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"With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver-thematically and formally-within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice"--

Emphasizing the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically and practically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a culture that is hospitable to democracy

This article identifies a blind spot in constructivist theories of representation and their account of legitimacy in terms of the challenge posed by ecologies of social ignorance, generally and especially during foundational moments. Social ignorance is conceptualised here not merely as the absence of knowledge or true belief but as a social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin. In dialogue with social epistemologists and phenomenologists, the article shows how representation can nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation. A permanent feature of democratic politics, this problem becomes most salient during moments of constitutional re-founding, such as regime change, post-conflict reconstruction or constitutional referenda, when representative claims can reconfigure a community's political imaginary, rendering it more or less ignorant. The representative claims made by the Vote Leave's key figures during the Brexit referendum campaign serve as illustration.

In an effort to delineate a more plausible account of political change, this paper reads Pierre Bourdieu's social theory as a corrective to exaggerated enthusiasm about the emancipatory force of reflection. This revised account valorizes both Bourdieu's insights into the acquired, embodied, durable nature of the political habitus and judgment theorists' trust in individuals' reflection as a perpetual force of novelty and spontaneity in the public sphere of democratic societies. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal the mix of continuity and discontinuity that is characteristic of most transformations in the political common sense of democratic societies. In other words, this paper seeks to offer a more complex understanding of the inertial character of reflective judgment and of the difficulty of shifting the categories that define the political common sense. By cross-pollinating the ever-growing literature on reflective judgment and Bourdieu's sombre theory of politics, we can better calibrate our expectations regarding the possibilities of significant democratic transformation in late capitalist societies.