Abstract
The policing of checkpoints demands a commitment from the soldier. These commitments are realized, as Robert Cover says of legal judgments, in the flesh of those subject to the policing and of those who police. Such commitments are sometimes difficult to maintain in the face of arbitrary policies and even arbitrary re-locations of checkpoints and borders. Obedience is required, but obedience is not simply an act of acceptance. This article employs a psychoanalytic lens and the work of animation theory to consider how obedience is legitimated in the minds of those who police borders and how practices of humiliation toward civilians at the borders function both to display the uncertainties about the regime’s legitimacy, and to aggressively depict this legitimacy in the flesh of those subject to the borders. This depiction, I argue, employs understandings of time, identity and the question, and these are then employed as techniques of humiliation. These techniques evoke a rhetorical landscape located somewhere between Freud’s discussion of the work of jokes and Scarry’s discussion of torture; between these two points is the promise of a legal world where there are only angels and devils and where these figures are animated in the flesh of both civilian and soldier.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In the context of Australia there is perhaps a more aggressive insistence of jurisdictional madness because of the slip between land and jurisdiction that was simply slid over in the years after the invasion of the British. See Dorsett and McVeigh (2012).
Breaking the Silence consists of video testimonies of soldiers who are or were part of the Israeli Defense Force. Along with the testimonies, it is also a broader project which has the stated aim to ‘collect and publish testimonies from soldiers who, like us, have served in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since September 2000, and hold lectures, house meetings, and other public events which bring to light the reality in the Territories through the voice of former combatants’. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/organization.
Peter Rush has made a similar, although parallel point in relation to the Mabo (2) judgment in Australia. See Rush (2005, pp. 753–766).
This thinking was prevalent in feminist discussions prior to and even after the publication of works such as Butler (1997) or Grosz (1994). For examples see Kappeler (1995, pp. 38–51); but these logics still permeate the commonsense ideas in the field of peace studies and transitional justice, as exemplified in the underlying presumptions in Minow (1998).
There is an obvious link here to the Lacanian notion of jouissance. Such enjoyment, particularly in its trajectory that seeks the solidity of judgment, as a sanction of ‘knowledge’, lends itself to reading of the objet a status of knowledge that Lacan discusses in Seminar XVII where he refers to ‘the Other’s jouissance as knowledge’. Lacan (2007, p. 14). To link ‘the regime’ here specifically to the Other is beyond the scope of this article, but I have discussed this relationship in depth in 2013.
I have elaborated the concept of arbitrary sovereignty judgment and its unconscious implications in Rogers (2010).
I am drawing here in Lacan’s work on the ‘mirror stage’, Lacan (2006, pp. 75–81).
The stated aim of the project is: ‘bring to light the reality in the Territories through the voice of former combatants’. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/organization. Accessed 21 October 2015.
There are many such accusations levelled at the policies and practices of Israel toward the Palestinians. I will not cite these authors here. I believe they diminish the issues for all. Suffering occurs in this terrain, and there are many stories that are worthy of being told without the need for such analogies.
The work of Melanie Klein on the practice of ‘splitting’ the world into only good and only bad in the condition of the paranoid-schizoid position is relevant here but beyond the scope of this project. For an excellent discussion of this work in the context of practices of violence in Northern Ireland see Cash (2009, pp. 87–107).
Torture, of course, can have this effect also, but in another form. Torture works, sometimes, to induce betrayal—of friends, of community, of cause—and, in some cases the tortured may experience this betrayal as having made a choice to betray rather than experience further pain. Again see Scarry (1985, pp. 27–59).
Interview with the author for the Australian Research Council Project, ‘The Quality of Remorse’, Mr M, 17 October 2013, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
References
Australian Research Council Project. 2013. ‘The Quality of Remorse’, Interview with Mr M, 17 October. Belfast: Northern Ireland.
Breaking the Silence. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/organization. Accessed 21 Oct 2015.
Browning, Christopher. 1992. Ordinary men: Reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution. New York: Harper Collins.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. California: Stanford University Press.
Cash, John. 2009. Negotiating insecurity. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 87–107.
Cavell, Stanley. 1969. Music discomposed. In Must we mean what we say? 180–212. New York: Scribner’s.
Cover, Robert. 1986. Violence and the word. Yale Law Journal 95: 1601–1629.
Cuneen, Chris. 2006. Racism, discrimination and the over-representation of indigenous people in the criminal justice system: Some conceptual and explanatory issues. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 17(3): 329–346.
Dorsett, Shaunagh, and Shaun McVeigh. 2012. Jurisdiction. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (trans: Alan Sheridan). New York: Pantheon.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001 (1905). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, Vol VIII (trans: James Strachey). London: Vintage.
Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2004. A human being died that night: A South African woman confronts the legacy of Apartheid. New York: Mariner Books.
Goodrich, Peter. 1994. Jani anglorum: Signs, symptoms, slips and interpretation. In Politics, postmodernity and critical legal studies: The legality of the contingent, ed. Costas Douzinas, Peter Goodrich, and Yifat Hachamovitch, 107–144. London and New York: Routledge.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Books.
Hatzfeld, Jean. 2005. Machete season: The killers in Rwanda speak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kappeler, Susanne. 1995. The will to violence: The politics of personal behaviour. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (trans: Bruce Fink). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The other side of psychoanalysis: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII (trans: Russell Grigg). London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Langer, Lawrence. 1980. The dilemma of choice in the death camps. Centerpoint 4(Fall): 222–231.
Lavi, Amit. 2015. ‘Keeping things interesting’. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/44688. Accessed 21 Oct 2015.
Milgram, Stanley. 1974. The perils of authority. Harpers Magazine.
Minow, Martha. 1998. Between vengeance and forgiveness: Facing history after genocide and mass violence. Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Na’amen, Oded. 2015. ‘I never knew he was in distress’. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/78162?sg=0. Accessed 21 Oct 2015.
Na’amen, Oded. 2015. ‘You have no judgment’ http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/23852. Accessed 21 Oct 2015.
Pick, Daniel. 2012. The pursuit of the Nazi mind: Hitler, Hess and the analysts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rogers, Juliet. 2010. Torture: A modicum of recognition. Law and Critique 32: 233–245.
Rogers, Juliet. 2013. Law’s cut on the body of human rights: Female circumcision, torture and sacred flesh. London: Routledge.
Rush, Peter. 2005. Surviving common law: Silence and the violence internal to the legal sign. Cardozo Law Review 27(2): 753–766.
Salecl, Renata. 2010. Choice. London: Profile Books.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. Body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sereny, Gitta. 1995. Albert Speer: His battle with truth. London: Picador.
Acknowledgements
This work was made possible with the assistance of Australia Research Council DECRA funding for the project ‘The Quality of Remorse’ DE120102304. My gratitude to the Council and to many colleagues at Kent Law School and Queens University Law School who participated in conversations on early versions of this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rogers, J.B. The Work of Humiliation: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Checkpoints, Borders and the Animation of the Legal World. Law Critique 28, 215–233 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9195-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9195-y