Words of apology are amongst our most familiar forms of speech, so familiar that we assume we know exactly what they mean, even when they arise in unfamiliar contexts. This type of pre-reflexive interpretive fluency is what makes it possible for us to operate with such ease in a space of shared conventions, but its immediacy gets in the way when a practice shifts and in fact demands a different reading. With a well-worn code at the end of our interpretive fingertips, we import assumptions about the meaning of apology into debates about political apologies, where they shape our evaluations and ability to make sense of the sui generis work that political apology might do. In the literature on the political apology one sees this most strikingly in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's influential contention that political apologies transpose what is essentially an individual discourse onto a collective, and his subsequent conclusion that they are thus a type of category mistake. No doubt, if we begin with the template of the repenting, feeling, reflecting individual (standing before his or her friend, lover, or priest) and project that form onto the collective, we are bound to imagine apologizing states as giant sentient beings stumbling around like cartoon characters, absurdly fraught by deep regret. But are we so bound?

The step that this analysis skips is the one of specifying, and even more importantly examining, what type of act a political apology actually is.