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Praise for Spectres of Reparation in South Africa:

“In this ground-breaking book, which draws seamlessly on both African indigenous
cosmology and psychoanalytic theory, Barnard-Naudé helps us understand how
spectres of reparation continue to haunt South Africa, many years after the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) formally finished its work. […] This impor-
tant book deserves to be read in South Africa and beyond, across disciplines, and by
scholars and practitioners who are interested in linking transitional justice to more
robust theoretical and political agendas.”
– Paul Gready, UNESCO Chair, Centre for Applied Human Rights,
University of York, author of The Era of Transitional Justice:
The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa and Beyond (2011).

Praise for Jaco Barnard-Naudé:

“A highly original scholar, at ease in the domains of politics and philosophy, law
and literature, Jaco Barnard-Naudé has been making his mark for some time by
bringing psychoanalysis to the negotiating table of political injustice. His work,
rapidly becoming indispensable, has far-reaching ramifications for anyone reflect-
ing on how to advance in the maelstrom that is South Africa today.”
– Jacqueline Rose, Professor and Co-Director,
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London,
author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2021).
Spectres of Reparation in South Africa

This book argues that South Africa is haunted by the spectre of reparation. The
failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to secure
adequate reparation for the victims of colonisation and apartheid continues to
drastically undermine the legacy of the commission’s processes and findings.
Investigating the TRC’s key processes of amnesty, archiving and forgiveness
in turn, the book demonstrates that each process is fundamentally thwarted by
the terminal lack of reparation. These multiple forms of the spectre of reparation
haunt post-apartheid society in deeply traumatogenic ways. The book proposes a
new ethic of “reparative citizenship” as a means of encountering the spectres of
reparation in a productive and transformative manner, generating hope even in the
face of the irreparable.
This book will be an important read for South Africans interested in overcoming
the impasses and injustices that haunt the country, but it will also be of interest to
post-conflict transitional justice and politics researchers more broadly.

Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence, Co-Director of the Centre

for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) and Director of Research at the Faculty of Law,
University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Routledge Contemporary South Africa

1. Social Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Social Re-engineering for Inclusive Development
Ndangwa Noyoo
2. Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa
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10. Spectres of Reparation in South Africa

Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Jaco Barnard-Naudé

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Contemporary-South-Africa/book-series/RCSOUTHAFRICA
Spectres of Reparation
in South Africa
Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission

Jaco Barnard-Naudé
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Jaco Barnard-Naudé
The right of Jaco Barnard-Naudé to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-26861-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26865-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-29027-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003290278
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction 1

2 The Ghost in the “Impossible Machine”: Reparation and the

Biopolitics of Transition 33

3 On Apology and the Spectre of a Haunting Shame in the TRC’s Process 63

4 The Spectre of Reparation in the Archive: The TRC’s Work on the

Role of Business During Apartheid and the Ongoing Demand for
Reparation 87

5 The Spectre as Refusal: Reparation and Forgiveness in the Work of

Mourning 147

6 Creative Haunting: Towards the Poetic Justice of Reparative

Citizenship 176

7 Conclusion 210

Index 239
Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book have been published previ-
ously, as follows:

Chapter 2 was originally published as “Real Zones of Indistinction: Crisis,

Exception, Norm and the TRC as Biopolitical Imperative” in Karin van Marle
and Mia Swart (eds) The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 20 Years On (2017) Brill: Leiden 186–220.

Chapter 3 was originally published as “On Apology and the Failure of Shame in
the TRC” in Melanie Judge and Dee Smythe (eds) Unsettling Apologies: Critical
Writings on Apology from South Africa (2022) Bristol University Press: Bristol
264–289.

Chapter 4 was originally published as “For Justice and Reconciliation to Come:

The TRC Archive, Big Business and the Demand for Material Reparations” in
François du Bois and Antje du Bois-Pedain (eds) Justice and Reconciliation in
Post-Apartheid South Africa (2008) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
172–205.

Chapter 5 was originally published as “The Work of Mourning, Refusal,

Forgiveness” in Karin van Marle (ed) Refusal, Transition and Post-Apartheid Law
(2009) SUN Media: Stellenbosch 101–120.

Chapter 6 was originally published as “Towards the Poetic Justice of Reparative

Citizenship” in Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (ed) Breaking Intergenerational Cycles
of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory (2016)
Barbara Budrich Academic Press: Leverkusen 49–70. A segment of Chapter 6 was
also originally published in “What Pandora Did: The Spectre of Reparation and
Hope in an Irreparable World” in Kim Wale, Jeff Praeger and Pumla Gobodo-
Madikizela (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Collective Memories of
Historical Trauma (2020) Palgrave Macmillan: London 67–92.

Chapter 7 republishes segments from “‘She Reigns and He Does Not Govern’:
The Discourse of the Anxious Hysteric in Post-apartheid South Africa” (2017)
 Acknowledgements ix

28(3) Law and Critique 267–287 and “‘Space Is Space’: The Nomos of Apartheid,
the ‘Coloniser Who Refuses’ and Uncolonial Spatiality in JM Coetzee’s Waiting
for the Barbarians” in Jaco Barnard-Naudé and Julia Chryssostalis (eds) Spatial
Justice after Apartheid: Nomos in the Postcolony (2022) Routledge: Abingdon
130–147.

Thank you to the publishers of the above works for allowing subsequent publica-
tion with their permission.
“Without […] reparation, no law will stop the apartheid ghost from haunting our
society”
– Joe Slovo (1992).
1 Introduction

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a subject

of lack
Conjuring now the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
as a subject—and specifically as a subject of lack. While there are myriad ways
of contemplating the TRC as an institution, this book will advance the proposition
that studying the TRC as a subject of lack provides a renovated basis for a critique
of the TRC as an institution as well as for a critique of its legacy in the context of
broader current debates relating to the question of the afterlife of apartheid. The
proposition that the TRC be studied as a subject of lack may be justified by con-
sulting the text out of which the TRC was constituted—the famous epilogue of the
1993 Interim Constitution (Constitution 1993). As we shall presently see, this epi-
logue constructs and constitutes the South African nation at the dawn of the formal
dismantling of apartheid precisely in terms of lack. After proclaiming that “[t]he
pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace
require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction
of society,” the epilogue diagnoses the symptoms of the South African nation as
“gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in
violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge.”
It then goes on famously to proclaim that these symptoms “can now be
addressed” on a particular basis, namely on the basis that there are three forms of
what the epilogue calls “need” and what I propose to call lack. These three forms of
need/lack are the need for understanding, the need for reparation and the need for
ubuntu. The way in which the epilogue is written at this point in the text also gives
us a palpable sense of what South Africa does not need/lack at this constitutional
moment. These are vengeance, retaliation and victimisation. The epilogue tells us
that there is quite enough, a surfeit even, of these forms of social antagonism in the
South Africa that is to be constituted. But if we are prepared to look at these from
a vantage point of lack, what we find is that these three forms of what South Africa
does not lack are in fact themselves statements of lack: Vengeance, for instance,
as the lack of forgiveness, retaliation as the lack of grace, victimisation as the lack
of reconciliation. On the whole, then, the epilogue is at pains to tell us that South
Africa is a country, a subject, of lack, that there is in fact an overabundance of lack
when it comes to constituting South Africa after apartheid.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003290278-1
2 Introduction

From the point of view that the TRC was derived from this epilogue in which
there is such an abundance of lack, it should not be surprising that the TRC itself
would reflect this constitution of South Africa in the midst of lack. Indeed, the TRC
stands narrated as an institution that was destined to address the lack in which it
was founded and grounded, especially the three lacks of understanding, reparation
and ubuntu but also the lacks that inhere in the surfeit of vengeance, retaliation and
victimisation. However, this book takes the position that this does not mean that the
TRC must or can be understood as a subject of abundance as the opposite of lack,
although I will certainly have much to say about that which abounded in the TRC.
Rather, I propose that despite the abundance of the TRC, it is nonetheless itself a
subject that is constituted by a specific lack. This constitutive lack of the TRC is
the lack of reparation.
That the TRC is constituted by and in the lack of reparation is something that
is immediately evident from the powers of the Commission. As everyone who
has studied the TRC knows well, the Commission did not have the power to order
reparations. It could only, through its Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee,
make recommendations to Parliament as regards adequate reparations. That the
TRC was acutely aware of this lack of the power to order reparations, while hav-
ing, at the same time, the power to grant amnesty to perpetrators (which is where
abundance will become part of our picture), is played out in the TRC Report in
statements that are clearly calculated at exhorting the post-apartheid state to award
adequate reparations, in other words, to fill the lack that the TRC was acutely aware
of self-consciously.
For instance, in Volume 5 of the Report the Commission writes that “[v]ictims
of human rights abuses have suffered a multiplicity of losses and therefore have
the right to reparation” (TRC Report 1998, 170 (emphasis added)). In this state-
ment we see how the Commission reads the “need” for reparation in the Interim
Constitution’s epilogue as in fact constituting a right to reparation, despite the fact
that there is in fact no such right in the Constitution or any other domestic law.
The Commission goes on to say that reparation is “essential to counterbalance
amnesty” (170) in that amnesty denies the victims the right to institute juridical
claims against the perpetrators. As such, “the present government” (174) should
take responsibility for reparation, the Commission writes. The Commission in this
regard is emphatic that “[w]ithout adequate reparation and rehabilitation measures,
there can be no healing or reconciliation” (175). The Commission then lays out
what it calls the “legal basis” for reparation. This basis exists in the Azapo judg-
ment’s (Azapo 1996) acknowledgement that the epilogue “envisages our own state
shouldering the national responsibility” (171) for reparation.
In addition to this, the Commission cites the fact that South Africa is party to
several international law treaties in which the right to compensation for victims
of human rights violations is recognised (TRC Report 1998, 172–174). It further
goes on to cite the enabling Act of Parliament, the Promotion of National Unity
and Reconciliation Act (PNURA 1995) to the effect that measures must be taken
to provide for reparation, and it also acknowledges its power to make recommen-
dations to Parliament in this regard (TRC Report 1998, 171). In a section entitled
 Introduction 3

“moral argument” (174), the Commission makes it plain that “we must ensure that
those whose rights have been violated are acknowledged through access to repara-
tion” (174). In Volume 6 of the Report (TRC Report 1998), the Commission reiter-
ates these points and states that the “international legitimacy” (110) (presumably
not to mention the national legitimacy) of the amnesty mechanism “depends on
the provision of adequate reparations to the victims of gross violations of human
rights” (110). “Making good the injuries to victims of gross violations of human
rights where their ability to seek reparation has been taken away from them,” the
Commission writes, “is thus an inescapable moral obligation on the part of the
post-apartheid democratic state” (110).
So much for the TRC’s efforts to secure an adequate filling of its constitu-
tive lack of reparation for apartheid’s victims in its report. The point is that the
Commission could not secure adequate reparations by virtue of the very fact that
it did not have the power to order these reparations and as such became reliant on
the post-apartheid state to make reparation. What we now know, of course, is that
very little came of the Commission’s exhortations in this regard. Individual victims
were paid a paltry sum far less than what the Commission recommended, and, as
regards other recommendations, these have mostly been ignored or the govern-
ment has dragged its feet in terms of progress with these to such an extent that
over 20 years later, nothing has come of, for instance, community reparations and
rehabilitation (see Barnard-Naudé and Madlingozi 2021, 37–42). The bold prom-
ises made by the then President Thabo Mbeki in his Statement to the National
Houses of Parliament and the Nation at the Tabling of the Report (Mbeki 2004,
15) are belied by a post-apartheid landscape that harrowingly reflects systemic and
endemic poverty, unemployment, deprivation, ongoing de facto segregation and
destitution. What stands indeed crisply rendered are the consequences of all the
qualifications and reservations that the then President Mbeki cited in his statement,
for instance that the reparation payments would be made with “some apprehen-
sion” (22), because “no one can attach monetary value to life and suffering” (22).
President Mbeki, in this (cynical) statement, attempts to weaken the obligation
to make reparation because no reparation can ever be enough for the loss of life
and for suffering, missing of course the point that this is precisely why adequate
reparations should be paid. There is also the then president’s famous rejection of
the (ultimately failed) apartheid reparation litigation against corporations in the
United States courts, on the basis that it is “completely unacceptable that matters
that are central to the future of our country should be adjudicated in foreign courts”
(24), followed closely by the rejection of the TRC’s proposal of a once-off wealth
tax on corporations (25). Instead, President Mbeki proffered a “co-operative and
voluntary partnership to reconstruct and develop South African society” (24–25).
Indisputable statistics and other forms of real evidence such as pervasive service
delivery protests as well as the recent spate of widespread looting and burning in
July of 2021 show on a daily basis that this “partnership” has not worked and that
it is not working in terms of addressing the “needs” of post-apartheid South Africa.
South Africa, like the TRC which aimed to represent it, remains a country, a sub-
ject, deeply marked and thus defined by a constitutive lack of reparation.
4 Introduction

Against the backdrop of this history, I propose to treat the TRC as constituted by
a lack of reparation. Some commentators would immediately retort that the TRC
cannot be held responsible for the lack of reparation in South Africa, precisely
because it did not have the power to order such reparations. However, the wager
of this book is aimed at making a prior point, namely that the lack of reparation
is discernible in the TRC itself. What do I mean by this? In essence, my argu-
ment is that there is an unconscious to the TRC and in this unconscious the lack
of reparation is constitutive. It is thus not merely that the TRC lacked, at the level
of consciousness, the power to order reparation. Rather, the lack of reparation in
the TRC’s unconscious is a palpable and ubiquitous lack once we delve beneath
the surface of the TRC’s constitution and inner workings. I will shortly say more
about the theoretical import of premising a subject on the basis of constitutive lack.
But before I do so, let me say that just as the lack of reparation first constituted in
terms of the South African nation in the Interim Constitution was extended into the
TRC, this lack of reparation has been and continues to be re-extended into South
African society in the aftermath of the TRC. To begin, then, by focusing on the lack
of reparation in the TRC itself has the value of furnishing a critique of the TRC as
an institution of transitional justice in a time when it has been held up as a model
of how to conduct transitional justice. As is well known, the TRC model has been
exported to numerous settings, and it is likely that its exportation will continue
in time to come as other countries move into a post-conflict period. Honing the
point that the TRC is a subject of the lack of reparation should accordingly interest
everyone who is concerned with posing critical questions about the advisability
of such an export—then and in the future. The identification of the TRC with the
lack of reparation, as proposed here, should be especially interesting to countries
that are in the process of embarking upon transitional justice, specifically when
considering ways in which the TRC model could be supplemented with a view to
its improvement. From the point of view that reparation is a much-neglected topic
in transitional justice, scholars that have studied, are studying or wish to study
the ongoing phenomenon of transitional justice in the twenty-first century may
also find value in the argument that approaches the TRC in the terms of a lack of
reparation.

The trajectory of the argument

At this point, it is perhaps most appropriate to lay out the trajectory of the book,
before I go on, in the rest of this introduction, to expound the concepts that sit
at its heart. In the next chapter, I will make the case for understanding the TRC
as a biopolitical imperative, haunted by the spectre of reparation. The aim of the
chapter is not only to illustrate (relying on the seminal work of Adam Sitze (2013))
the TRC’s antecedents in colonial-apartheid era juridical forms but also to under-
score that the TRC emerges out of Sitze’s account as an institution that is struc-
tured, through its precedents, by the lack of reparation. Indeed, supporting Sitze,
my argument will be that not enough was done in the conceptualisation of the
TRC to distinguish it from its colonial-apartheid precedents. The structure of the
 Introduction 5

TRC that emerges, namely as an institution that can grant amnesty but does not
have the power to order reparations, is all but coincidental—it has its origins in
the colonial-apartheid Commission of Enquiry and so-called compensation com-
mittees. The conclusion that I draw from the biopolitical analysis of the TRC is
that while the TRC was a biopolitical imperative, an intervention at the level of
the life of the South African population, it is nonetheless a deficient or incomplete
biopolitical imperative, for its biopolitics is stymied by its constitutive inability to
make a definitive and affirmative biopolitical intervention: Reparation. As such, it
remains stuck within a Foucaultian and Agambenian version of biopolitics under-
taken solely in the name of consolidating the sovereignty of the nation. This means
that what I call a “structural ghost” inheres in Adam Sitze’s rendering of the TRC
as an “impossible machine.” This ghost is the spectre of reparation.
In Chapter 3, I move to the TRC’s amnesty process to illustrate that the lack
of reparation here exists in the failure of shame. I argue that the TRC regarded
itself as the Lacanian big Other of forgiveness and that this self-perception severely
occluded the occurrence of shame in the amnesty and human rights violation pro-
ceedings. This is particularly the case because at the same time as the TRC regarded
itself as the big Other of a consummate forgiveness, perpetrators who appeared
before the TRC regarded it as the fictitious Other of the Other, the complete and
good Other, before whom neither apology nor shame is necessary. Such a failure
of shame critically undercut the (liberal proposed) reparative value of apology in
cases where it was offered. I analyse a number of testimonies before the TRC to
illustrate the failure of shame on both sides of the political divide, before conclud-
ing that another spectre of reparation haunts these proceedings, namely the spectre
of a haunting shame.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the TRC’s archive on the role of the business sector dur-
ing apartheid in order to show how the spectre of reparation haunts this archive. I
deal with several ghosts in relation to this archive—the ghost of time, the ghost of
inattention and the ghost of the public/private divide, all the while attempting to
show how these ghosts influence the construction of the TRC’s archive as the place
of beginning and commandment (see Derrida 1995, 1). I argue that this archive
cannot speak/proclaim a law of the new beginning because it is not sufficiently
cognisant of its death drive. As such, its commandment fails in its very beginning.
In concluding the chapter, I call on a law of the new beginning that could provide
an adequate legal basis for reparation claims against big businesses that aided and
abetted apartheid as a crime against humanity. Central in these considerations, will
be the contention that the crime against humanity does not prescribe—an idea that
also finds its roots in South African customary law and the concept of ubuntu.
If the crime against humanity as apartheid does not prescribe, then conduct that
effectively amounted to aiding and abetting does not prescribe and this can be used
as a sufficient legal basis for domestic reparation claims in South African courts. I
propose that such cases may indeed be a way of finally becoming conversant with
the spectre of reparation in and through an identification with the lack of the TRC
in this regard. This, then, constitutes a way in which lack and law could become
conversant, a way in which law can respond to lack.
6 Introduction

In Chapter 5, I turn to the relationship between the work of mourning and

forgiveness with reference to the work of Jacques Derrida (see Derrida 2001). I
consider reparation in its relationship with both mourning and forgiveness. I argue
that the relationship between the work of mourning and forgiveness turns, ethically
and politically, on a dialectics of double refusal such that forgiveness refuses the
work of mourning while, at the same time, the work of mourning refuses forgive-
ness. This dialectic suggests a posture in which forgiveness and the work of mourn-
ing are locked in struggle, wrestling with each other, in the manner of Delacroix’s
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. Such a dialectic of double refusal points to the
processual character of both mourning and forgiveness. I argue that the spectre
of reparation is critically involved in both mourning and forgiveness. In fact, the
reading I follow here is of the spectre of reparation as a trigger of both mourning
and forgiveness. In this regard, I shall follow Mark Sanders’s Kleinian reading of
reparation in the context of transitional justice (Sanders 2007, 114–146). In conclu-
sion, I shall consider Gillian Rose’s (1996, 70) concept of inaugurated mourning in
order to distinguish it from the work of mourning as politics that we find in Derrida.
Arguing that Rose’s concept of inaugurated mourning ultimately de-ethicises for-
giveness, I argue that the subject remains firmly sovereign in Rose’s work, whereas
for the kind of reparative mourning and reparative forgiveness that I see as needing
to take place in South Africa, we are in critical need of a decentring of the subject
of sovereignty—a decentring that becomes available through a psychoanalytic ver-
sion of forgiveness.
In Chapter 6, I will propose an ethic of reparative citizenship as a mode of
subjective and decentred being that harbours the possibility of creatively coming
to terms or becoming newly conversant with the spectre of reparation. I follow the
work of Agamben (1999, 67) on the “poetic status” of the human being in order to
situate an aesthetic version of subjectivity and thus of citizenship in a time-space
marked by the Irreparable. The chapter posits hope as the condition that is to be
made out of the encounter between the spectre of reparation and the Irreparable.
I revisit the myth of Pandora and Jane Harrison’s (1900) recasting of the myth
in order to argue that the encounter with the remains can generate hope if it is
thought of and actualised as a reparative encounter. The reparative dimension of
the encounter, I argue, is impossible without an aesthetic disposition in relation to
the Irreparable. Having made the case for a re-appreciation of the poetic status of
the human, the chapter proceeds to a discussion of the literary imagination in the
work of Martha Nussbaum (1995), arguing that reparative citizenship is incon-
ceivable without the literary imagination. For instance, the productive encounter
with the spectre of reparation depends on the ability creatively to draw on the
imagination in the invention of reparative action. The argument further supports
Nussbaum’s plea for the emotions as an essential part of social rationality. Via a
reliance on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (2006), the chapter positions reparative
citizenship as an ethic of “poetry’s resistance” to the proclivity of late neoliberal
capitalism for utility. In conclusion, I suggest that reparative citizenship, as a way
or modality of productively consorting with the spectre of reparation, can open up
a horizon of hope for post-conflict societies.
 Introduction 7

In the Conclusion, I consider the discursive importance of the recent calls for
decolonisation in South Africa in the context of the book’s consideration of the
spectres of reparation. I argue that the student protests of 2015–2017 in Higher
Education have palpably revealed that South Africa remains a subject constituted
by the lack of reparation but also that South Africa is discursively speaking a coun-
try in which there seems to be an interminable oscillation between what Lacan
(2007) called the discourse of the “hysteric” and the discourse of the “master.” I ask
after the conditions of the possibility of another, revolutionary kind of discourse
in South Africa, namely the discourse of the analyst. Engaging Achille Mbembe’s
(2021) work on decolonisation as “disenclosure,” I argue that the discourse of the
analyst is premised precisely on a revolutionary disenclosure of the subject and as
such is conducive to the decolonisation that has been called for. I will suggest, in
conclusion, that the discourse of reparative citizenship cannot but be a discourse
of the analyst, on condition that we understand the discourse of the analyst as
a discourse of de-colonisation, a discourse, in other words, in which paralysing
symptoms and ossified certitudes (and the Manichean distinctions on which such
certitudes are based) come apart or are given up, in exchange for master signifiers
that are more open and receiving of the Other, that are more concerned with the
plight of the Other and that are, ultimately, more willing to consort with the spectre
of reparation, knowing that this spectre can and should never be finally exorcised.
In the conclusion of the chapter, I offer a reading of J.M. Coetzee’s (1980) Waiting
for the Barbarians as a literary instance of a discourse of the analyst that undoes
the subject of colonisation and juridicity.
Having laid out the trajectory of the arguments in this book, I now want to
turn to key concepts that animate the course of this argument. In the remainder
of this introduction, I therefore propose to deal with an exposition of what has
been called “the politics of lack” (Robinson 2004, 259), after which I will turn to
Derrida’s concept of hauntology. In this section I will make brief remarks on spec-
trality and haunting. The conclusion of this introduction deals with the relationship
between reparation and lack as the ultimate animating theoretical device in the
book’s argument.

The ontology and the politics of lack

The concept of lack as I will employ it here derives from the psychoanalysis of
Jacques Lacan who regards the subject as constituted by both a lack in being and
a lack of having. The Lacanian lack in being is a lack at the level of existence and
arises as a result of the subject’s constitutive alienation in the signifier. The lack in
having is not unrelated to the lack in being, since the lack in having touches upon
the desire that the subject feels for an object that can temporarily and incompletely
cover the lack in being. As Mari Ruti (2008, 484) has argued, this prioritisation of
lack in subject formation means that Lacan sees lack as “a necessary foundation of
identity.” Lacan, she argues, is “concerned with lack as the ontological underpin-
ning of human existence.” Tønder and Thomassen (2005, 5) relate this ontological
status of lack to the centrality of language in Lacan:
8 Introduction

the subject, who is only a subject in language, is constituted through identi-

fication with a signifier in language […] while this serves to fill the lack […]
the filling of the lack is always incomplete and temporary […] Identification
always fails […] because it comes up against the limit of signification, which
cannot itself be signified within language […] the limit of signification is
not something lying beyond the realm of language, but a lack inherent to
language itself.

In this regard, Ruti (2008, 488) points to the prohibitive and castrating force of the
signifier: Insofar as it carries cultural prohibition, the signifier forces the subject
“to realize that she is not invincible, that she operates within a social world that is
much more powerful than she could ever be, and that there are parts of that world
that she does not have access to.”
Before I go further into a discussion of the political valence of Lacanian lack, I
want to situate Lacan’s conceptualisation of the subject as a subject of lack within
the broader intellectual historical context that attends to the ontology of lack, so
that we may better understand the philosophical and existential foundations out
of which Lacan’s thinking in this regard arose. Here the work of Oliver Marchart
(2005) is instructive. Marchart (2005, 17) begins his argument by first drawing
attention to the meaning of ontology: The study of being in general. He then traces
how ontology became designated as a general metaphysics, before charting how,
in modern philosophy, a shift from ontology to epistemology occurred. Marchart
designates this shift as a shift from the study of “being-qua-being” to “being-qua-
understanding” (18). A “return to ontology” took place in the early twentieth cen-
tury “prepared by Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche” (18). However, this return to
ontology did not “re-emerge in full glory, as a return to the pre-critical, ‘pre-mod-
ern’ stable ground of being” (18). Instead, the new thinkers of ontology approached
being as “something intrinsically precarious,” “something haunted by the spectre
of its own absent ground” (18). For this reason, Marchart argues that being in the
revived version of ontology should not be understood as onto-theology but must
instead be conceived of in terms of “hauntology, where being is always out-of-
joint, never fully present” (18).
Martin Heidegger’s thinking of finitude in this context prepared the ground for
theories of “a constitutive lack-in-being” (Marchart 2005, 19). Heidegger argued
that Dasein is “intrinsically temporal because it is finite: the being of Dasein is a
being-towards-death” (19). And while this sense of one’s own death is felt as an
absence in the life of the human being, it is nonetheless an absence that has a very
real presence: “Finite being is […] held out in a Nothing that is not at all neutral
or indifferent” (19). Marchart contends that Heidegger’s thinking of finitude was
“folded back” (19) into Hegelian dialectics with Alexandre Kojève’s 1933–1939
seminar on Hegel in Paris:

Hegel is celebrated by Kojève for having introduced into ontology the

fundamental category of negativity, yet by assimilating that category to
the Heideggerian notion of finitude Kojève proposes an “existential” or
 Introduction 9

“anthropological” version of Hegelian dialectics, whose field of application

is now entirely restricted to the realm of human affairs, thus excluding the
realm of nature. As a result, Kojève can define negation as the constructive
act by which man, under the sign of his/her own finitude (or death) freely
creates history.
(19)

Marchart shows how Sartre took up this idea of anthropological negativity in his
Being and Nothingness to argue for a being-in-itself (conscious human being) that
is “permeated by nothing: it always is what it isn’t, and it isn’t what it is” (20). As
in Kojève, Marchart argues, lack-of-being in Sartre becomes the “source of human
freedom” (20): “the moment of active negation is the moment of freedom, and
freedom in turn becomes synonymous with lack” (20). Thus negativity and lack,
through the early and mid-twentieth-century reading of ontology, are reinterpreted
to be productive as opposed to nihilistic categories (20).
It is against this backdrop in the history of ideas, Marchart (2005, 20) argues,
that Lacan’s thinking of lack as constitutive of subjecthood must be understood as
a “specific articulation of Freud’s thought with Kojèvian dialectics and the Sartrean
concept of lack-in-being”:

As for Sartre, for Lacan the irresolvable lack-of-being constituted the onto-
logical ground of the subject’s desire for being. It is on the premise of the
subject’s lack-of-being—and subject in Lacan is just the very name for that
lack—that the dialectics of desire is set in motion.
(20)

Marchart makes the important point that Lacan radicalises Kojève’s negative
understanding of desire as desire for the Other, by following the trajectory of lack
in desire when arguing that desire is the desire of the Other—the Other here being
the symbolic order of language or the social (21). With this argument, Lacan situ-
ates desire as always coming from somewhere outside the subject—it is not to be
found within, the subject remains “excentric vis-à-vis itself” (21). And since the
subject is pure lack, “what is absent can only be pure presence: jouissance, a pre-
symbolic, real enjoyment that was lost when the subject entered into language”
(21) and thus became a subject of desire.
We are now in a better position to understand lack in the terms of political
ontology. Marchart (2005, 21) begins his discussion in this regard by positing a
definition of lack as it emerges out of the above adumbrated history: Lack is, at
its most general level, the name for the “absence constitutive of and operative
within presence.” It is thus the absence of a ground for being that paradoxically
becomes the very ground for thinking being. It is a ground “haunted by its own
absence: an entirely unstable ground” (21). The most important consequence of
this, Marchart argues, is that “lack can only be experienced in the cracks and
fissures within being, or, in the breakdown of signification and the unconscious
slips and failures of the Other” (22). By making the important point that Lacan’s
10 Introduction

concept of the Other as socio-symbolic order, thus as “an essentially intersub-

jective agency,” brings ontology “down to the worldly ground of the social and
the political” (22), Marchart accomplishes the shift from abstract philosophy to
concrete politics.
Here, Marchart (2005, 23) hastens to point out that Lacan’s claim that desire is
always the desire of the Other, “implies that not only the subject, but also the Other
itself, is defined by a constitutive lack (and, hence, not in possession of the sub-
ject’s object of desire.” This “lack in the Other” is of critical importance democrati-
cally speaking, for it “gives the subject […] a breathing space, it enables him to
avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack but by allowing
him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack in the Other” (23). These are the
“ontological” underpinnings of a Lacanian theory of a politics of lack as we find it
in the work of Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek it is the task of radical democratic politics
to insist on the lack in the Other, to “try to keep this empty place open” (24). In
Žižek’s thought, which this book will follow, democracy is nothing other than the
attempt to institutionalise lack “against any ideology promising once and for all to
fill up this place” (24). Marchart concludes:

the moment of emancipation—both in analysis and politics—is only reached

when the subject identifies not with this or that imaginary object supposed to
fill up his/her lack, but when s/he ‘identifies’ with lack itself: with the consti-
tutive impossibility of social fullness.
(24)

In each of the chapters in this book, I am concerned to state the lack opened up by
and in the TRC and to proceed with an articulation of the emancipatory possibilities
that could follow for reparation from such an articulation of lack. Let me provide
at least three examples of such an articulation of lack that opens up emancipatory
possibilities for reparation. In Chapter 2, I argue that the constitutive (biopoliti-
cal) lack of reparation that opens up in the structure of the TRC itself provides an
opportunity for beneficiaries of apartheid to step into the breach through an affirm-
ative biopolitics grounded in the obligatory gift. In Chapter 3, I argue that a lack of
shame opens up in the TRC’s amnesty proceedings and that such a lack of shame
creates new possibilities for thinking about the relationship between apology and
reparation. I argue that a demonstration of shame is an essential requirement for
any apology to be reparative and that such a demonstration largely lacked in the
TRC. In Chapter 4, I argue that the spectre of reparation that haunts the TRC’s
archive on the role of business in apartheid opens a lack in post-apartheid law, one
that could be set upon to provide a legal basis for reparation claims in South Africa
through creative legal activism. This, then, becomes a way of playing the big Other
of the post-apartheid against itself by exploiting its lack of reparation. Similarly,
in Chapter 5 I argue that a lack of reparation should fundamentally structure the
interplay between mourning and forgiveness in transitional justice processes—the
spectre of reparation opens up a gap of/as refusal in the discourse of forgiveness
and such a gap animates forgiveness in a psychoanalytic direction.
 Introduction 11

Treating the TRC as a subject of lack, I propose, is part of a strategy of cultural

humility—it is to explode the myth that the TRC was a completion and a full-
ness all by itself, it is to expose that the TRC, like any subject, is not captured by
the signifiers that permeate within it, that its identification with these signifiers
(for instance with “forgiveness” or “reconciliation”) is always already fraught and
failed. Thus, in following the constitutive lack of reparation in the TRC, this book
is interested in the meanings, thoughts and action that may arise out of an identi-
fication with the lack of reparation in the TRC. As is clear from the above, lack
grounds desire, and accordingly to posit the TRC as a lack of reparation is to ask
after and to posit it as a subject that desires reparation from the Other. Such a desire
for reparation from the Other has already been evident in the TRC’s exhortations
to the government to make reparation. So this book’s focus on the lack of repara-
tion in the TRC is not only concerned with what the TRC could have done more or
better in relation to itself making/securing reparation for apartheid’s victims—it is
also concerned with how the TRC is a subject that desires reparation. The aim is
thus not at all to simply discredit the TRC as an institution but rather to ask after
the institutional and affective architecture that animated the TRC and its aftermath.
As is pointed out above, lack, and focusing on it, is not intended to be a nihil-
istic endeavour—lack is productive in the sense not only that something—ideol-
ogy—always arises out of it to fill the lack temporarily and incompletely, but, more
importantly, lack is productive because something emancipatory may arise out of a
fixation on the lack itself. In the chapters that follow I traverse these two forms of
manifestation that arise out of the lack of reparation in the TRC. Chapter 2 is meant
to sketch the biopolitical ideology out of which the TRC emerges as a subject of
lack. In this sense, it is meant to provide the ground for the rest of the chapters as
a ground that is, at the same time, inexistent—a ground as lack (of reparation). In
Chapter 3, we will explore forgiveness as a substantive ideology of the TRC that
arises out of its lack of reparation but, as I will argue, is a substance that generates
its own lack in relation to apology and shame. In Chapter 4, we will be interested
in the ideological stakes of the archive that is generated out of the lack of repara-
tion for the role of business in apartheid while at the same time consorting with
the ghosts that preside over this archive and thus radically prevents its completion/
fullness. In Chapter 5, we will be most concerned with how a fixation on the lack
of reparation itself enables and disables both processes of mourning and forgive-
ness through a metaphor of refusal that prevents them from ever coming to an end.
In each of these chapters the concern remains, then, to keep the empty space/
the lack open as haunted, permeated by ghosts. Moreover, conceiving the TRC as a
subject of lack, rather than as simply an ideology of fullness and social completion,
has the value of re-politicising the TRC in the context of the wider debate about
reparation in South Africa, for if the TRC is a subject constituted by the lack of
reparation, then it must be understood as a process that has not come to an end, that
in fact, cannot come to an end, despite institutional dismantling. The lack in the
TRC as a lack of reparation thus grounds the argument for the continuation (and,
of course, structural funding) of processes that the TRC either did not address or
addressed incompletely. This sense of the lack of reparation will ground the work
12 Introduction

of Chapter 6 and the Conclusion. In the passages above, I have already alluded to
spectres, ghosts, spectrality, haunting and hauntology. It is now time to confront
these concepts head-on.

Hauntology: Of spectres, ghosts, spectrality and haunting

In the previous section, we saw how Marchart traced the re-emergence of ontology
in the twentieth century to an absence at the heart of being—being as precarious,
always haunted by the absence of its own ground and, as such, the new treatment of
being would be better described as hauntology “where being is always out-of-joint,
never fully present,” Marchart writes. This hauntological version of being thus
grounded the ontology of lack. I now want to consider more directly that which is
implicated by hauntology in terms of the proposed study of the TRC as a subject
of the lack of reparation.
Colin Davis (2005, 373) argues that the hauntological preoccupation with the
“figure of the ghost” is meant to function as an “ethical injunction,” because the
ghost is thought here in terms of the Levinassian Other: “a wholly irrecuperable
intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellec-
tual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving” (373).
In many ways, the ghost can itself be understood as the presence of an absence,
the positivisation of a lack. There are obvious resonances here with the idea of
the lack in the Other that in Lacanian radical democracy is posited as something
critically to be preserved and fought for, for the place of the lack in the Other (and
in the subject) is precisely something radically Other “not comprehensible within
our available intellectual frameworks.” Davis quotes Fredric Jameson to make the
point that “spectrality” has nothing to do with the belief (or not) in ghosts—

all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely
as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its
density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.
(373)

In this elaboration of spectrality, we thus again see the association of the spectral
with the productive capacity of the absence of which the ghost is the figuration.
There are thus clear resonances between hauntology and the constitution of the
subject on the basis of lack. In both, the concern is to subvert the self-presence and
self-sufficiency of the present or the given, be it the subject or the social, or both.
Given my title, Spectres of Reparation in South Africa, notions of ghosts, haunt-
ing and spectrality will pervade this book and in an effort to heed the ethico-polit-
ical injunction of what I call the spectres of reparation. Simply put, Spectres of
Reparation in South Africa is concerned to provide a “hauntology” of the TRC
and its place in transitional justice, and my argument holds that the “absence of
ground,” that which haunts the being of the TRC, is the absence of reparation
despite everything we find in the TRC that is concerned to secure reparation. From
the point of view of reparation, I argue, the TRC is constitutively out of joint with
 Introduction 13

itself and as such cannot be thought as a self-present, self-sufficient, stable sub-

jectivity. Noting that the word “hauntology” was coined by Jacques Derrida in his
Specters of Marx (1994, 10), Davis (2005, 373) has provided a succinct definition:
“Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being
and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent,
neither dead nor alive.” My proposition is that reparation functions in the TRC as
this form of ghost which is neither fully present nor absent, neither dead nor alive
in the work of the Commission. In addition, reparation functions to undermine the
“density and solidity” of our post-apartheid present in the aftermath of the TRC by
opening up a relation with an unresolved past, often described as the “unfinished
business” of the TRC.
“Derrida’s spectre,” Davis (2005, 376) writes, “is a deconstructive figure hov-
ering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established cer-
tainties vacillate.” Davis suggests that Derrida implores us to “listen and speak to
the spectre, despite the reluctance inherited from our intellectual traditions and
because of the challenge it may pose to them” (376–377). He goes on to associate
Derrida’s spectre with a “structural openness or address directed towards the liv-
ing by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future”
(379). Davis’s remarks, then, suggest that the question of hauntology, of the spec-
tre and of haunting is a matter of responsibility thought as ethicity. This brings the
question of the relationship between ethics and the ontology of lack to the central
foreground, and it is therefore no coincidence that Derrida writes of hauntology
in the same breath as he does of justice. For Derrida (1990, 947), justice must be
rigorously distinguished from law (droit), and he describes justice in his late work
as centrally finding its location in an experience of aporia. In his “Force of Law”
essay, Derrida (947) describes the aporia as a “non-road,” as “something that does
not allow passage.” For this reason, it is impossible to have what Derrida refers to
as a “full experience” (947) of the aporia. Yet, there is, for Derrida no justice with-
out this experience of the impossible. As he puts it in Specters of Marx (1994, 27):

does not justice as relation to the other suppose […] the irreducible excess
of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some “out of joint” dislo-
cation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the
evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable
insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other
as other?

We must be careful here not to elide the importance of the fact that the aporia “does
not allow passage,” for this implies infinite engagement—an orientation that Davis
above draws out of hauntology. The aporia of justice, of justice as a spectre, does
not let you pass, does not let you go and provides no form of good conscience, only
infinite responsibility (Derrida 1994, xv). Thus, it is the very experience of the
impossibility of having a full experience of justice that demands ceaseless engage-
ment with it. This is, clearly, the ethical dimension of Derrida’s insistence on the
aporia of justice—that it demands infinite response-ability. The aporetic nature of
14 Introduction

justice means that it is always already radically incomplete and thus deficient and
absent, never fully over and done—ethics, in other words, always haunts politics
and the political; the political is the realm of decision, of finitude and certainties
which the ethical/justice disrupts at the very moment that such decisions and cer-
tainties come to pass. In the terms of Derrida’s engagement with the relationship
between law and justice, justice is the name of the spectre that haunts all law:

Every time that something comes to pass or turns out well, every time that we
placidly apply a good rule to a particular case, to a correctly subsumed exam-
ple, according to a determinant judgment, we can be sure that law (droit) may
find itself accounted for, but certainly not justice. Law (droit) is not justice.
(Derrida 1990, 948)

Later in the “Force of Law” essay, Derrida relates justice explicitly to the notion of
the ghost, but he does it through the elaboration of what he calls the “ghost of the
undecidable” (Derrida 1990, 963) as a “form of the same aporia” (Derrida 1990,
965) of justice. He describes the undecidable as “the experience of that which,
though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still
obliged […] to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of
law and rules.” It is this ethico-political experience which

remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost - but an essential ghost—in every

decision, in every event of decision. Its ghostliness deconstructs from within
any assurance of presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that
would assure us of the justice of a decision.
(Derrida 1990, 965 (emphasis added))

In Specters of Marx, Derrida (1994) addresses a different but still closely related
aspect of the relationship between the spectre and his concept of justice:

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and genera-

tions, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not
present, nor presently living, either to us, or outside us, it is in the name of
justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let
us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no
more than the law, reducible to laws and rights […] No justice […] seems
possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all
living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts
of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of
wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sex-
ist, or other kinds of exterminations.
(Derrida 1994, xix (emphasis added))

One sees in these later remarks on a different aspect of the relationship between the
spectre and justice, nonetheless, a convergence that will become important: What
 Introduction 15

joins these quotations is their references to the present and presence. Derrida’s
insists that ghostliness/the spectre “disjoins the living present” and so decon-
structs “any assurance of presence.” Moreover, it is this very disjunctive work
of the spectre—its haunting—in the “living present” that anchors the principle of
responsibility, that ensures that no decision can ever be described as fully “just.” In
Chapter 6 we will see how, via the work of Giorgio Agamben on rhythm, the act
of reparative citizenship relies on a necessary interruption of the present of linear
time in order to come to pass. As such, I will argue that reparative citizenship as an
ethico-political undertaking relies precisely on the disjuncture of the living present
and thus derives its force from spectrality.
Mark Sanders (2007, 117) has elegantly shown how the aporia as the ghost of
the undecidable attends the question of reparation in the TRC’s Report. Sanders, it
will be seen, in fact, establishes a correspondence, a correlation even, between rep-
aration and justice—what they share is not only their aporetic essence but indeed
also a spectrality. Sanders shows how the TRC first acknowledged that reparation
is an aporia—impossible, because reparative measures can never “bring back the
dead, nor adequately compensate for pain and suffering” (116), while at the same
time the TRC insists that the order of calculation and decision must be entered—
the “quality of life of the victims” (116) must be improved through such measures,
which are then elaborated in the details of the individual reparation grants that the
TRC recommended to Parliament.
However—and while Sanders is not explicit about this aspect—he also shows
(Sanders 2007, 115–119) how this crossing of the aporia, as an assumption of
responsibility, eventually broke down. Thabo Mbeki’s 2003 speech to Parliament,
referred to earlier, cynically twisted the TRC’s engagement with the order of the
incalculable, by putting it (the acknowledgement that no monetary value can be
placed on life and suffering) in service of, in the form of a justification for, its crude
and wholesale surrender to the order of decision based only on calculation and
aimed solely at exorcising the ghost of the undecidable: Mbeki unceremoniously
announced the decision to pay severely diminished, “once-off” individual repara-
tion grants, while at the same time making it clear that the government opposed
the apartheid reparation litigation in the United States. As regards the individual
grants, Sanders (2007, 119) remarks:

The idea of a “once-off grant,” […] tells one that a debt has been paid and
paid off, that things are and can be over, that one ought to think of them as
over […] At worst it restarts the cycle of historical wrong.

Moreover, and in addition to these ways in which the aporia of justice and repara-
tion was betrayed in the aftermath of the TRC, one should also note that transitional
justice’s over-reliance on Archbishop Tutu’s tropes of “confession, forgiveness and
reconciliation” (as they are invoked throughout the TRC Report) has meant that
this formula has often figured as transitional justice all on its own, with the ques-
tion of reparation on the discursive periphery of such a justice. This, for instance,
is one way of explaining why the reparation debate in South Africa and Rwanda
16 Introduction

(the country of the TRC’s first export) becomes prominent only some years after
the formal transition (see Du Bois and Du Bois-Pedain 2009). In this regard, one
should not lose sight of the fact that governmental power may well regard the
reparation question as a potentially catastrophic threat to the consolidation of the
renovated national sovereignty (Salazar 2014, 44) and, for this reason, is interested
in managing the discursive field in such a way that the question of reparation is
effectively repressed. Yet what stands out, ironically, is precisely how the spectre
of reparation comes back to haunt the TRC in its aftermath. In fact, one could say
that the TRC’s holy trinity of “confession, forgiveness and reconciliation” har-
bours an unconscious and thus repressed dimension which returns in the form of
the spectre of reparation and always in an untimely fashion, namely at a time when
political authority is most interested and concerned to place it out of reach.
In the aftermath of the TRC, “reparation” has shifted from the periphery of tran-
sitional justice to its very centre, where it is often articulated as “justice,” alongside
a term such as “reconciliation” with the insistence, echoing, ironically, the TRC
itself, that there can be/is no reconciliation and no forgiveness without justice as
reparation (Corlett 2011, 608). By identifying reparation not only as one of the
post-conflict forms of justice but now indeed as the post-conflict form of justice
that is most lacking, transitional justice no longer follows the governmental script
and has, perhaps unwittingly, supported the understanding of reparation as the
name of the spectre that haunts post-conflict/still-conflict societies. For to assert
that it is the form of justice that is most lacking in the postcolony is to insist that it
is the most spectral.
Even if it was disputable that reparation is the form of justice that lacks most in
the post-conflict setting, would it not be, at all events, responsibly realistic to hold
that we are always already and in general haunted by reparation, simply because
of the fact that, as Sanders clearly shows and this section attempts to underscore,
“reparation” is a form, an instantiation, a name, of the aporetic justice as spectre
that Derrida expounded? As regards the generality of this haunting by reparation,
Sanders (2007, 129) quotes Melanie Klein’s assertion that “making reparation is
[…] a fundamental element […] in all human relationships” and concludes that
“reparation constitutes a basic structure of responsibility.” (In the following sec-
tion, we shall consider these characteristics of reparation in further detail, espe-
cially regarding their relationship to the ontology and politics of lack.)
It is precisely here that it is worth noting that Derrida conceived of hauntology
in a particular context, in response to a particular discourse, namely the “end of
history” discourse of Francis Fukuyama which had held that global society by the
end of the 1980s had reached a point where history culminates in the consolidation
of capitalism as political economy and liberal democracy as the paradigmatic form
of government. It is no coincidence that the TRC comes about within the atmos-
phere of, and is a creature of, this very discourse, for the TRC to a great extent
was a critical element in the effort to consolidate national sovereignty in order to
install liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism in South Africa. Against this
discourse of the “end of history,” Derrida raised the spectres of Marx, arguing that
“[a]t a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neocapitalism
 Introduction 17

and neoliberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts”
(1994, 37). As Tom Lewis (1996, 22) indicates:

through Specters of Marx, Derrida is intervening not only in a scholarly con-

text (“marxology”) but also in a political context (the end of the cold war) in
which he honestly hopes to fill a political vacuum within a broadly defined
Left.

What I am alluding to, then, is the confluence between the spectre of reparation and
the spectres of Marx. Indeed, from the point of view that we have not rid ourselves
of the spectres of Marx, that they haunt “end of history” ideology in ever more
proliferating modalities, it is not difficult to see that the spectre of reparation that
haunts the TRC is in fact one of the spectres of Marx. The spectre of reparation
shares with the spectres of Marx the idea that history is not over and done with, that
the present is not fully present to itself, that there is a “disjointure” in the present,
what Derrida calls

the heterogeneity of a pre-, which, to be sure means what comes before me,
before any present, thus before any past present, but also what, for that very
reason, comes from the future or as future: as the very coming of the event.
(1994, 28)

The prioritisation of this pre- complicates any referential framework within which
the post- of apartheid is simply comprehended as given after apartheid’s institu-
tional dismantling, over or past, behind us. As such, the pre- necessarily and ines-
capably returns us to the primal scene of “post-”apartheid South Africa such that it
can be understood, as Karin van Marle (2010, 635) has insisted that an irrevocable
tension between “post-” and “past” insists and persists. Thus, what this heterog-
enous pre- enacts is a return to the past and as return, then, it raises the spectre of
the past, a spectre of reparation, over the present and so guarantees its haunting.
Avery F. Gordon (2011, 2) has suggested that haunting “is one way in which
abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in eve-
ryday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with […] or when
their oppressive nature is continuously denied.” Gordon believes that haunting is
an “animated state” (2) through which the persistence of social violence makes
itself known, when “the over-and-done-with comes alive” (2). Spectres of repara-
tion in South Africa takes it as given that apartheid (then and now) constitutes the
racialised form of capitalism par excellence, that it is the over and done with that
remains spectrally alive in the everyday lives of the majority of South Africans.
From the point of view that this capitalism called apartheid has not been super-
seded, reparation critically involves the making or the doing of concrete and mate-
rial measures of justice (however symbolic such measures may nonetheless be) to
the victims of apartheid-related conflict. The spectre of reparation is thus a spectre
that turns on a rendering of justice against the neoliberal, neocolonial and capitalist
given of injustice and deprivation. This is the justice that the spectre of reparation
18 Introduction

wants. As such, the spectre of reparation is interested in what may still be called
the ethics and politics of a communist spirit. In this way, too, the spectre of repara-
tion remains a spectre of Marx.1 To premise that South Africa is a haunted nation
and that it is primarily haunted by the spectre of reparation is to re-inscribe in it the
legacy of what a certain Marxism may have achieved in the life of the nation. There
can be no doubt that this spirit of Marxism was alive in the liberation movement
and sponsored much of the thought that animated the struggle. To insist, then, on
a spectre of reparation is also to pay tribute to the accomplishments of this thought
in the struggle against apartheid, while at the same time attempting to re-animate
this thought in the here and the now. To be sure, the Marxism that the spectre
of reparation is interested to maintain is not a nostalgic longing for any kind of
dogmatic or scientistic “classical” Marxism, nor for any form of institutionalised
(and bastardised) communism as it was practised in the twentieth century. Rather,
the spectre of reparation as a spectre of Marx maintains Marxism precisely as a
spectral substance from which may be drawn the inspiration for an alternative,
non-hegemonic, counter-utopian praxis of justice. The force of Marxism in the
spectre of reparation, then, lies precisely in its potential to act as a counterweight
to the injustices that neoliberal colonialism perpetrates and has perpetrated in the
postcolony.
However forceful the spirit of Marx may be in the spectre of reparation, the
analysis embarked upon here is, at the same time, also an effort to place the legacy
of the TRC within the context of indigenous knowledge and living customary law
in which consorting with the ancestors’ spirits remains a critical avenue of knowl-
edge production and ethics. We must recall here again the Interim Constitution’s
“need for ubuntu” precisely because ubuntu is a crucial way into the understanding
of the relationship between ancestry and the living in African customary systems.
As Edwards et al. (2009) explain, the saying “umuntu umuntu ngabantu” from
which ubuntu is derived is not simply an ontological statement of the self as consti-
tuted by others (a person becomes a person through other people) but is also indica-
tive of a “shared sense of self in both temporal and spatial dimensions that include
the common ancestral heritage” (2). As Edwards et al. go on to note “ancestral
reverence of historical persons demonstrating outstanding divinity […] as well as
[of] recently deceased parents and grandparents, are fundamental for spirituality”
(2) in African indigenous systems. Ramose (2001) in this regard argues that the
“metaphysics of ubuntu” is articulated at three levels of being, making up a “triadic
structure” consisting of “the living, the living dead (the supernatural forces) and the
yet-to-be-born.” Ramose is emphatic about the idea that it is the living dead that
determines justice for the living.
So, while the Interim Constitution’s declaration of a “need” for ubuntu was
clearly concerned in the textual context of its invocation to articulate a counter-
ethic to the “retaliation” to which it opposed ubuntu, it cannot be denied, against
the backdrop of the above mentioned, that the articulation of the need for ubuntu
was also an articulation of a desire to restore and revivify the ancestral domain, as
well as to draw a basis for ethics and politics in the new South Africa out of that
domain. Indeed, it would hardly be going too far to suggest that ubuntu, understood
 Introduction 19

in this way, in fact affirmed a need for haunting, a desire to consort with the ances-
tors and to heed their call for justice once more. As Gordon remarks, the emphasis
on something-to-be-done in haunting requires that “the ghost him or herself be
treated respectfully (its desires broached) and not ghosted or abandoned or disap-
peared again in the act of dealing with the haunting” (2011, 3).
From the point of view that many of apartheid’s survivors have ancestors who
were profoundly victimised by apartheid without having received any form of com-
pensation (and I am obviously not restricting the term to monetary forms of com-
pensation), the spectre of reparation makes the memory of these ancestors a critical
part of its business. Edwards et al. (2009, 3) go on to account how, in African indig-
enous belief systems, the ancestors are thought to preside over the living in such a
way that, unless appropriate rituals are performed, the living will remain vulner-
able to ancestral discontent that can cause profound disruption and misfortune in
life. As such, the ancestors play a critical role in the everyday lives of the living
since they not only take a “lively interest” (3) in these descendant lives, but are
indeed thought to shape these lives in profound and indubitable ways. Accordingly,
questions of intergenerational transmission of trauma as they are posed in psychoa-
nalysis have clear resonance with African forms of cultural production and inherit-
ance. The African version of ontology captured in ubuntu understands deeply that
the traumatic experiences of one generation can slip into the bloodstream of its
descendants and there wreak havoc if left untreated—an insight long recognised by
psychoanalysis as inter- or transgenerational transmission.
It is thus no surprise that Edwards et al. (2009, 5) connect the profound role
of the ancestors in African indigenous belief directly to psychoanalytic notions
like the “family unconscious” and Jung’s collective unconscious (5). In this they
suggest a direct relation between African indigenous belief and the way in which
psychoanalysis approaches the question of inheritance and transmission. One of
the most directly resonating instances of this connection can be found in Nicolas
Rand’s (1994, 167)—the editor of Abraham and Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel
Vol I—contention that Abraham’s concept of the phantom calls for an understand-
ing of psychoanalysis as a “cult of ancestors” and a form of “honoring the dead
with rightful burial.” He continues:

in the psychoanalytic realm, laying the dead to rest and cultivating our ances-
tors implies uncovering their shameful secrets, understanding their nameless
and undisclosed suffering. We should engage in this unveiling and under-
standing of the former existence of the dead not because we may want to
appease them or prevent them from perpetrating their nocturnal pranks, but
because, unsuspected, the dead continue to lead a devastating psychic half-
life in us.
(Rand 1994, 167)

Thus, while African indigenous belief may hold on to the possibility of “appeas-
ing” the ancestors, it still nonetheless finds common ground with psychoanaly-
sis in the belief that we should make an effort to understand the nameless and
20 Introduction

undisclosed suffering of the dead because the ancestors can lead and do lead “a
devastating psychic half-life in us.” Consorting with the spectre of reparation as
is suggested in this book is thus also an effort to come to terms with the ways in
which the ancestral continues to live its life within the living present in the form of
a haunting that seems to know no end, precisely because of the present’s stubborn
refusal productively to confront the spectre of reparation.
Finally on this score, I think it is worth noting the resonances between, on the
one hand, the African indigenous version of ontology as represented in ubuntu and,
on the other, the way in which Lacan accounts ontologically for the formation of
the subject in psychoanalysis. My proposition in this regard is that in both we find
the idea of haunting at work in a foundational sense. As Louis Althusser master-
fully explained in 1969, there is no way in which it can be denied that for Lacan
the subject is constituted by the Other from the very moment of its birth. Althusser
(1969, 59) refers in this regard to the “two great moments” of “transition”—the

the dual pre-Oedipal intercourse, in which the child, concerned with nothing
but one alterego, the mother, who punctuates its life by her presence (da!)
and absence (fort!) lives this dual intercourse in the mode of the imaginary
fascination of the ego, being itself that other, any other, every other, all the
others of primary narcissistic identification;

and the

Oedipal moment, in which a ternary structure emerges against the back-

ground of the dual structure, when the third (the father) intrudes on the
imaginary satisfaction of dual fascination, overthrows its economy, destroys
its fascinations, and introduces the child to what Lacan calls the Symbolic
Order, the order of objectifying language that will finally allow him to say: I,
you, he, she or it, that will therefore allow the small child to situate itself as
a human child in a world of adult thirds.

Althusser argues that Lacan’s crucial discovery was that the two moments are
directed by one single law—the law of the symbolic, formally correlated to lan-
guage. “Lacan demonstrates the effectiveness of the Order, the Law,” Althusser
(1969, 60–61) writes, “that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before
his birth, and seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and rôle, and
hence his fixed destination.” Althusser (61) calls this symbolic order of Lacan’s
the Law of Culture, and he refers to it as the “discourse of the Other, of the great
Third.”
There can thus be no question about the fact that Lacan constitutes the subject in
the midst of intersubjectivity. The resonance with the ontology of ubuntu is, in fact,
crystal clear, for in both Lacan and ubuntu there is no way in which subjectivity can
be without being with others—a person becomes a person because of or in relation
to others. In both ubuntu and in Lacan the idea of the ego as a bounded entity is
a fiction—the ego is constantly being formed and reformed by the intersubjective
 Introduction 21

agency of the Other. The path back to spectrality here is not difficult to discern, for
Lacan’s proposition that the subject is lack, is nothing but a formalised statement
that the subject is forever constituted as haunted not only by the fantasmatic mem-
ory sense of a primal unity that it will forever attempt to recuperate in its relations
of desire but also simply because the subject is constantly haunted by the Other of
the symbolic order itself. In ubuntu a similar fantasy of plenitude and fullness/com-
pletion undergirds the relation with the ancestors in that harmony and unity with
them is believed to be one of, if not the major, purpose of life. As Ramose (2001)
simply remarks: “Justice is determined by the supernatural forces. Their determi-
nation seeks to restore harmony and promote the maintenance of peace. Justice as
the restoration of equilibrium is a central element of the ubuntu philosophy of law.”

Reparation in the ontology of lack

As must be clear by now, it is not just this or that ghost, this or that spectrality and
this or that spectre (in other words, spectrality in general), that this book is inter-
ested to explore and affirm—it is specifically and discretely the spectre of repa-
ration. For this reason, engagement with the work of Melanie Klein—the major
psychoanalytic theorist of reparation in the twentieth century—is essential. Klein
(1975, 306) wrote of reparation in the context of an infant’s “first object of love
and hate – his mother.” Reparation is thus from the start a matter of the kind of
intersubjectivity with which I concluded in the previous section. Klein subscribed
to two primary psychic positions in relation to the young infant’s development:
The paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The paranoid-schizoid
position corresponds to a period during early infancy in which the infant is beset by
paranoid anxiety as regards the object of its gratification, the breast, and by a form
of splitting of the breast into a good object and a bad object. Hannah Segal (1964,
25) explains that the early infant is from birth exposed to anxiety that arises out of
the polarity of the life instinct and the death instinct. The way in which the early
ego deals with the anxiety provoked by the death instinct is by deflecting it—the
“ego splits itself and projects that part of itself which contains the death instinct
outwards into the original external object—the breast” (25). In this way, the breast
becomes an object associated in the child’s mind with the “fear of a persecutor”
(25). The part of the death instinct that remains in the ego is converted into aggres-
sion against the bad breast. At the same time, the life instinct, or libido, is projected
outwards onto the very same object but now viewed/split off in its ideal manifesta-
tion—as the object that is associated with the preservation of the life instinct. Thus,
a dual relation of splitting in relation to the breast occurs in that it is split between
the ideal breast and the persecutory one (26). Splitting is accordingly a fundamen-
tal feature of the paranoid-schizoid position.
Segal (1964, 37) argues that in order to transition out of the paranoid-schizoid
position into the next position, the depressive position, “the necessary precondi-
tion is that there should be a predominance of good over bad experiences.” When
there is such a predominance of good over bad, the ego comes to believe in the
“prevalence of the ideal object over the persecutory objects” (37) and accordingly
22 Introduction

also in the prevalence of the life instinct over the death instinct. It is the repeated
identification of the ego with the ideal breast which enables it to cope better with
anxieties “without recourse to violent mechanisms of defence” (37). Thus, where
there is a greater flow of libido (i.e. greater energy expended in relation to the
ideal breast), “the fear of the persecutor lessens and the splitting between ideal
and persecutory objects lessens as well”. As the splitting lessens, the ego develops
a greater ability to tolerate its own aggression, to “feel it as a part of itself” (37).
The depressive position, Klein argued, is that phase of development “in which
the infant recognizes a whole object and relates himself to this object” (68). The
whole object relationship is to be contrasted with the split object relationship of the
paranoid-schizoid position, especially because the infant recognises not only his
mother and father as whole objects in this position but also himself: “He begins to
see that his good and bad experiences do not proceed from a good and a bad breast
or mother, but from the same mother who is the source of good and bad alike” (68).
A very important change occurs as regards the psychopathology of the depres-
sive position vis-à-vis the paranoid-schizoid position: In the paranoid-schizoid
position the major anxiety that the infant defends against is the anxiety that his
ego will be consumed by the bad persecutory object; in the depressive position the
main anxiety is that his own destructive impulses “have destroyed or will destroy,
the object that he loves and totally depends on” (69). In addition, feelings unknown
in the paranoid-schizoid position result as a response to this shift in the primary
anxiety. Segal mentions that mourning and “pining for” the good object felt as
lost and destroyed, as well as a feeling of guilt for having destroyed the good
object with her own destructive impulses, pervade this position in psychic devel-
opment. The position is called “depressive,” precisely because at the height of the
affective experience in this stage, lies a depressive despair: The infant remembers
that she has loved and still loves her mother, but she feels that she has devoured
or destroyed her so that she is no longer a part of the external world. This paves
the way for what Klein designated as reparation. “The experience of depression,”
Segal writes, “mobilizes in the infant the wish to repair his destroyed object or
objects” (72).
In her essay on love, guilt and reparation, Klein (1975) begins by explaining
that the initial expression of a child’s sexuality is given in feelings of love for the
mother when the mother is “satisfying his need for nourishment,” when the mother
functions as the “good breast” (307) of the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein then
goes on to suggest that when the baby’s desires are not gratified, hatred and feel-
ings of aggression are aroused and he becomes “dominated by the impulses to
destroy the very person who is the object of all his desires” (307)—the important
point here being that the infant has moved on from the paranoid-schizoid position
of splitting and thus experiences this reaction in relation to the mother as his whole
object. Klein then proceeds to argue that the impulses of love and hate towards
the mother as whole object are accompanied by “a kind of mental activity” which
she designates as “the most primitive one”: “phantasy-building” or “imaginative
thinking” (308). “When a baby feels frustrated at the breast,” Klein writes, “in his
phantasies he attacks this breast; but if he is being gratified by the breast, he loves
 Introduction 23

it and has phantasies of a pleasant kind in relation to it” (308). For Klein the most
important feature of the negative phantasy, which she equates to a death-wish, is
that “the baby feels that what he desires in his phantasies has really taken place”
(308, emphasis added). As a response, the infant in a sense has no other choice
but to construct a phantasy that Klein designates as of the “omnipotent” kind—a
phantasy “that he is putting the bits together again and repairing” the mother. Klein
extrapolates out of this rendering of things the idea that it is always the case that
alongside the phantasy of destruction there is a desire to make good, to “put right
loved people who in phantasy have been harmed or destroyed” (311).
Moreover, for Klein (1975) identification with the loved person who has been
destroyed in phantasy is a precondition of the ability to make reparation. In this
regard, Segal makes the important point that the pain of mourning in the depressive
position and the drive to make reparation constitute the mainsprings of creativity
and sublimation (75), thus alluding to a profound linkage between empathy and
reparative creative activity. I will explore this link further in Chapter 6 when I pro-
pose reparative citizenship as an ethic of poetic justice that can begin to come to
terms with the spectres of reparation in South Africa. While Klein wrote in numer-
ous instances of the overcoming of the depressive position, Segal (1964) writes
that the depressive position never fully leaves us, is “never fully worked through,”
and the “anxieties pertaining to ambivalence and guilt, as well as situations of loss,
which reawaken depressive experiences, are always with us” (80). This suggests
that in Klein mourning and reparation in the form of sublimating creative activity
not only constitute something of a blueprint for the adult life of the individual but
also find application in contexts seemingly far removed from the parent–child rela-
tionship in which it was first conceived.2
We are now in a position to associate Kleinian reparation with the ontology of
the subject as lack in Lacan. In this regard, the book length conversation between
Amy Allen and Mari Ruti (2019) has become a ground-breaking resource. The
first chapter of Allen and Ruti’s book revolves around the Kleinian and Lacanian
views of subjectivity. Ruti, in this conversation, makes the important point that for
Lacan the object (in the form of das Ding) is primary in subject formation, similar
to the way in which the object (first as split breast and then as a whole mother) is
primary in Klein’s account of subject formation. Ruti writes that the subject comes
to be for Lacan through the fantasy of the essential loss of das Ding in the acqui-
sition of language (7). In both Klein and Lacan, as Allen and Ruti point out, it is
only in so far as a loss in adult life reactivates in some way the primary loss of the
object/das Ding that it is experienced as a loss in the first place (7). Ruti writes that
the Lacanian subject is “intrinsically melancholic” because it is “born from a loss
that can never be redeemed for the simple reason that it only exists as a retroactive
fantasy” (8). The Lacanian subject, as a subject of lack, is forever destined to turn
to the outside world, other people, “to plug the hole left by the loss of the Thing”
(14). Ruti then says that for her this constant burden of having to work through loss
in Lacan is similar to the way in which Klein thinks of subjecthood as a continu-
ous working through the depressive position (8), through reparation. In Klein, the
loss of the object is as fantasmatic as it is in Lacan and the effort to restore this loss
24 Introduction

through reparation is, similarly, a matter of phantasy. It thus cannot admit of any
doubt that both the Kleinian and the Lacanian subject are subjects that are, in one
or another sense, haunted by reparation. Lacan, of course, does not employ Klein’s
terminology, but it cannot be discounted that the Lacanian subject’s eternal and
tragic movement from one objet petit a to another has similar motivations at its
base as the Kleinian drive to reparation—in both, the attempt exists as an attempt
to overcome loss through the fantasised restoration of an itself imagined/fantasised
loss of an original plenitude.
In the wake of Klein’s work there have been many interventions that have
extended Kleinianism to politics, making for a distinct psychoanalytic understand-
ing of a wide array of contemporary political questions (see, for instance, Rose
1993). Ruti and Allen too devote the concluding chapter of their book to poli-
tics. Allen here argues that Klein’s account of reparation “offers possibilities for
rethinking justice in the context of the violent tendencies of contemporary social
and political life” (Allen and Ruti 2019, 192). Ruti, for her part, responds by say-
ing that it seems as if “the paranoid-schizoid position has become the norm for our
political landscape” (193), and she argues that if reparation is an always tenuous
attempt to counter the destructiveness of the death drive, then we are “spectacularly
failing at this attempt” (193). Both Allen and Ruti see the destructive dynamics
of the paranoid-schizoid position at work on the contemporary political scene in
everything from “the dynamics of splitting and demonization at work in defining
groups of immigrants or refugees as outside the existing social and political order”
(192) to the “politics of defensiveness” (196) that characterise the fundamentalism
of ISIS and Donald Trump’s ability to rally people around the notion of “returning
America to ‘real’ Americans by keeping out all intruders” (196). To this we could
add the extremely alarming way in which political authority in South Africa have
criminalised poverty in the post-apartheid era, primarily by deploying laws and
bylaws to forcibly remove the poor from areas demarcated for “development” or
identified as urban land.
Ruti asks Allen about the potential of reparation if we accept that the subject
starts out from aggression and destructiveness. Allen responds by invoking Judith
Butler’s discussion of nonviolent ethics. She says that she finds Butler’s work
rewarding precisely because it does not shy away from the subject’s negativity.
Butler finds in Klein a way of thinking an ethical orientation compatible with and
emerging out of destructiveness (Allen and Ruti 2019, 194). According to Butler,
we

cannot understand the reparative trajectory of identification without first

understanding the way that sympathetic identification, according to Klein,
is wrought from efforts to replay and reverse scenes of loss, deprivation, and
the kind of hatred that follows from nonnegotiable dependency.
(194)

Allen argues that the primary object relation in Klein is characterised by ambiv-
alence: “destructiveness gives rise to guilt and reparation” (194). When, in the
 Introduction 25

depressive position, the subject realises that the object it hates is also the very object
that it loves, it generates guilt and the drive to make reparation from within—these
do not have to be imposed by strict moral laws from without. Furthermore, says
Allen relying on Butler, when the subject engages in reparative acts, she doesn’t
disavow her destructiveness and aggression, but rather seeks to “reverse its damag-
ing effects”: “It is not that destructiveness converts into repair, but that I repair even
as I am driven with destructiveness, or precisely because I am so driven” (195).
Ruti proceeds to make a point via the work of Noëlle McAfee that has a direct
bearing on the concerns of this book, namely the relationship between reparation
and the work of mourning. Ruti says that at the core of McAfee’s work is an argu-
ment that deliberative politics cannot do without affect: It demands “an affective
process that allows participants to collectively mourn the loss of ideal arrange-
ments and definitive resolutions” (Allen and Ruti 2019, 195–196). Without this
capacity to mourn, Ruti argues, politics easily turns into a kind of “adolescent
fundamentalist faith in ideality” (196) that leads to an inability to compromise,
a lack of empathy and an intolerance for less-than-perfect solutions. Ruti links
the inability to mourn back to the paranoid-schizoid position by saying that if we
are denied the capacity to mourn, we necessarily revert back to this position “so
that one categorically splits the world into good and bad components, projects all
the badness to the (threatening) other, and idealizes one’s own position” (196). It
seems clear then that the depressive position and the reparation that is available in
it are premised on the subject’s ability to mourn—in fact, in both Ruti and Allen
mourning becomes the modality of the depressive position, and in this way we can
understand that reparation is a critical element of the work of mourning. To posit
reparation as a critical component of the work of mourning also leads us out of the
ethical danger that Ruti identifies, namely that an emphasis on mourning as such
may too easily lead to a position where we think that as long as we mourn the lot of
victims, we have done our ethical and political duty (196). If reparation is situated
as the critical instalment in mourning, mourning can be thought of as carrying a
potential for concrete interventions that go beyond mere acknowledgement.
In the South African context, Mark Sanders (2007) has done pioneering work
in terms of relating reparation as a political question in South Africa to the psy-
choanalysis of reparation as we find it in Klein. Sanders begins by drawing atten-
tion to the fact that in Klein reparation is embedded in phantasy and that Klein is
interested in the effect of reparation on the agent thereof. He then makes the point
that when the South African state occupies at the same time the place of perpetra-
tors of human rights violations on the one hand, and the “place” of capital, on the
other hand (as it does in the aftermath of the TRC), the making of reparations on
behalf of both perpetrators and the holders of capital “can still satisfy a phantasy
of reparation” (128). Sanders argues that the virtual maker of reparations (here, the
South African state as a proxy) “provides the conditions of possibility for actual
instances of reparations, just as ‘symbolic’ reparation provides for material repa-
rations” (129). He then writes that the question is whether “by universalizing the
imperative – all South Africans must contribute (as Mbeki said in his 2003 speech)
– the act of making reparation is transferred across the polity, making the phantasy
26 Introduction

a shared one” (129). For Sanders, Klein’s dynamics of reparation as set out above
in fact represent the makings of ethical agency in general, and this dynamic always
presupposes that violence has been done to the object (130). It is thus conceivable
that “love, or something like love can be achieved through the making of repara-
tion” (130). Like Ruti and Allen, Sanders is interested in the relationship between
mourning and reparation in Klein. Like these authors, Sanders also argues that
reparation is a component of mourning in the sense that reparation is a mourning in
a general sense: “if there is a Kleinian ethics – of reparation, responsibility – then
it is strongly linked to the work of mourning” (133).
Coming back to South Africa, Sanders (2007) writes that the agent of reparation
“is commonly conceived as a perpetrator of the violation” (133). “But the agent is
also the mourner” (134), Sanders writes. What is crucial, however, is that the repar-
ative agency of the agent of reparation must, if we are to stay true to Klein, follow
from a phantasy of destruction (134). Sanders carefully describes the numerous
pathological responses to reparation that can result from such a phantasy (such as
Dan Roodt’s grossly misguided argument that “apartheid included a significant
number of positive elements” (134)) but argues that “it is possible to argue for an
ethics that […] relies upon phantasmatic perpetratorship” (134). Here, the phantasy
of destruction and the impulse to make good is “made available to anyone” (134):
“[w]hatever the facts […] someone has to make good; in the system we have, the
only way one can is to assume – virtually, phantasmatically – the place of the per-
petrator of the worst deeds” (134).
Sanders’s work, then, makes the point that for reparation to take place a perpe-
tratorship must be stepped into, has to be assumed and worn like a phantasmatic
or virtual cloak, just as the South African state assumes responsibility for repara-
tion by acting as a proxy for both perpetrator and capital or capital as perpetrator.
However, the assumption of this phantasmatic perpetratorship exposes the agent of
reparation to a certain endlessness: It is imperative that reparation be made, while
at the same time such reparation can never be enough. This is why Sanders distin-
guishes between reparation on the one hand and reparations on the other—however
many reparations are made, they can only ever approximate, without fulfilling,
the general obligation to make reparation. In this way reparation is similar to the
Derridean idea of justice as an aporia, as I have explained above. Sanders con-
cludes that embarking on a course of reparation may foster bonds of what he calls
“responsibility-in-complicity” (145). He is, however, careful to draw out the pos-
sibility of a negative reaction (“retribution,” “rivalry” (145)) because of owning up
to past misdeeds, even in this phantasmatic way, and he also insists that the attempt
at, or offer of, reparation “involves staging a plea or prayer for a counter-response”
(146). Sanders writes that this need for a counter-response renders the agent of
reparation precarious—for the agent can never know whether the predicament that
they have explicated will draw forth “the countersignature of the other” (146).
Such never-knowing, Sanders concludes, “is also a condition of existence” (146).
This conclusion neatly returns us to the idea of a lack in being and a lack in
having that lies at the heart of this book. Reparation, no matter how extensive,
no matter how elaborate, can never finally cover up the lack in being or the lack
 Introduction 27

of having—that is why I insist on speaking of reparation as a spectre. Instead of

this serving as an alibi to stay out of reparation, Sanders suggests on the contrary
that the realisation of the precarity of (the agent of) reparation must call us to vigi-
lance “when terms and limits are set for actual reparations” (145). Instead, then,
the realisation that reparation is only ever incomplete and itself lacking calls us to
an infinite responsibility that allows no form of good conscience: The work that
reparation must do always remains to be done, and we are always behind when it
comes to reparation.
The drawing out of an infinite responsibility in relation to reparation via the work
of Melanie Klein is a far cry from the way in which reparation was approached in
the aftermath of the TRC. While the obligation to make reparation was placed as a
general obligation on all South Africans, the way in which the post-apartheid state
limited and attempted to avoid its obligation to make reparations—with arguments,
for instance, that the struggle was not about money—belied this very general obli-
gation to make reparation. Instead of acknowledging its own infinite obligation
to make reparation, the South African state attempted—cynically so—to justify
its making of severely limited (and widely regarded as inadequate) reparations. It
thereby undercut the very general obligation to make reparation which it was sup-
posedly proposing. However, the fact that the state failed and is failing in its obliga-
tion to make reparation does not absolve the beneficiaries of apartheid from their
obligation to make reparation (Mamdani 2016, 187). As I will propose in Chapter 4,
capital or big business especially had and still has an enormous responsibility-in-
complicity in this regard. The fact that the state has assumed a proxy status in rela-
tion to capital at the same time as it has grossly failed to assume the responsibilities
of such a proxy status shifts the obligation to make reparation back to where it first
originated—in the big business that aided and abetted the apartheid legal order.
Moreover, the fact that the state failed or is failing the victims and survivors of
apartheid when it comes to reparation should not mute or paralyse the ongoing call
to make reparation via the state. This is also why I will propose in Chapter 4 that
there remain ways and means of legally holding the beneficiaries of apartheid to
account for reparation. This is only one way in which the machinery of the state can
be engaged via the courts to compel reparations from those who do not acknowl-
edge their perpetratorship. An obvious alternative route is through ongoing advo-
cacy through which the state may come to alter its intractable stance in relation
to the making of reparation. What I think is needed in South Africa is not simply
the general responsibility for reparation based on a phantasmatic perpetratorship
(although the ethic of reparative citizenship that I will argue for in Chapter 6 draws
much of its inspiration from this concept) but also a coercive mechanism to compel
reparations from those who wish to avoid it or even from those who do not know
how to make it.
In his contemplation of the aporia of justice, Derrida (1990, 967) writes of the
necessity to judge, to decide in the “night of non-knowledge and non-rule” it is
true, but to decide nonetheless. The coercion in relation to reparation that I will
argue for here is strictly derived from the idea of the general obligation to make
reparation as that obligation resides in a common perpetratorship. Coercion is thus
28 Introduction

not opposed to the idea of a general perpetratorship nor to the voluntarism that
seems to be implicit in Sanders’ discussion of it. Rather, coercion is a way in which
such general perpetratorship can be concretised and, where appropriate, individu-
alised. Coercion, in other words, is itself a crossing of the aporia of reparation, a
move from reparation to reparations. It is precisely because the obligation to make
reparation is infinite that it can be judged and enforced by the law in concrete situ-
ations. South African courts have, in many cases where it is faced with the task
of awarding damages, especially non-patrimonial damages, emphasised that it is
an impossible task to attach monetary value to the dignity of life. As the Supreme
Court of Appeal recently remarked in the Komape case (2020, para 56):

Attempting to determine an adequate solatium for the appellants’ suffering

is, of course, a daunting task as no monetary compensation can ever make up
for their loss. Some guidance may be obtained by having regard to awards in
previous cases but comparisons are always odious, particularly as the facts in
different cases are never, if ever, directly comparable. […] At the end of the
day, a court is called upon to exercise its discretion to determine an amount
which it feels is fair and reasonable to both parties, given the particular cir-
cumstances of the case in question.

Thus, while it is an impossible task to award a “solatium,” our courts have rec-
ognised that they nonetheless have the responsibility to do so and a discretion to
make a reward that is fair and reasonable. Our courts have thus struggled for many
years with the same kind of agony that would be attendant on the award of a repa-
ration claim. In the end, justice, as Derrida also recognised, requires the making
of a decision, requires judgment; without decision there would be no justice. I
think, moreover, that the adjudication of reparation claims should be regarded as
an important, indeed critical, feature of transformative constitutionalism as it has
been described by Klare (1998, 150): “an enterprise of inducing large-scale social
change through nonviolent political processes grounded in law.” Surely, it cannot
be doubted that reparation claims and their payment can make a monumental con-
tribution towards the induction of the kind of “large-scale social change” that is so
necessary in South Africa.
If we accept that apartheid as a crime against humanity is imprescriptible, we can
posit an alignment of the aporia of reparation with the imprescriptibility of apart-
heid as a crime against humanity, as follows: Because apartheid is imprescriptible,
the reparation to be made in relation to it can never be fully made, no reparation
will erase the imprescriptibility of the crime. Yet at the same time, it is precisely
because the crime is imprescriptible that reparation in relation to it remains due
as a matter of practice and of policy. In short, it is the very imprescriptibility of
apartheid that grounds the obligation to ceaselessly cross the aporia of reparation.
Coercion in relation to reparation in no way undermines the Kleinian idea that
reparation is embedded in phantasy. If anything, coercion in relation to reparation
can function as a critical mechanism through which the phantasy of reparation can
not only be facilitated by a figuration of the big Other but also traversed. For this
 Introduction 29

reason, I will argue in the Conclusion of this book for the discourse of the analyst
in post-apartheid politics, conceived as a discourse of decolonisation. Indeed, I
will argue that decolonisation is precisely the figuration of reparation most appro-
priate to the postcolony, on the condition that we understand decolonisation as a
disenclosure as Achille Mbembe (2021, 42–89) has argued. I will propose that
such disenclosure of the subject of reparation is one of the conditions of possibil-
ity of decolonisation in the postcolony. As such, I will insist that the spectres of
reparation that the TRC left us with can be creatively and productively consorted
with once we become prepared to undergo the discursive shift in the postcolony on
which Lacan’s discourse of the analyst, as a revolutionary discourse, is premised.

Notes
1 I am not unaware of the various criticisms of Specters of Marx to the effect that Derrida’s
hauntology in fact erases any kind of revolutionary horizon for politics in the twenty-
first century (see in this regard especially Lewis 1996, Ahmad 1994 and Spivak 1995).
To the extent that Derrida does so in Specters of Marx, I disagree—but even if these
authors’ various criticisms are valid, that does not mean that the validity of hauntology
as an approach to politics in the new millennium is thereby rendered defunct. Moreover,
I do not think that Derrida would not have contemplated that the spectre and haunting
itself may very well have revolutionary consequences—that societies may still rise up
by force of their hauntings. Derrida’s emphasis on the undecidability and incalculability
of the spectral seems to suggest otherwise. It is especially in the context of Derrida’s
association of the spectral with the incalculable future-to-come of justice and democ-
racy that enough room, in my opinion, is created for doubting that Derrida completely
exorcised the spectre of revolution in Specters of Marx. Consider, for instance, the fol-
lowing passages: “at the extremity of the extreme today, there would thus be announced
the future of what comes. More than ever, for the future-to-come can announce itself as
such and in its purity only on the basis of a past end: beyond, if that’s possible, the last
extremity. If that’s possible, if there is any future, but how can one suspend such a ques-
tion or deprive oneself of such a reserve without concluding in advance, without reduc-
ing in advance both the future and its chance? Without totalizing in advance?” (1994,
37) and “At bottom, the spectre is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only
as that which could come or come back” (1994, 39). It seems to me that it does not take
a great leap of hermeneutic audacity to recognise the reference to “beyond […] the last
extremity” as a reference to revolution and the reference to “the spectre is the future”
that “could come or come back” as a reference to a resuscitation of the revolutionary
tradition.
2 “[A]nything that is felt to give out goodness and beauty and that calls forth pleasure,
and satisfaction, in the physical or in the wider sense, can in the unconscious mind take
the place of this ever-bountiful breast,” Klein (1975, 333) writes. She further argues that
feelings of aggression and the drive to make reparation “can be transferred to another
sphere, far away from the original person” (334). Klein then herself discusses the trans-
position of reparation to the sphere of politics when she mentions the cruel aggression
against “native populations” displayed by colonisers (334). Some of the early aggressive
phantasies of the infant, she writes, “were expressed in reality by the attitude towards the
natives” (334). She then goes on controversially to suggest that the reparation phantasy
found its equivalent in the colonial situation through the repopulating of the conquered
country with people of the colonisers’ own nationality. This remark has caused David
Eng (2012, 159) to argue that “psychic theories of reparation” can function “as an exten-
sion of aggression and violence rather than as a check against their negative capacities”
30 Introduction

(175). Eng argues that Klein in fact places here “the possibility of [reparation as] an
experimental, ethical practice” in “explicit crisis” (176). “In this particular scenario,”
Eng writes, “the European colonizer cannot be aligned with the helpless infant, as Klein
tries to do. The colonizer is, in fact, less the powerless infant than the powerful mother,
and his aggression against native populations brings about neither a state of heightened
anxiety nor the amelioration of violence toward the native other” (177). This, then, must
beg the question whether what Klein describes as a reparation phantasy is in fact that at
all. Eng argues that the example constitutes a form of splitting of reparation itself into,
on the one hand, the extension of violence towards the natives and, on the other, the
preservation of life and love for the self-same. For Eng this means that Klein’s passage
“starkly illustrates reparation as a process that is more accurately characterized by the
unequal distribution of love and hate across disparate populations and peoples consti-
tuted through this process as human and inhuman” (179). The “political unconscious
of reparation” is, thus, “a hidden history of colonialism and race” (179). For my part,
I think that it is quite clear that what Klein is really describing is a reaction formation
of the paranoid-schizoid position, because in the phantasy the good and the bad objects
are split—natives are “bad,” while the self-same is regarded as “good.” I thus think that
Klein seriously misidentifies and misdirects her own theory of reparation in the exam-
ple—if the phantasy was really congruent with the depressive position and thus repara-
tive, it would have been precisely directed at the natives as whole “objects” that are
both good and bad; reparation would have been undertaken in relation to them and not
in relation to self-same others. What this means is that extreme vigilance must prevail
when we seek to identify reparative interventions in politics, particularly in the colonial/
postcolonial situation, for what the example illustrates is how the theorist herself easily
misidentified as reparation something which actually arises out of the paranoid-schizoid
position.

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2 The Ghost in the “Impossible Machine”
Reparation and the Biopolitics of Transition

Introduction: Indistinction
It is, by now, a common place to assert that the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a creature (of statute) born of crisis. The
state of near civil war in South Africa that prevailed in the immediate period before
the TRC began its work is often selected as the justification for the assertion that
the TRC was precipitated by a crisis. There are, of course, also the circumstances
that prevailed in the midst of the drafting of the Interim Constitution of 1993,
when the security forces of the outgoing apartheid government threatened that
they would not secure the first democratic elections if there was no mechanism in
the Interim Constitution to protect them from prosecution by the new order. Then
there is the assertion that apartheid was as such a prolonged situation of crisis if
not a full-fledged state of exception. Whether one takes the more general circum-
stances of a near civil war as the point of departure, or the more specific situation
of security forces fearing retaliation, or the point of view that apartheid rule was
essentially rule in a state of exception, the conclusion that is arrived at is that the
TRC was intended to play a critical role in the restoration of a state of norm(alcy).
When, moreover, one considers that the TRC was born out of the law that was
the Interim Constitution and that that Constitution installed the rule of law for the
first time properly in South Africa, then one is drawn to surmise that the TRC was
considered to be a critical component and condition of possibility of the rule of law
taking root as the norm.
Yet, the TRC’s central mechanism—amnesty—posed and continues to pose a
challenge to any clear distinction between norm and exception (or crisis) in the
birth of the new South Africa, for amnesty seemed to undermine the rule of law at
the very moment that it was “properly” inaugurated. Much ink has been spilled on
this question, and many justifications and understandings offered to explain how
the amnesty of the TRC fits with the rule of law. This fit or no fit was essentially
the question faced by the Constitutional Court in the Azapo (1996) case, where
the court concluded that the amnesty referred to in the epilogue of the Interim
Constitution internally limited that Constitution’s protection of the fundamental
right to access to the courts. But if that is the case, then it means that an exception
was built into the very heart of the norm at the foundation of the new South Africa.
It means that exception intermingles with the norm at the very moment of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003290278-2
34 The Ghost in the “Impossible Machine”

Constitution. But is this intermingling of the norm with exception simply a result
of expediency, a consequence of the mess that South Africa was in at the end of the
1980s? Or is it that norm and exception share a much more general and intimate
conceptual history such that their intermingling can be attributed to far more than
merely a solution grounded in expediency?
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) pro-
vides, as far as the history of political philosophy from ancient to modern is con-
cerned, a definitive answer. From the ancients, Agamben draws the idea that a
certain politicisation is already at work in Aristotle’s foundational definition of
political life. As soon as Aristotle distinguishes—in the course of formulating that
definition—between political life (bios politikos) and bare life (zoē), the exception
arises in the form of an included exclusion. Agamben calls this “the aporia that
lies at the foundation of Western politics” (13). In other words, politics constitutes
itself in the West as a politics of bare life and political life. If this is the case, then
the political order carries the exception in its heart and from its birth. Agamben
then goes on to argue that in the modern era “[b]are life remains included in politics
in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through
an exclusion” (13). And as such, the exception constitutes “the hidden foundation”
on which the entire political and juridical system is predicated (9). Agamben goes
as far as claiming that the inscription of bare life into “the sphere of the polis” (10)
“constitutes the decisive event of modernity” and goes on to assert that the cen-
tral characteristic of modern politics is the extent to which the ancient distinction
between bare life and political life collapses into a “real zone of indistinction” (4),
to the point that any and all attempts still to wrench difference out of their perennial
encounter have become utterly futile. The truth seems to be that “indistinction” has
become an especially accurate signifier to characterise the “real zone,” or zone of
the Real,1 today.
Can this description of the general socio-political state of affairs today, be
applied to the more specific question of the postmodern juridical order that South
Africa founded at the beginning of the 1990s? I argue in this chapter that Agamben
would certainly answer that question in the affirmative. At the very moment when
Agamben (1998, 4) writes that “the exception is the originary form of law,” he
plunges his discourse into the treacherous water of indistinction. It is the extraor-
dinary meditation on the relation between law and politics that follows from
tirelessly returning to the assertion that the very “form of law” originates in the
exception that sets Agamben’s analysis in Homo Sacer apart from earlier (juridico-
institutional) approaches to the problem of power—notably, Michel Foucault’s.
To admit today that it is not only that the norm as law has entered into the crisis
of exception but also that the very distinction between the norm and the exception
has entered into an irrevocable crisis that has always been present within that dis-
tinction as its potentiality for a radical auto-immunity, is, however, not to dismiss
out of hand the achievements of modern democracy. But it is, to paraphrase Johan
van der Walt (2005, 2) (citing Heidegger), to consider the crisis of democratic law
and politics as the “capacity for an incapacity.” And it is also as Agamben (1998,
10) writes, to try to understand why, when contemporary democracy seems to have
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