Introduction: Imagining Restitution

Simon Curtis’ 2015 film Woman in Gold narrates the struggle of Maria Altmann, a Jewish war refugee from Austria (played by Helen Mirren), to reclaim her family’s property confiscated by the Nazis in a protracted court battle with the Austrian state (Republic of Austria...

Émile Durkheim’s Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the ‘Solidarity of Things’

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.

The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This chapter brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in conversation with two moral sentiment philosophers of the 18th century, Joseph Butler and David Hume. It focuses on the connection between the modern restitutive trope and reparation as premised on shared humanity. The ‘problem’ that the Creature from Frankenstein illuminates is the conditional logic of restitution, which is open only to those who are already included in human society; animals, monsters, and other non-humans do not partake in restitution. By showing that the concept of benevolence has a central place in the construction of prelapsarian desires in Shelley’s novel, the chapter argues that the Creature represents for the other protagonists the humanity’s ‘radical outside’; he is both excluded from the benevolent society and divested of restitutive possibilities. The Creature is a figure of ‘unrestitutability’ because the possibilities of return, undoing and repair are barred from him by the virtue of his constitutive exclusion from humanity.

Epilogue: Restitution that Doubles the Loss

Louise Erdrich’s book LaRose (2016) tells the story of two families belonging to an Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota, whose lives are shattered by the accidental shooting of a child, Dusty, by the neighbour, Landreaux Iron, while hunting for deer.1 The profound rift that the child’s killing causes in the families’ coexistence and in the local Ojibwe community at large can be repaired only through a compensatory ritual, whereby Landreaux’s family performs an act of restitution to their neighbours by ‘replacing’ the killed child with their own son, LaRose. Adopted by Dusty’s parents, Peter and Nola, LaRose becomes a substitutive presence in Ravich’s family, filling the void caused by the killing; he stands in the place of another child, and, assuming a new name, personal objects and identity, ...

‘I only loved’: Restitution in Psychoanalysis

This chapter offers a reading of texts by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein on undoing, restitution and reparation. It elaborates psychoanalytic the insights into the theory of restitution alongside two non-identical, though overlapping, trajectories—the concept of retroactive annulment (Undgeschehenmachen) and Klein’s theory of reparative action—as well as into the discussion on status quo ante, which has been very closely connected to the history of the concept of restitution. It contrasts restitution-as-undoing and restitution-as-repair in Klein’s writings and her important theory of the subject’s reparative and curative undertaking following their destructive impulse towards the love-object. It links Klein’s theory of reparation with a text by Joan Riviere, which presents status quo ante as an expression of the subject’s refusal to submit to analysis. Riviere outlines a figure of an ‘unrestitutable subject’, who refuses ‘to get better’, and obstinately clings to the neurotic state.

In dominum pristinum statuere: Hugo Grotius’ Theory of Restitution and the Return of the Former Condition of Things

This chapter focuses on the theory of restitution in Hugo Grotius’ writings on the conduct of war and on conditions of ante bellum in his 1604/1605 De Iure Praedae and in the 1625 De Iure Belli ac Pacis. It looks closely at three aspects of Grotius’s restitution theory: first, its association with corrective, compensatory and expletive justice response to wrongdoing; second, its understanding as an expression of a uniquely human desire for social community; and, third, its relation to the broader imaginary of the law of postliminium. This elucidates different, though overlapping, meanings of return at play in the modern restitutive discourse, including the return of expropriated objects to their previous owner; the subject’s return as home-coming and repatriation; and the subject’s return to a previously occupied position or condition.