On Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, British soldiers in Derry, Northern Ireland, opened fire on a civil rights march, shooting to death 13 unarmed civilians. One of those victims was Kevin McElhinney, a shop clerk, age 17, killed shortly after 4:00 P.M. In the moment of his death, McElhinney became someone with only a past. Over the years, his absence and death became intertwined with a related kind of distance, that of being historical, of belonging to a time very different from the present. Thirty-eight years later, on June 15, 2010, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, led by Lord Saville, published its findings. The wounded and dead, it concluded, were shot without cause; their names were cleared of any taint of wrongdoing. Prime Minister David Cameron spoke before Parliament, accepting the Report and apologizing on behalf of the British Government. Family and community members, some carrying photographs of the dead, gathered in central Derry to hear the Prime Minister's statement. There they witnessed McElhinney receiving his measure of justice: some 21 words, not to attempt to mend the irreparable but to acknowledge him, and to say that he was innocent and wronged. “We are sure,” the Saville Inquiry stated, that he “was posing no threat to soldiers when he was shot. He was simply trying to crawl to safety” (Lord Saville et al. 2010, vol. 5, chap. 86, para. 461). Above the crowd was a large image of McElhinney, his eyes looking out over the throng of people gathered in central Derry (see Figure 1). This banner suggested a kind of presence, as though the absent victim was there: a persisting member of a community of justice, demanding recognition and receiving at last what was owed him. His image and those of the other Bloody Sunday dead also pointed to the central place of the absent victims, as if to say that doing justice was principally about them and the wrongs they suffered. The dead were distant but not therefore nullities.

FIGURE 1.

“Derry Rally,” June 15, 2010

Source: By permission of the Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland.

Death, the passing of time, and judicial marginalization of the victim combine to challenge the idea that we can address the absent dead of historic injustices. So, for example, the changes since Bloody Sunday: The war in Ulster, then in full flower, now ended; the Unionist political dominance that was a principal target of the civil rights march that day, a thing of the past; many of those immediately concerned, family members and others, dead; evidence lost and eyewitness memories faded; the concerns of the past now less weighty. In that sense, the shooting of Kevin McElhinney is a historic injustice, and dealing with it involves difficulties common to that class of phenomena. At the same time, and relatedly, there is another distance, more radical still, a pastness not of calendar time but one introduced by death, that seems to make doing justice to those victims impossible. For the Catholic faithful at the funeral Mass there was the certainty that McElhinney and the other Bloody Sunday dead would in fact confront their killers in the next life. In the words of Hebrew Scripture (Wisd. of Sol 5:1ff), read at Mass that February 1972 day, “The upright will stand up boldly to face those who had oppressed him. . ..” But how are we to understand such a calling to account from a this-worldly perspective? What would it mean to say that the Saville Inquiry gave a measure of justice to the dead of January 30, 1972? What is it to do justice to the dead who, though once persons and thus capable of demanding and receiving justice, are now (it appears) nullities? Perhaps addressing historic injustice is simply a gesture on the part of the present and living, who—it might be urged—constitute the only real subjects in this drama, and whose interests and perspectives alone steer these dealings with the past. And with that, we might conclude that “doing justice to the past” is in the end just a manner of speaking, the real meaning of which lies elsewhere, in the present or future. “The dead are honored with tears that flow only for the living” (La Rochefoucauld [1678] Reference La Rochefoucauld1991, 118 [Reflection 233]).

Answering historic injustice involves a struggle against absence. What follows is a reflection on the foundations of that struggle, on absence and justice, and in particular on the cluster of issues raised by our efforts to deal with injustices where absence has opened a seemingly unbridgeable distance. This topic embraces a wide swath of events of interest to students of politics. Some of these are as recent as the genocidal violence in Rwanda or ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; others are historical and as old as slavery in antebellum America. All have in common that they and their victims are marked by distance from us, a separation that makes doing them justice deeply perplexing. That distance, as I suggested, is of two principal kinds. The flow of time creates one; death another. Yet they overlap: The passing of the years, the process of becoming historic rather than contemporaneous, eventually yields the absence of death, and thus the latter becomes willy-nilly part of the former. Death, in its turn, seems to consign its victim to a pastness, shut off entirely from the present and future. Pastness is “born of absence” (Darwish Reference Darwish and Shaheen2010, 30).

Key problems in addressing historic injustices participate in this broad and core issue: The absent victims of injustice—whether those of the historic past or the dead of more recent crimes—dwell in profound separation from us. That crucial facet of absence and doing justice can be seen in Orestes’ ancient question (which gives this article its title), “What thing can I say, can I accomplish from this far place where I stand to mark and reach you there in your chamber?” (Aeschylus Reference Smyth1971b, lines 315–17). How, from the “far place” of the present and living, can he bring justice to his murdered father, Agamemnon? The distance created by the killing of his father is that of the apparently unbridgeable pastness to which death has consigned him. Death yields that once-and-for-all separation. The long duration of passing time also results in distance, though it admits of degrees in a way that death does not. In both cases, it is absence that is central to the aporia shaping our reflection on what it is to reach distant victims of injustice, those who seem to be so much “dust and nothing” (Sophocles Reference Grene and Lattimore1992, lines 245–50).

Some aspects of this have been well canvassed, especially in the voluminous literature on the Holocaust and on the aftermath of the Second World War. Those parts of it that consider the question of duties of remembrance parallel some of the themes of the present article. Recent studies analyzing the role of past injustices in the transitions to democracy in South Africa, Central and Latin America, and Eastern Europe have deepened our understanding of the issues involved in dealing with the past.Footnote ¹ However, much of this latter work, because of its focus on transitions, is oriented toward the present and future of those societies, and hence only obliquely (if at all) to the status of the absent victim.Footnote ² There the problem of what it means to do justice to the absent dead gives way to a concern with the role of trials, truth commissions, and so on in building a democratic future. Still other analyses look to the historical roots of current injustices, but with a view to addressing present, not past wrongs. Although I will touch on some of this work, my question here is different: What does it mean to recognize and answer the absent victims of injustice, given the distance that separates us from them?

In this article I sketch an argument that the absent victims of injustice are not “dust and nothing” but retain a status and a presence as claimants on justice that gives rise to and shapes our efforts to address the wrongs done them. That presence calls on us to notice or recognize them as persons and not mere nullities owed no such acknowledgment (Spaemann Reference Spaemann and O'Donovan2006, 180ff). Their presence, though not that of a living subject endowed with voice, interests, hopes, and a will, is nevertheless that of persons, not things, and it is the basis of our further duties to them, including answering the injustice done them. Failing that, there would be no relevant subject, no one to whom a response was due. To say then that Kevin McElhinney was owed the justice given him by the Saville Inquiry is to accept that he had such a presence, calling on us to notice, to recognize, him and then to address him as a wronged person: “All obligation [Sollen] is grounded in such noticing.”Footnote ³ At the same time, his standing as a claimant on justice is by no means unproblematic. The intractable boundaries of that ambiguity are captured in the following pair of questions. Adapting Robert Spaemann's phrasing, we could argue that giving justice “to the dead is . . . the meeting of a claim. And if there is a claim, how can the one who makes the claim no longer exist?” (Spaemann Reference Spaemann and O'Donovan2006, 162). But then as Paul Ricoeur writes, “Someone has disappeared. A question arises, and obstinately arises again: Does he still exist? In what other place? In what form, invisible to our eyes? . . . What sort of beings are the dead?” (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur2007, 36).

Here is how I proceed: In “Distance,” I map out in more detail the opening theme of distance or absence and the basic problems to which it gives rise. I then turn, in “Aeschlylus on Absence, Persistence, and Justice,” to tragedy, with a view to gaining another vantage point on the argument that the absent victim of injustice, despite being in a “far place,” nevertheless remains a central and enduring (and problematic) presence. The section titled “Representing the Absent” and its opening subsection outline an understanding of enduring claimants on justice and their place, even in death, in a mesh of relations of justice. And because the nullification of the victim as a party to justice is the work not only of time or death but also of the displacement of her as the center of institutionalized justice, I consider—in “Decentering the Victim”—some contemporary writing on criminal trials that engage with that issue. This material I also use to underline the claim that it is not a general public good but answering the victim's need for a response that is crucial to doing justice. This section concludes—in “Representation and Doing Justice to the Past”—with a discussion of representation and recognition of absent victims as central to our (limited) capacity for answering the injustices done them. Finally, in the Conclusion, I draw these strands together and offer some final observations.

DISTANCE

Distance inflects our efforts to do justice. The changes that accompany the passing of events and persons into the historic past call into question the continuity of responsibility across time and the meaning of restoring a status quo ante under radically changed circumstances. The distance brought by death overlaps with that of the past but raises other issues, bound up with the status of the dead, the absent victims of injustice, and whether they are nullities or claimants. This manifold character of distance and absence requires that we first set out some basic ideas.

Death and the passing of time are both central to addressing historic injustice. Consider an individual's relationship to her own past; a historian's efforts to know another era; a detective dealing with a crime so old that it has become a “cold case”; our attempts to respond to historical injustices. These bring to light the types of distance that the passage of time creates. The spatial language of distance, applied to relations across time, evokes the separateness of the here and now and what resides in the past. Thus the person I was in my youth may seem almost another self to me now, with different values, behaviors, and so on. The passing years can render an unresolved crime “cold,” i.e., remote, less pressing, and more difficult to act upon given the erosion of memories, loss of witnesses, corrupted physical evidence, and so forth. So too the pastness of historic injustices means that acting on them involves addressing persons and events that belong to a place distant from that which we occupy in the present. Even when that temporal distance is not great, and there are still living perpetrators and surviving victims, the corrosive effects of distance can be seen. The old man who in 1961 appeared in the glass defendant's booth in Jerusalem, “middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and near-sighted eyes,” might almost have seemed a different person from the young Nazi officer, Adolf Eichmann, whose crimes were being prosecuted in that court (Arendt Reference Arendt1992, 5). Distance in time had given Eichmann a commonplace presence quite unlike that of his earlier years. Does such distance also annul what one was and did, and one's accountability for it? “For what length of time is a man identical with himself?” asked Michel Zaoui (Reference Zaoui2009), in relation to the trial of the Vichy collaborator Maurice Papon (12–13).Footnote ⁴ Time, he continued, seemed to have separated Papon from his crimes and to have kept him from acknowledging those wrongs and victims. In this and a myriad other ways, the passing of the years threatens to undermine the work of justice: “Time erases everything” (Aeschylus Reference Smyth1971a, line 286; translation modified).

I turn now to that other form of separation, also intimately related to historic injustice, the absence of the dead. Death, like the historical past, is a distance between its denizens and those here and present. It too is a kind of being past. “The moment of death is that in which we are only the past and no longer in any sense the future . . .” (Theunissen Reference Theunissen, Winau and Rosemeier1984, 118–19). If historical distance sometimes admits of degrees of separation, the dead belong (it seems) wholly to the past. The depth of their exile is the result not just of the fading and forgetting of the passing years but of a departure with no return, a destruction of the self, rendering them nonpersons to whom no recognition or duties are owed (Theunissen Reference Theunissen, Winau and Rosemeier1984, 119). Whether they died yesterday or decades ago, the dead, on this view, are entirely of the past and beyond “our reach” (Certeau Reference Certeau1970, 168). The core and common property of the historical and the dead is the fact of absence, of their profound distance from us. The former picks out the passage of time as the root of distance; the latter, death, whether recent or remote, as the sealing in the past tense of an absent subject. For my purposes here, it is the radicalness, the apparently unbridgeable distance of absent victims of historic injustice, that is central. The possibility of doing justice to them will turn on whether that absence amounts to the nonexistence of the dead, their being “dust and nothing,” or if in fact the absent remain present and demand justice. It is this relationship between the conflicting claims of presence and absence that frames the question of our ability to address the absent victims of historic justice (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur2000, 474).

One of the principal thematic voices in this dialectic of presence and absence holds that the absent victims, the dead, are nullities: Death is a final kind of separation, a departure without return, indeed—as we said—the abolition of the (departed) self. The dead person, it is argued, belongs entirely to the past; his or her distance is final and without return (Theunissen Reference Theunissen, Winau and Rosemeier1984, 117–19). If “the non-existence of the subject [began] with death,” (Feinberg Reference Feinberg1984, 80) then the idea of answering to the absent victims of injustice would lose its anchor point. The dead, irredeemably other and absent, would lie beyond justice. A second voice in this counterpoint suggests that the nullity thesis runs counter to the experience of the absent dead as a lingering presence, and a source of obligations weighing on the living. This is familiar especially in rituals of familial mourning and remembrance. We have only to enter a family living room, and see photographs of the beloved dead, to understand that they still do have a kind of represented presence (Blustein Reference Blustein2008, 257; Macé Reference Macé1993, 25). The title of Camille Laurens's (Reference Laurens2004) account of death and loss, “That Absent One There,” conveys the sense of absence, but of someone still there in a way and not a mere handful of dust; a presence that calls out to be noticed, to be recognized.

The dead and the living, in that view, share a porous border, and are sustained in their ongoing relationship by the love of the enduring familial community of which they are a part (Jeudy Reference Jeudy1997, 80; Spaemann Reference Spaemann and O'Donovan2006, 162–63; Urbain Reference Urbain1998, 25). That relationship of love “is the exception to nothingness” [the nothingness of death and absence] because it “makes [the absent] visible” (Laurens Reference Laurens2004, 15, 19). Recognizing the absent, and in that sense making them visible, is the basis of the obligations we feel to our familial dead. Something similar, we might speculate, holds in the case of historic injustice and the relations of justice that call on us to act. Like the more intimate illustrations just mentioned, those victims retain a presence, and a standing in relation now to a community of justice, from which arises the imperative to close the gap between the original wrong and what justice owes them. Making sense of that possibility leads us to search for a language to express the standing of the absent dead, a vocabulary to underpin our intuition that the fact of distance transforms but does not abolish the reality of the wronged person, or of our duty to acknowledge her and to answer the injustice done her.

Without such an understanding, the absent victims are of no intrinsic interest to doing justice (Blustein Reference Blustein2008, 158–59, 160, 219–20, 291; Cockburn Reference Cockburn1997, 153–54, 298–99, 317; Hampshire Reference Hampshire1989, 146–47; Scarre Reference Scarre2003, 237). Of course we could still do justice to those in the present who are linked to them in some way. And their stories would be part of a repository of lessons for the future, or among “the political-cultural resources” needed for resistance to injustice in the here and now.Footnote ⁵ Much work has been done along those lines, sketching possible avenues that might overcome or at least circumvent the dialectic of distance and presence. One such path allows for the importance of past wrongs where the latter are causally related to present-at-hand, actionable, injustices and where there are continuity criteria—stringent or relaxed—between past and present groups (Ivison Reference Ivison2000, 365, 369; Posner and Vermeule Reference Posner and Vermeule2003, 691, 700, 704–5; Sher Reference Sher2005, 191–92). Spinner-Halev (Reference Spinner-Halev2007), for example, suggests that the injustices that matter most are those that afflict persons in the here and now. The idea of “status harm” is a variant of this. Slavery and segregation profoundly harmed the status of the African American community, not only then but into the present as well. Although the initial victims and their injuries now belong to the past, the status (identity) harm they set in motion endures into the here and now. This approach authorizes us to bypass the thicket of issues concerning absence and justice, given that the relevant harms are those that, though distant in origin, are suffered by persons today (Herstein Reference Herstein2008, 5, 9–10, 49–50; Spinner-Halev Reference Spinner-Halev2007, 575–76, 587–88, 592). Broadly characteristic of these analyses is—in Thomas McCarthy's (Reference McCarthy2004) words—their “forward-looking argument” for dealing with the past (755–56). They treat the past not as a locale of obligations but as something at most causally or instrumentally related to the present and future (Cockburn Reference Cockburn1997, 317). Their question therefore is different from the one guiding this article.

AESCHYLUS ON ABSENCE, PERSISTENCE, AND JUSTICE

Greek tragedy brilliantly addresses issues of absence and acting on injustice (Romilly Reference Romilly1995, 11, 14–15), and I will now turn to one part of it for help in framing the argument. My focus will be on Aeschylus, for nowhere is this thematic concern more central than in his Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, Eumenides). That trilogy, we might recall, recounts the story of Orestes, son of the murdered Agamemnon, who, together with his sister Electra, avenges him by slaying his killer (and their mother) Clytaemestra. Subsequently, Orestes is pursued by the dead Clytaemestra's Furies (Erinyes), who seek vengeance on her behalf for his act of matricide.Footnote ⁶ The cycle ends with Orestes’ trial and acquittal and the displacement—on one standard reading—of the Furies and their vengeful, violent, and private justice by the deliberative, institutionalized, public justice of the city. Interpreting the unity of the Oresteia is made particularly challenging by the multiple tensions that shape its dramatic action: ancient and new conceptions of justice, the old and new gods, gender, and the complex mesh of revenge killings in which justice is arrayed against justice, with no truly clean hands (Gagarin Reference Gagarin1976, 70). My concern here will be on a smaller scale, with a focus on one moment in the trilogy's treatment of absence: the confrontation between Clytaemestra's eidōlon or image/shadow, the Furies representing her, her killer Orestes, and the city's justice that ends the Eumenides.

If doing justice to the absent dead is central to the drama of the Oresteia, the relationship between the Athenian audience and the play offers another facet of that same engagement, now shaped by historic distance. In the Eumenides’ closing scene, perhaps uniquely in the Greek tragic corpus, past, present, and future are brought together (Gagarin Reference Gagarin1976, 58; Grethlein Reference Grethlein2003, 220, 221 note 78, 222–23, and note 85; Müller Reference Müller1833, 115; Seaford Reference Seaford and Goff1995, 212). The play does this by setting out the remote origins of the Athenian homicide court, the Areopagus, and some have speculated that this convergence of time past, present, and future would have been dramatized on the ancient stage by the audience participating in the final procession.Footnote ⁷ In the Eumenides, the Athenian audience witnessed the acquittal of a killer as the original act of their Areopagus. How did they respond to this theatrical portrait of their past? Did they applaud the use of rhetoric, even sophistry, in securing that outcome, and see themselves as unsullied by those origins? Did the audience see the consigning of the Furies’ justice to the underground as a victory for the city or (as some have suggested) as a corruption at the root of their democratic institutions and rejection of the voice of justice? How they understood the killing of Clytaemestra and the acquittal of Orestes is now lost to us. It is nevertheless possible to see that ambiguity itself as pointing to one of the ways in which the dialectic of distance and presence shapes how we think about justice.

Clytaemestra's status as an absent presence, a dead claimant on justice, and its attendant difficulties, makes her an exemplar of that dialectic. Crucial to the drama is the thought that the “far place” of death and absence may indeed lie beyond justice. But the dead resist that nullification and struggle to retain a presence, demanding recognition and justice. This they do through their helpers: Agamemnon's children who will not allow their dead father to be exiled to that “far place” beyond the hands of justice; the Furies who will not permit Clytaemestra's killer his rest. Their care is for the victims and the injustice done them, a concern unaltered by the distance of death and time (Sewell-Rutter Reference Sewell-Rutter2007, 130–31; Simondon Reference Simondon1982, 197). So long as the victims’ fate is not acknowledged, their claims remain restless and unrequited. They dwell in, and struggle against, a kind of absence from justice and from those who share in a community of justice (Ramnoux Reference Ramnoux1959, 113).

Here I use a panel from a classical era (380–360 BCE) Lucanian vase (see Figure 2) interpreting the Eumenides’ conclusion to show the outlines of an Aeschylean understanding of the central importance of the presence of the dead victim to doing justice. That image makes clear in a particularly striking way the core theme of justice and the presence–absence of the victim.Footnote ⁸ We see Orestes confronted by two Furies. These “helpers of justice” and “upright witnesses” for the murdered victim hold a mirror reflecting the crowned head of the dead Clytaemestra, her accusing glance turned directly toward Orestes (Aeschylus Reference Smyth1971a, line 318; Laks and Most Reference Laks, Most, Laks and Most1997, 11, 94 col. IV). In the Eumenides, Clytaemestra is indirectly present in the form of a shadow, an eidōlon;Footnote ⁹ on this vase, she is shown as a reflection. Her mirrored image is not a portal or window through which Orestes can see his victim in the “far abode” of her utter pastness/death. On the contrary, it is her actualization, making her present to confront him in justice and in the here and now. She is both present and absent: a presence but not of the ordinary kind; shadowlike, an image in a mirror; an absence yet not a nullity. The dead, as Nicole Loraux writes in another context, are in a way still among the living (Loraux Reference Loraux1999, 81). Like the picture of Kevin McElhinney looking out over the crowd in Derry, the mirror's reflected face insists on her standing as a wronged subject, and so on her centrality to justice.

FIGURE 2.

Brooklyn–Budapest Painter

Source: Photograph number MN4854/C by permission of the Archivio Dell'arte (Museo Archeologico Nazionale: Naples, Italy).

Images in mirrors convey an obliqueness, the presence of something not seen directly but represented to us in polished metal or glass. In ancient Greece, mirrors were a common feature of death cults and suggested a kind of overcoming of distance in the context of the relationship of the living and the dead (Dreger Reference Dreger1940, 96; Herrmann Reference Herrmann and von Lücken1968, 669; Kossatz-Deissmann Reference Kossatz-Deissmann1978, 111). That overcoming of absence is always ambiguous, however. Jean-Pierre Vernant writes that the image of the deceased on the classical Greek grave marker substituted for and was the equivalent of the formerly living person. At the same time it gestured to “a new mode of being, different from the old one, that is the status of being dead that the deceased acquired in disappearing forever from the light of the sun” (Vernant Reference Vernant1983, 36). As I noted, the mirror portrayed on the vase shows Clytaemestra to be there, a represented image, shadowlike but demanding a response from the living. Here we see underscored the two principal voices of the counterpoint of justice and absence: her centrality to doing justice and her unstable status as an absent presence.

If the victim's reflection in the mirror points to the ambiguities of her status, the act of holding the mirror up so that others will see her tells us something of what it is to do justice. That act does not create her presence but rather notices or acknowledges it (Spaemann Reference Spaemann and O'Donovan2006, 184, 237, 241). In so doing, it also recognizes her as a possible claimant on justice. The Furies who hold the mirror represent Clytaemestra to the here and now, bring killer and victim face to face once more, the victim now not dust and nothing in her blood-spattered chamber but a claimant acting under the auspices of justice. The Furies have a special affinity for the unjustly dead—especially those within a family—and in their turn those absent victims have a particular need for the representation that these friends of justice offer. Neither personifications of the dead nor justice itself, they nevertheless play a crucial and related role as the “helpers” of both. By making visible the presence of the absent victim, the Furies represent those who otherwise would remain in the shadows, and in so doing they “suppress the distinction between the space of the dead and the space of the living.”Footnote ¹⁰ They thus venture a response to one of the Oresteia's central questions: Can the dead victims of injustice be recognized as present and as claimants still on justice, their distance from us overcome? The Furies answer this with their mirror, by means of which they overcome what had appeared to be the unbridgeable pastness of death (Améry Reference Améry1977, 116, 123; Garapon Reference Garapon and Barret-Ducrocq1998, 113).

The Lucanian vase's interpretation of the Eumenides invites the following observations: (1) The absent victim retains a presence. (2) This presence is made known to her community only in an oblique way, in her reflected face. That is, she must be represented, disclosed by the “helpers of justice,” to a present all too inclined to grant reality and weight only to the near at hand. (3) The victim is central to doing justice. The encounter portrayed here is between the victim and the perpetrator, and it is her claims—and not a public good or an instrumental end—that are advanced against Orestes. (4) The mirror points to her presence and to the relational dimension she insists on: she is there, wronged, and demanding justice from the living. The Furies’ holding the mirror is a way of bringing her to her tormentor and to others. Without the mirror and the Furies carrying it, she would remain invisible to them, silent and overshadowed by the present. She would be, in the words of Hélène Cixous (playwright, and translator/producer of Aeschylus for the contemporary stage), “the victim who has never spoken” in the place where justice is done (Cixous Reference Cixous1995, 72). Aeschylus, Cixous says, responds to that silence by becoming the guardian of these dead as claimants on justice (Cixous Reference Cixous1995, 20; Cixous and Fort Reference Cixous and Fort1997, 445).

Doing justice is in part the struggle to overcome, to invert those absences by showing that what seems nonexistent and distant in fact retains a presence, one demanding a response. The Oresteia is a story of duties to the dead who, though distant and unreachable in one sense, still remain present to justice and who therefore can be further wronged by the failure to do justice on their behalf. The victims need a response because, even in death, they remain claimants on justice. Though their presence is not a confection of the present, they themselves are powerless to secure the justice that is their due. It is the living and present that are the agents of this completion of justice. The Furies urge them to do that and this commitment to representing the victim is a vital part of doing justice. In representing the dead victim, they thus “stand firmly on the side of dikē [justice]” (Cixous Reference Cixous1992, 1; Gagarin Reference Gagarin1976, 71–72, 78; Johnston Reference Johnston1999, 121, 127; Mace Reference Mace2002, 47; Vellacott Reference Vellacott1984, 44). A failure to respond to that would be a rent in the fabric of justice. When Karl Schlögel (Reference Schlögel2008) describes the forgetting of the victims of the Stalin dictatorship in the USSR as their “second death,” we take him to be speaking metaphorically: Plainly, the dead cannot die again (18). Yet we also grasp the underlying thought: That such forgetting would be a wrong, an injustice, not (only) because their living and present descendants would be hurt, or because lessons for the future would be lost, but primarily because it would be a failure to respond to the wronged subjects and in that sense a further injury to them.

REPRESENTING THE ABSENT