Abstract
This article will explore Derridean hauntology in relation to the UK Supreme Court case of Keyu & Others, as well as through the lens of Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis. In particular, this article will argue that there are two main groups of spectres, or ghosts, which loom over the case. The first are the spectres of Marxism and class struggle, which form the overarching framework of the case. The second are the spectres of the victims of the Batang Kali killings in 1948 at the hands of a Scots Guard patrol. Here, Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis can shed light on the tension between democracies and undemocratic measures, which co-exist side by side and indeed are mutually constitutive. In addition, Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis can provide a way to further understand the need for the victims’ and their relatives’ voices to finally be heard and acknowledged by the Symbolic Order (the big Other). Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis can further offer a useful interpretive framework through which to understand the traumatic impact of the killings of the Batang Kali rubber plantation workers on their relatives (the appellants of the case), and how it can potentially be mitigated through articulation and integration into the Symbolic. In so doing, this article will expose and bring to light the spectres and ghosts, as well as the obscene underside, that are latent in cases of historical human rights violations, whether those are related to insurgencies in the days of the decline of the British Empire or otherwise. This is important in terms of giving a voice, as well as acknowledging that voice, of the victims and survivors of such human rights violations, which is often silenced or ignored, as well as exposing and acknowledging the obscene supplement that characterizes, for example, democracies and their workings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Keyu and Others (Appellants) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and another (Respondents) [2015] UKSC 69.
Derrida is insistent on the multiple spectres, and therefore legacies and interpretations, of Marxism (Derrida 2006).
Wooden longhouses raised from the ground with a veranda entrance.
In late 1969, one of the Scots guardsmen, William Cootes, provided a sworn statement to the newspaper The People, which stated that the victims at Batang Kali had been massacred in cold blood. Sworn affidavits were consequently taken from three other guardsmen who were part of the patrol that went to Batang Kali: Alan Tuppen, Robert Brownrigg and Victor Remedios. A further guardsmen, George Kydd, who did not provide a written statement, told a reporter from The People that the killings constituted murder, that the victims had been shot down in cold blood, that they had not been trying to run away, and that there had been no reason to shoot them (Keyu and Others 2015, para. 26). A few days later, two of the soldiers, Alan Tuppen and Victor Remedios, also gave interviews on British national television and radio confirming the account of unlawful killing, with Tuppen arguing that in his view the killings amounted to murder (Keyu and Others 2015, para. 27). One of the survivors also told a reporter from The People that the troops had separated the women and children from the men—who had not been trying to escape—divided the men into groups and then shot them. The Straits Times interviewed one of the guides, Inche Jaffar bin Taib, who said that shortly before the killings, a sergeant told him not to look at the male detainees. After he turned his back, he heard a burst of gunfire, and when he turned around he saw ‘dead bodies everywhere’. (Keyu and Others 2015, para. 29) The sergeant told him that he would be jailed if he breathed a word about what had occurred. Cootes, Tuppen, Brownrigg and Kydd, whilst being interviewed under caution, again admitted that they had been ordered to shoot the men, who had not been attempting to escape. A further guardsmen, Keith Wood, also admitted when interviewed that the men were murdered. Further, Brownrigg and Kydd said that they had been instructed by the army to provide the false explanation that the men had been attempting to run away (Keyu and Others 2015, para. 33).
For Emmanuel Levinas, ethics arise in our relationship with the Other, in his/her absolute alterity (Levinas 1991). Specifically, Levinas wishes to provide an alternative to Husserl’s phenomenology in which the Other is regarded as another ego, as well as Heidegger’s ontology, which is argued to prioritize the relation to Being over beings. For Levinas, both phenomenology and ontology represent philosophies of violence (de Ville 2011). However, Derrida, at the very least the Derrida of Violence and Metaphysics (2001), diverges from Levinas’ alterity of the Other insofar as in Derrida’s interpretation, alterity is always relative alterity, and therefore always partially grounded in a phenomenological conception of the Other. Therefore, alterity is always to a certain extent dependent upon and relative to the self. In addition, Derrida also provides an account that differs from Levinas’ position in relation to Heidegger, insofar as Being is always to some extent required to ground the ethical relation and distinguish the self from the Other. Moreover, Derrida argues that Being cannot be prioritized over beings, since there can only be an order of priority between existent things, and Being is not an existent (de Ville 2011). The impossibility of the encounter with the absolute alterity of the Other is additionally compounded by the mediating role of language (de Ville 2007).
The United Nations Charter, 1945; Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; the Four Geneva Conventions, 1949; the Refugee Convention, 1950; the European Convention on Human Rights, 1950; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966.
R. v Clegg [1995] 1 A.C. 482.
Hale (2013, p. 12) appositely suggests that the events in Kenya could open the door for more ‘closeted spectres’ of the British military establishment.
In the case of Kenya in particular, but with implications for other parts of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins explicitly highlights this tension. Elkins argues the following in relation to the ECHR, which had been drafted in the wake of World War II, and the attitude of colonial officials: ‘Most thought Africans and Asians not yet civilized, and therefore not entitled to the rights and obligations that went along with the postwar notions of international citizenship. Additionally, Mau Mau suspects were thrown into a category all of their own. Their bestiality, filth, and evil rendered them subhuman, and thus without rights. The British argued that Mau Mau threatened not just the life of the colony but that of British civilization as well. Detaining these subhuman creatures amounted not only to saving Africans from themselves but also to preserving Kenya for civilized white people. The world had heard variations of this logic before, most recently when nearly 50 million people had lost their lives in the fight against fascism for the preservation of liberal democracy. Yet only seven years after the end of World War II, Britain found itself in a curious position of constructing its own labyrinth of detention camps in its fight to preserve colonial rule in Kenya.’ (Elkins 2005, p. 97).
Lacan argued that the subject emerges through the interplay of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The subject becomes a subject proper through the accession into the Symbolic Order, or the realm of law and language. This accession is supplemented by imaginary identifications that construct the ego and which arise when the infant is in between 6 and 18 months of age—a stage that Lacan termed the Imaginary (Lacan 2001). The excess that cannot be codified within the Symbolic, and which paradoxically is also retroactively created by it, is called the Real. The Real is dangerous insofar as it lies outside the realm of the law and the social; it threatens to return, erupt and disrupt through the subject and the coordinates of the social. For Žižek, the social and the political are also constituted by those three levels—the Symbolic constructs the narratives of our political and social life, which are further supplemented by imaginary identifications, or fantasies around which our desire finds its coordinates—these are attempts to plaster over the Real of abstract, radical negativity that characterizes the social (Žižek 1989; Stavrakakis 1999).
References
Anderson, David M. 2014. Exit from empire: Counter-insurgency and decolonization in Kenya, 1952–1963. In At the end of military intervention: Historical, theoretical, and applied approaches to transition, handover, and withdrawal, ed. Robert Johnson, and Timothy Clack, 107–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aristodemou, Maria. 2014. A constant craving for fresh brains and a taste for decaffeinated neighbours. European Journal of International Law 25(1): 35–58.
Aristodemou, Maria. 2015. The pervert’s guide to the law: Clinical vignettes from Breaking Bad to breaking free. In Žižek and law, ed. Laurent de Sutter, 13–30. Abingdon: Oxon.
Belau, Linda. 2001. Trauma and the material signifier. Postmodern Culture 11(2).
Butler, Rex. 2014. The Žižek dictionary. Abingdon: Routledge.
Brendon, Piers. 2007. A moral audit of the British Empire. OpenDemocracy, 6 November. https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/visions_reflections/british_empire.
Davis, Colin. 2005. Hauntology, spectres and phantoms. French Studies 59(3): 373–379.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Writing and difference (Trans. Alan Bass), 97–192. London: Routledge..
Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Spectres of marxism. New York: Routledge.
de Ville, Jacques. 2007. Deconstruction and law: Derrida, Levinas and Cornell. Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 25: 23–53.
de Ville, Jacques. 2011. Jacques Derrida: Law as absolute hospitality. Abingdon: Routledge.
Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Britain’s gulag: The brutal end of empire in Kenya. London: Pimlico.
Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian subject: Between language and jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fink, Bruce. 1997. A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Friedman, Danny. 2013. Torture and modernity. European Human Rights Law Review 5: 494–511.
Frosh, Stephen. 2013. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2012. The end of history and the last man. London: Penguin Books.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gordon, Avery F. 2011. Some thoughts on haunting and futurity. Borderlands 10(2): 1–21.
Hack, Karl. 1999a. Iron claws on Malaya: The historiography of the Malayan emergency. Journal of South East Asian Studies 30(1): 99–125.
Hack, Karl. 1999b. Imperialism and decolonisation in Southeast Asia: Colonial forces and British world power. In Colonial armies in Southeast Asia, ed. Tobias Rettig, and Karl Hack, 239–265. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hajjar, Lisa. 2013. Torture: A sociology of violence and human rights. New York: Routledge.
Hale, Christopher. 2013. Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai. Stroud: The History Press.
Harper, Timothy Norman. 2001. The end of empire and the making of Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huggan, Graham. 2014. Hauntings. W.G. Sebald as travel writer. In Travel and ethics: Theory and practice, ed. Corinne Fowler, Charles Forsdick, and Ludmilla Kostova, 231–241. New York: Routledge.
Jackson, Robert. 2011. The Malayan emergency and Indonesian confrontation: The Commonwealth’s war 1948–1966. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military.
Keyu and Others v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and another. [2015] UKSC 69.
Lacan, Jacques. 1988. Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 2001. Écrits: A selection. London: Routledge Classics.
Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The ethics of psychoanalysis: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ladd, Thomas M. 1977. The Malayan communist insurgency. Asian Affairs 4(5): 306–316.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and infinity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Loytomaki, Stiina. 2014. Law and the politics of memory: Confronting the past. Abingdon: Routledge.
Macherey, Pierre. 2008. Marx dematerialized, or the spirit of Derrida. In Ghostly demarcations: A symposium on Jacques Derrida’s spectres of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker, 17–26. London: Verso.
Monbiot, George. 2005. How Britain denies its holocausts. The Guardian. 27 December.
Monbiot, George. 2012. Deny the British Empire’s crimes? No, we ignore them. The Guardian. 23 April. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities.
Morgan, Michael. 1977. Britain’s imperial strategy and the Malayan labour movement 1945–1950. Race & Class 19(1): 29–51.
Ramakrishna, Kumar. 2002. Emergency propaganda: The winning of Malayan hearts and minds 1948–1958. Richmond: Curzon Press.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Schroeder, Jeanne Lorraine. 2008. The four Lacanian discourses or turning law inside out. Abingdon: Birkbeck Law Press.
Shapiro, Sean. 2013. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions by Stephen Frosh. Jewish Quarterly 60(2): 64–66.
Sheehan, Sean. 2012. Žižek: A guide for the perplexed. London: Continuum.
Smale, Catherine. 2013. Phantom images: The figure of the ghost in the work of Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann. London: Modern Humanities Research Association.
Stanley, Tim. 2013. The British must not rewrite the history of the Mau Mau revolt. The Daily Telegraph. 6 June. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/kenya/10103371/The-British-must-not-rewrite-the-history-of-the-Mau-Mau-revolt.html.
Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the political. London: Routledge.
Stenson, Michael. 1980. Class, race and colonialism in West Malaysia: The Indian case. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
The examined life. 2008. [Film]. Astra Taylor. Dir. Canada. Zeitgeist Films.
Ucko, David H. 2010. The Malayan Emergency: The legacy and relevance of a counter-insurgency success story. Defence Studies 10(1–2): 13–39.
Vadivella Belle, Carl. 2015. Tragic orphans: Indians in Malaysia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel, and the critique of ideology. Durham: Duke University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the desert of the real. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2005a. The metastases of enjoyment: Six essays on women and causality. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2005b. Iraq: The borrowed kettle. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. The parallax view. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. How to read Lacan. London: Granta Books.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. In defense of lost causes. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. The most sublime hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Danil, L.R. Keyu and Others (2015): Derridean Hauntology and Lacanian-Žižekian Psychoanalysis in Between the Lines. Law Critique 28, 43–60 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9190-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9190-3