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AbstractPolitical theory scholarship tends to resist guilt, and especially collective guilt, as a framework for thinking about wrongs committed in the past or still enduring. The voices and experiences of those wronged, however, often imply that they are attributing guilt, and they are attributing it to a collectivity. I follow their lead and think through the potential of political guilt in motivating reparation and redress. Drawing on insights that Karl Jaspers fails to fully develop, I appropriate his notion of political guilt as situation, and read it as something that is contested among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Through contestation political guilt creates political spaces for reckoning with the past, and can be instrumental in making space for marginalized voices. I apply my framework to race relations in the contemporary United States, but guilt could be a catalyst to rethink postcolonial relations as well.

In this paper I argue that, despite resistance by many to its incorporation into public discourse, suffering is a constitutive element of politics today, both a consequence of and a motive for political action. I consider some of the problems attending the incorporation of suffering as a subject of political discussion and I propose a phenomenological approach to address some of these problems. This approach is based on the notion of situation, which allows for a contextual reading of suffering as an intrinsically relational experience encompassing multiple differently situated perspectives. Drawn from Karl Jaspers' writings on psychiatry, this approach focuses on empathic listening to the claims of differently situated selves, and is rooted in awareness of our own situation.