Drawing upon resources in relational psychoanalysis (Chodorow, 1978; Stolorow and Atwood, 1994), the philosophy of religion (Farneth, 2017), and social phenomenology (Marín-Ávila, 2023; Sahlins, 1965), the proposed paper argues that the hallmark of contemporary political conflicts within the context of rising fascism is the violence of what Chilean anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz (2005) deems exchanges of “negative asymmetric reciprocity,” where the structural dynamic of such relations is the pairing of materially consequential power differentials and generic forms of reciprocal exchange that are designed to be confused with altruism or consent. While prototypical instances of negative asymmetric reciprocity are overt forms of domination, coercion, and exploitation, this paper contends that negative asymmetric reciprocity also characterizes instances of familial pressures on children toward reconciliation predicated on “agreeing to disagree” regarding fundamental rights discourse, which are covertly deployed as deflections of accountability, and where any principled commitment to truth telling becomes easily neutralized under the purported liberal rubric of decorum and process. Such an analysis offers the practical payoff of unmasking how political actors with asymmetric power relations frequently exploit the idea of empathic reciprocity as a trap to disarm activists and interpersonal caregivers in their practices of solidarity within high-stakes conflict settings.
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