The ghost in the impossible machine: Reparation and the biopolitics of transition.

This paper represents an excavation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from the point of view of its antecedents in colonial-apartheid jurisprudence. Relying heavily on the work of Adam Sitze (2013), the paper argues for an understanding of the domination of biopolitics as a mode of government during the colonial-apartheid era. The paper proceeds to a deconstruction of the distinction between sovereignty and biopolitics, exposing that a biopolitical imperative lies in fact inhumed in the very idea of sovereignty. In addition, the paper considers the rudimentary iteration of the spectre of reparation in the biopolitical compensation committees of colonial-apartheid and emphasizes how these committees was part and parcel of apartheid biopolitics in its thanatopoloitical declension. The question then becomes how one unties the notion of compensation / reparation from this history of thanatopolitics. I suggest that an affirmative biopolitical reading of the obligatory gift as grounded in ubuntu, can become a productive way of confronting the spectre of reparation in a post-apartheid era.