Political violence leaves behind painful scars, if not open wounds, not only in the personal memories of victims and survivors, but also in societies’ collective memory. In transitional societies the public memorialization of violent pasts is linked to the questions of reconciliation and peace. Transitional societies have developed various strategies to deal with a record of traumatic political violence, ranging from pleas for forgetting (often a deliberate move by elites implicated in committing the violence) to the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC’s). In the paper, I critically assess these strategies in the light of an agonistic theory of peace. With regards to the TRC’s, for example, I argue that the positivism (in both senses of the word) with which TRC’s link truth and ‘closure’ of the past with reconciliation and peace is not unproblematic. On the contrary, violent memories show themselves to be of an unruly nature, in practice as well as theoretically. Specifically traumatic memories of political violence resist an easy closure of the past, for they operate not in linear time (which constitutes or performs a clear break between the present and the past) but in trauma time, a temporal regime in which the past is spectral: it haunts the present, it is still present in the present, as nightmares, flashbacks, or as a distinct experience that the past, given its extremely painful nature, is not yet over. By ignoring these characteristics of traumatic memory, the search for reconciliation through truth and ‘closure’ risks leading to contestation of public memorial practices or to a disappointed silence on the part of victims, instead of establishing a more broadly supported (agonistic) peace, in which the substantive and temporal plurality of memories of the violent past is recognized and given a proper place in the public memorial sphere.
