PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Our societal and scholarly pursuits of social justice, and, in general, the ways we address historical injustice, manifest our ethical relations to the past. We routinely pass ethical judgments on the past, and lately we seem to be increasingly invested in the question “Who’s to blame?” Blaming past ideas, behavioral patterns, social forces and social groups for the dire shape of the present, however, is significantly different from more common ways of judging the past. Through the examples of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement and a prevalent humanities position in the Anthropocene debate, this chapter attempts to understand blaming the past as an ethical relation to the past on its own right. In exploring its merits and shortcomings, the chapter pays special attention to the conceptual distinction between blaming the past and judging the past; the intersection of legal and historical measures in evaluative relations to the past; the question of temporality and the time of the imprescriptible underlying past-blaming; the multiple notions of responsibility invoked by this; and hailing the past as blaming’s counter-relation to the past.