Transitional Justice, Political Temporality and the Injuries of Normality

The paper draws attention to a type of historic injustices that have been largely neglected by transitional justice, both as an academic field and as a field of political intervention, namely human rights violations linked to notions of normality, productivity and fitness. It introduces the concept of injuries of normality to denote systemic human rights violations that result from, operate through, reiterate and reinforce practices of categorizing people along social norms and standards of health, fitness, productivity, and/or conformity and discusses whether and to which extend transitional justice is a useful framework for problematizing this type of historical wrongs. By injuries of normality I mean, first, systemic human rights violations against people marked as socially inadequate, abnormal, deviant or deficient. Second, these human rights violations are injuries of normality insofar as they occur not only under exceptional political circumstances but also in situations of “normality”, or, more exactly: in situations taken for “normality”. The logic of marking and categorizing people as deviating from certain social norms and standards has not been confined to undemocratic, authoritarian systems, nor to situations of strife, war or civil war, although the latter may have aggravated the infringements. Hence, the term is meant to denote injuries through “normality”, injuries during “normality”, and as forming part of “normality”. It addresses four paradigmatic cases of injuries of normality under Nazi rule: the persecution of people categorized as mentally ill, hereditarily ill, homosexual, or asocial and argues that their suffering escapes the transitional justice. The transition paradigm, I contend, implies a specific political temporality that hinders injuries of normality from coming into view.