precisely because political art grapples with evil, it must constantly problematize its own modes of production and reception. For the portrayal of severe trauma on stage, screen, or paper always carries the risk of feeding voyeurism.Footnote ⁸¹ As the puppeteers, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, admit, “badly handled, such stories could easily become a kind of horror pornography.”Footnote ⁸² Ubu and the Truth Commission faces this challenge by vigorously undercutting appeals to empathy. The fact that puppets channel, rather than embody, victim accounts demonstrates how precarious this process is. At its center resides the problem of audience identification when confronted with factual testimonies of violations. Through the back-and-forth between puppeteers and victim-puppets, the audience members are impelled to empathize with the suffering on stage, without ever managing to establish an emotional connection with the testimonies. Jill Bennett stresses this constitutive contradiction when she points out that

To sum up, Ubu and the Truth Commission mobilizes a variety of estrangement devices to interrogate the inter-actions of perpetrators and victims in the aftermath of violence. The play deals with the difficulty of using verbatim witness accounts as “raw fodder” by rendering the artificiality of the stagecraft palpable, through an array of animated clips, grotesque imagery, and documentary footage. An upshot of this method is that the audience's impulsive instinct to identify with the victims is repeatedly frustrated, with the effect that critical thinking and transformative self-reflection can hopefully gain traction.

Paradoxically, it is from within the chasm between the viewers and the actors/puppets/puppet handlers that a space for understanding unfolds; feeling for the victims alone, perhaps induced exclusively through documentary footage taken from the TRC, would not achieve the same world-disclosing outcome, for it would remain based on the dubious logic of immersive identification. In the absence of intersecting layers of estrangement, the members of the audience might be tempted to imagine themselves in the victims’ positions, contemplating what it is like to be tortured and maimed—an illusion that seems both phenomenologically questionable and politically dangerous, owing to the victim's reduction to a mere screen for assimilating suffering to one's own life-world.

Given the ever-present temptation of assimilation, we must remain emotionally at a distance from what is being represented to save ourselves from the facile self-deception of grasping the horror of human suffering. The play thus estranges us from ourselves when we watch how we react, emotionally and intellectually, to the stagecraft; through this process of reflection and self-inspection a new beginning can be envisioned. Returning to the distinction made earlier, we can therefore conclude that Ubu and the Truth Commission is such a potent play precisely because it estranges the audience for, rather than from, the world.

Resisting Closure

In this final section, I shall delineate some general conclusions that follow from my reading of Ubu and The Truth Commission as a paradigmatic case of world-disclosure through estrangement. Recall that defenders of agonistic reconciliation repudiate the image of restorative justice as the apex of transitional justice projects. Since many transitional justice projects, like the TRC, operate on the idealizing assumption that reconciliation crowns the restoration of society to its organic unity, part of what needs to be done is to critically probe the extent to which this assumption stands on shaky foundations. Schaap's insistence that political reconciliation needs to work through persistent conflicts, rather than simply renounce them, points in this direction.

When a settlement is presented as firmly reconstituting a moral community, it might be necessary to try to repoliticize it, even at the risk of deep differences between former enemies surfacing once again. By repoliticization I mean a continuous declaration of the need for a common world in which agonistic relations are positively upheld, rather than obfuscated. Counteracting the displacement of politics in the aftermath of violence is hence a major undertaking for the defenders of the agonistic view of reconciliation. Attending to negative emotions, apologies, and reparations, to reiterate the three exemplary modes of agonistic reconciliation rehearsed above, triggers repoliticization in this sense.

Yannis Stavrakakis avers that artists attuned to political issues can back such projects of repoliticization by dismantling the “fetishization and demonization of the enemy figure as an alien intruder destabilizing our supposed harmony.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In a postconflict setting, the fraught relationships between perpetrators, bystanders, and victims need to be rearticulated in such a way that a peaceful future can be collectively imagined. As I hope to have demonstrated in this paper, we require proper estrangement devices to facilitate the repoliticizing of those settlements that suppress and efface agonistic relations. If my argument is accurate, then political art is central to the prospects of agonistic reconciliation.

The discussion of Ubu and the Truth Commission has revealed how estrangement devices may enable us to resist depoliticization. Contesting the official story is based on putting both perpetrator stories and victim accounts into a contrasting setting. Depicting the leader of an Apartheid death squad as a thoughtless and farcical brute, who is completely incapable of connecting his own deeds to their horrible consequences, allows the viewers to look again into statements made in front of the TRC and to “critique the state supported truth.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In opposition to the chronicling of perpetrator stories, the peculiar staging of victim accounts never disputes their truth claims. Only puppets, which do not have human bodies, can recite these scripts in such a way that their authenticity is simultaneously preserved and reconfigured for theatrical consumption. This, in turn, makes it imperative for the members of the audience to become “active listeners,” obliging them to judge what is being negotiated on stage. Unmediated empathy would likely obstruct critical reflection and self-inspection; the emotional identification with the victims would nourish a fantasy of universal connectedness that cannot be politically validated. Just the right kind of distance—Boym's estrangement for rather than from the world—generates opportunities for genuine understanding.

Art works that deploy estrangement devices are highly demanding of the audience. As should be evident from my description, Ubu and the Truth Commission is not exactly light, easily accessible entertainment. What makes these art works difficult is their propensity to deliberately create unease and discomfort on the part of viewers. Since they rely on estrangement, rather than catharsis, plays like Ubu and the Truth Commission take us beyond ourselves; they shake the comfortable position of our acquired knowledge and question that which seems most fixed and stable to us.

Interestingly, estrangement for rather than from the world can touch audiences in unexpected ways. Although the story of Ubu and the Truth Commission has nothing to do with Romania, where the transitional period after the fall of the communist regime looked very different from South Africa's, Kentridge remembers the following encounter:

A critic could object that the reception of the play, and of estrangement more generally, will vary considerably, depending on who sits in the auditorium and who acts on stage: certain groups, such as beneficiaries, for example, might be induced to change their perspective on the reassuring truths about perpetrators, avowed by the TRC. But victims and survivors might feel very differently about a fictional narrative that appropriates their experiences in a defamiliarizing and satirizing manner. Recall, for instance, that Pa Ubu is throughout portrayed as a silly figure, whose pronouncements simultaneously provoke revulsion and ridicule. Victims and survivors will perhaps perceive the use of estrangement devices as a humiliating disparagement of their suffering.

This rejoinder cuts to the core of my argument. In response, a caveat on my proposal seems apposite. While this article has not attempted to scrutinize the real-world impact of Ubu and the Truth Commission, it certainly appears true that estrangement will not always deliver the most appropriate mechanism for achieving world-disclosure. To clarify, my argument has not been that estrangement offers a universally applicable formula to address the thorny problem of coming to terms with historical violence. Rather, what the play's interpretation brings to light is that, in certain moments, estrangement devices are indispensable to perturb naive, one-dimensional records of the past and to rekindle societal conversations about transitional justice. By undoing settled meanings and conventional understandings, political art—when concerned with ambiguity and contradiction—creates distance and renews the spectators’ orientation towards a common world.

In response to the objection, I hence contend that my vindication of a particular form of estrangement leaves sufficient space for alternative kinds of re-enactment that encourage other variants of “democratic political education.” Once again, the South African context provides an illustration of this proposal. While Ubu and the Truth Commission will arguably have the greatest impact on those viewers who display a simplistic grasp of the involvement of both perpetrators and bystanders in authoritarian societies, other types of theater might speak to different groups, directly involving victims and showing solidarity with those still agonizing.Footnote ⁸⁷ For example, the Khulumani Support Group dramatized the transitional process in a unique fashion, through their play The Story I Am About to Tell, performed by three survivors who had earlier testified before the TRC. The play is as much about survivors’ awareness raising and self-empowerment, as it forcefully articulates one of Khulumani Support Group's core demands: fundamental redress for the wrongs of Apartheid.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Stephanie Marlin-Curiel writes:

Despite its advancing in the opposite direction from Ubu and the Truth Commission, the Khulumani Support Group, too, rejects crude didacticism. The lessons to draw from cultural re-enactments are, hence, never straightforward.

As the juxtaposition between these opposing types of theater making corroborates, the power of the “political art par excellence”—theater—is today more fragmented and diffuse than in Arendt's original example, ancient Greece, where drama's intended aim was the instruction of an audience that, in principle, extended to the entire polis.Footnote ⁹⁰ But this fragmentation and diffusion does not diminish the great potential that theater still harbors: to make some of us see things differently.

Undoubtedly, this is a risky and uncertain endeavor, which many would want to eschew under all circumstances. After all, inspirational stories of national healing are much more soothing than the relentless probing of ambiguities and contradictions. Yet avoidance comes at a high cost, as Arendt has taught us: apathy, distrust, and anxiety reign supreme in a “worldless” polity where the essential pluralism of human relations has been abolished. This is why asserting the agonistic character of politics in general, and of reconciliation in particular, is ultimately inevitable. Art can help us in approximating this goal, by keeping optimism in check and nihilism at bay (to paraphrase Kentridge once again).Footnote ⁹¹