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Professor David Ng
welcome to the New Books Network
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Deep Acharya
welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Deep Acharya, and today I'm joined by Professor David Ng. Richard Fisher, professor of English and professor in the programs in Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature and Theory, and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. We are discussing his new monograph, Reparations on the Human, published by Duke University Press in 2025. The Holocaust and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki invoked in graphic terms the specter of total human destruction. In response, a new international order of reparations and human rights arose from the ashes of World War II. This legal regime sought to subrogate the sovereignty of the nation state in order to defend the sovereignty of the human being. While the Holocaust's history is settled, Nazis were perpetrators and Jews were victims, there remains little historical consensus as to the victims and perpetrators of the atomic bombings. In Reparations on the Human, David investigates a history of reparations across the Trans Pacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates and deliberations concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and transatlantic slavery. He considers how the Cold War Trans Pacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human. Ultimately, the book is a genealogical investigation that moves from land disposition in the Americas to the irradiated histories of the Cold War Trans Pacific, asking a fundamental question, who is considered deserving of repair? David, it is a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the show.
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Professor David Ng
Thank you so much.
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Deep Acharya
Deep before we jump into the specifics, David, about the book, could you tell our audience how you arrived at this particular topic? I mean, what inspired you to pursue the questions you explore in the Reverberations?
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Professor David Ng
The Human Ah, okay. So how did this book come about? I work broadly in law and psychoanalysis. So if you work on Asian immigration, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora, you cannot not study law, in particular immigration law. At the same time, I also work in gender and queer studies, and you cannot not know psychoanalysis in those fields. And so my work broadly, from the very beginning was at the intersection of. Is at the intersection of law and psychoanalysis. Or as I put it in the book, it really wants to think the subject of history, law in relation to the history of the subject, psychoanalysis. And my twist on that really is I want to think the subject of racial history in relation to the racial subject. So I wrote a book prior to this. It's called Racial Melancholy or Racial Dissociation on the social psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Because in one other hat, I also work with a psychoanalyst, Shin Hee Han, and we're very, very interested in the social and psychic lives of Asian Americans. In particular the students and the patients that we encountered in the classroom and the clinic. So in the arts, a lot of the students in my class, my Intro to Asian American Literature and Culture class, they would come out to me not as gay and lesbian, but they would come out to me as transnational adoptees. And they use that language of the closet. I'm coming out as an adoptee. They borrowed the language of stigma and shame. You know, I feel a level of shame. I feel level of disloyalty toward my parents and so shiny. And I started doing a lot of research and writing on transnational adoptees. And there was one case history. So we write case histories and commentaries together. And that particular case history was about a Korean transnational adoptee named Mina. And she totally idealized her white adoptive mother, and she totally hated her Korean birth mother. And, you know, usually it's the opposite. It's like you. You aggress the mother that is actually there. So it's usually you de. Idealize the white adoptive mother. You idealize the birth mother, whom you've never met. But Minnow is the exact opposite. And her. Her polarization of love and hate was so extreme that it sent Shinhee and me back to reading Melanie Klein, right, the primary psychoanalyst of child development and this kind of passionate child who really is split between these positions of love and hate. And so Klein's theory is that, you know, you. You split the object in good, bad, you aggress the bad object, you kill the bad object in your mind, and then suddenly you're like, oh, wow, maybe I've killed the mother, the bad mother on whom I'm dependent. So you repair it. And what we realized in Minna's case, and what she taught us about Klein, was that it wasn't just any old reparation, right? You aggress an object, you feel guilty toward that, and you try to repair it. But that reparation from Minna was racial reparation. In other words, that she had to somehow de. Idealize the adoptive mother just a little bit and re. Idealize the Korean birth mother so that the good enough could emerge, right?
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Deep Acharya
For, for.
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Professor David Ng
For object relations, for child development. You can't live in these polarized positions of love and hate. Those are extremes that leave you in a psychotic position. So this concept of the good enough, which is derived from DW Winnicott, that is a kind of psychic stability. Nobody's perfect. You have to be good enough. And so that earlier work set me on a path toward the problem of racial reparation. But as I said, I work broadly also in law. And I suddenly realized, oh, wow. So reparation is a key term in psychoanalysis, is a key term in object relations, but it's also a key term in political theory. And it's from that very granular, intimate case history that I moved to this completely different scale of trying to imagine the reinvention of reparations and human rights in the post war period, as you say, between these two signaled events that really changed our conception of human history and human. The Holocaust and Hiroshima. But of course, as you also mentioned, the history around the Holocaust is consensual. Jews were victims and Nazis were perpetrators. But in the case of Hiroshima, after the atomic bombings, there's no historical consensus then or to this day as to who was the victim and who was the perpetrator. And so the book really concentrates on the Trans Pacific there and looks at three interlocking events. The atomic bombings that ended World War II, the reparations that were paid to Japanese Americans for internment during that war, and the contemporary claims of comfort women, women and girls who were enslaved by the Japanese Imperial army during the war into sexual slavery. And of course, that history of comfort women and militarization and, and. And sexual slavery. That is completely related to the problem and the, and the question of transnational adoption, especially in relation to the post war period, the Cold War and the partition of north and South Korea, north and South Vietnam. These were the first waves of transnational adoptees who come to the west in relation to those wars. And so, you know, as I Think about that earlier project. In this project, it's a much larger historical framing of the problem of reparations, but also racial reparations.
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Deep Acharya
Oh, I think that's the most profound way that I've really heard someone draw that connection. I think it's all very clear to me because I was really trying to connect that dot from racial melancholy or racial dissociation to this reparations in the human. And I think that's really interesting how you approach the problem. And it's in some way or the other related to my next question that I was trying to grapple with this. This very category of the human that underpins your work in this book. And I want to start with this fascinating linguistic observation you begin the book with. You note that the human first appeared as a noun in 1840, having previously existed primarily as an adjective. So for our listeners, could you explain how this shift occurred from human being to the human as this universal category allowed the. The post 1840 liberal state to police the boundaries of who is considered deserving and who remains eccentric to that definition?
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Professor David Ng
Wow, that's a great question. And the person I would tell people to read is Ed Cohen, who is a professor at Rutgers. He's a friend and is very much attuned to the. The question of biopolitics and the emergence of biopolitics. And really. Right. Inspired by Foucault and how then populations and humans interact and are inextricably tied to one another. And so actually it was Ed who said, oh, you have to go look at the Oxford English Dictionary and see that the nominalization that the adjective to the kind of noun. This occurs kind of late in the story of enlightenment. And so I guess, you know, that's the immediate response that I would have. But the larger response I would have is the human is such a vexing category because on some level, right. It is human rights. It aspires to a kind of universalism, almost an ontological commonality among beings on the planet. But of course, the human is also the term that aspires toward the universality that's constantly differentiated over the course of colonial modernity. And that that's. That that tension between its universal aspirations and its differences is one that continues to haunt us, I think.
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Deep Acharya
Yeah, I understand also how the exclusion seems to be more than just a legal oversight and how it is also baked into the like very foundations of Western political thought, particularly in how we, let's say, understand land and ownership. So to that end, and want to turn our focus to your first Chapter where you perform this brilliant rereading of John Locke's two Treatises of government. And so most of us are familiar with, and I might be strawmaning this a little bit with Locke as this father of property rights figure and the social contract. Would you argue his theory of reparations has these two geographical bodies so interested in how you think Locke's logic protects the property of the European adversary while simultaneously characterizing the indigenous person as a noxious creature whose life is like four feet? And how does this, like racial contract still haunt our modern legal standing?
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Professor David Ng
So thanks for that question, Deep. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, which is, of course, the human is not just a political category. Often politics and law and national sovereignty determine who is human and who's left out of that community. But that wouldn't happen without a concomitant cultural and psychic corollary. So how is it that we can psychically accept the othering and the violence that's done against others? Like that's not just a political project. Right. That's also a psychological project. And so we can talk about that a little bit more later. But to move to the second part of your question about Locke. Yes, Locke, Hobbs, Rousseau, people think of them as the great social contract theorists who establish property rights, the rights of man, the social contract, civil society. And of course, that question of the rise of European liberalism has been critiqued and rethought and expanded by post colonial theorists, which is to say, how do we come to understand the establishment of liberal rights and reason against the colonization and exploitation of the peoples of the New World, the peoples of Africa and Asia? And so when I was thinking about the genealogy of reparations, I was actually quite shocked and surprised to see that after property, which is one of the key words in the Treatises, the that reparations is another keyword. It comes up again and again in book one and book two in particular, I think, chapters two and 16 of the second treatise. And what I came to realize is that, okay, there is not just Locke the social theorist, there's Locke the colonial administrator. I mean, the man was a colonial bureaucrat. He was the assistant to the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Governor of Carolinas. He helped to write the Constitution of the New World. He was invested in in the slave trade. And so there was a kind of theoretical Locke and there was a colonial Locke. And that's evident throughout the Treatise, which is to say at the same time as Locke is writing in the wake of the English Civil War and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. And at the same time that he's trying to check the absolute power of kings, he's also a colonial administrator. So it's like what is the relationship between Locke, who's trying to protect the rights of man in Europe, in relation to Locke, the colonial administrator in the Americas, who's not just justifying slavery, but also justifying dispossession, right, and extermination of the Indians in the name of justice. And the word he uses for that is reparation. And so there's this incredible passage in Locke where he talks about how the Indian is the aggressor, he's aggressing the colonists, who is defending his life as an adversary. And in defending himself against the Indian aggression, the colonists has every right to not just take the Indian's life, but also the Indian's land. Okay. And so it's that contradiction that led me to this idea that that reparation actually has two bodies, kind of inspired by Kentorowitz, the king's two bodies. That reparation has one meaning in Europe, which is about the checking of absolute power, but it has another meaning in the New World where it becomes the name for the justification and the rationalization of violence against the indigenous. And, you know, here I turn to international law. There's a scholar named Anthony Anghi who is a professor at NUS in Singapore as well as at University of Utah. And he writes about this early moment in relation to Victoria and Grotius and Gentile. And he says international law, such as it existed in Victoria's time, did not precede and thereby effortlessly resolved the problem of Spanish Indian relations. Rather, international law was created out of the unique issues generated between the Spanish and the Indian. Lifelock, how can I help?
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Professor David Ng
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Deep Acharya
No problem.
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Professor David Ng
I'll be with you every step of the way.
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Professor David Ng
Right. So, in other words, that the creation of European modernity and colonialism are coterminous with one another. The contradictions that we see in something like reparations are not eccentric, but they're actually completely built into the political theory.
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Deep Acharya
That's. Yeah, I, I think that was. Yeah, that really helped me understand because as. And when I was reading the book, I was trying to follow up and, and then the very next thing that you mentioned and that we've already talked about is how you make this pivot from Locke's political theory to client psychoanalysis. Right after the. In the same page and next paragraph. So your quoting of the professor from NUS really helped me understand this idea more as to what you're referring to. And I think that, yes, there is a lot of value to how you are trying to approach this, this entire phenomenon. So I know we have already talked about client psychoanalysis, but I really want to also know your thoughts on how. On your definition of what you call colonial object relations. Like in the Kleinian model, you mentioned how the infant makes reparation to restore the loved object. It has harmed in fantasy. However, you also note this chilling moment in Clients Were where the wished for restoration. And I'm quoting for the colonizer is merely like repopulating a country with people of their own nationality. So could you Speak to how this psychic contract allows for this bad faith, liberal white guilt that psychically colonizes the suffering of others.
- [20:48]
Professor David Ng
I could try. So, you know, I'm on sabbatical right now. Deep. So this is the most deep conversation I've had in a long, long time with Klein. I've mentioned how I became interested in reparation through Klein, originally through the case histories and the commentaries. But I said earlier that, of course, the problem of the human and the dehumanization of populations is not merely a political or legal project. It's also a psychic project. So that's one way in which psychoanalysis becomes very important to our discussion. We normally think about the way in which we harm another person, and then our values, our morals tell us that that is wrong and that therefore we need to fix, address, repair that. And that is not at all the argument that I make out of Klein, because, like Locke, Klein also, in her magisterial account of love, guilt and reparations, has a colonial scene in which repair has, like, two lives, right? It has two bodies in a way. You could say she has an example of the colonists who are driven by the need to discover a new motherland, and they go to the Americas and. And they fight against the elements. They try to establish, you know, a community, and they have to fight to survive, not just against nature, but against the Indian. And so they show immense cruelty and violence toward the Indian. And she says, but, you know, the wished for restoration, however, is not given to the Indian. It's given to brothers and sisters of the same tribe in repopulating the country with their own image. Right? So you see that what happens in Klein's example of reparations, which I call colonial, you know, object relations, colonial reparation is that somehow the colonizer becomes both the perpetrator of violence, but also the victim deserving repair. And the Indian is written out of that equation. So therefore, you know, it's not that I. I harm an object and then I have a moral framework and I want to repair that. But colonial object relations for me is the understanding that morality doesn't drive the scene of reparations incline. A kind of colonial morality is the effect of reparations, Right? So we could say that in this sense, reparation is not the solution to violence and aggression, but reparation becomes the grounds and the problem for reparation. So that's the way I would kind of frame what is going on psychically in Klein in relation to what's going on politically in Locke.
- [23:58]
Deep Acharya
Well, your theoretical framing of the good and bad object sets the stage for your book, Second Half, where you look at these, how these boundaries were managed after the devastation of World War II. And this is also something that we've talked about before. But when you move into the Trans Pacific and you make this sharp distinction between the settled history of the Holocaust at Nuremberg and the unsettled history of the atomic bombings and the comfort women system at the Tokyo trials, what do you think was the why do you think the judgment of history is so successful in Germany but so fragmented in Japan? And how did these Cold War exigencies create, like, a culture of impunity that still affects redress in Asia today?
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Professor David Ng
Okay, that's again, a great question. It's really huge. So let me back up and just go to one thing that I want to say about the paradox of Klein, which is that I approach Klein from a deconstructive angle, which is to say that it is those to whom repair are offered who retroactively become good objects for climb. So the issue is not that they're good objects and bad objects to begin with, but that the very act of reparation draws a dividing line between humans who are deserving of repair and those that are not human who do not deserve repair. So the real paradox in Klein is not how do you repair a good object? Because when you repair that object to core, it becomes good. But how do you repair a bad object? As we move from the colonial scene in the Americas to the post colonial scene in Asia in the post war period, I look at the production of all of these bad objects from the Japanese enemy during World War II and the Japanese American suspect in the US under internment to comfort women. And I try to understand how it is that the question of good and bad is also politically contingent. Good and bad objects are also produced not just by politics and law, but they are produced by politics and law. And how is it then that the history of reparations that you ask is so different in Europe as opposed to Asia? Okay. And I'm not a specialist in European history, but the people who really work on this issue around the judgment of history, John Scott's fantastic book on the judgment of history and the Holocaust as a kind of exemplary moment of the judgment of history in relation to Jews and Nazis and victims and perpetrators in Germany and Israel. One issue around the exemplary status of Europe was that for the first time, the kind of totalizing violence that was exacted on other parts of the world, it returned to Europe.
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Deep Acharya
Right.
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Professor David Ng
So, in other words, the Holocaust and The extermination of peoples was something that was happening in a white land, in a white continent. So it was white people killing white people, okay? And that's not true as far as Asia's concerned. So that gets us to a much longer discussion of the problem of the human and the differentiation of that universalizing category in Africa and Asia, right, as opposed to Europe and North America. But another way of really approaching that problem, of the unresolved nature of victims and perpetrators in Asia is precisely the rearrangement that goes on in the post war period. The Cold War, of course, was not cold in Asia. It resulted in a number of wars and partitions that we talked about a little earlier. And so how is it that Japan went from being inhuman? And there's a. One kind of legal document that I look at that justifies the. A absolute bombing of Japan by saying there are no civilians in Japan, right? So there are no humans there. Everyone's up, you know, for. As a target. So how do you get from that to the emergence of Japan rehabilitated as a. And then as. As the first kind of economic superpower in. In Asia, you get to that because of historical contingency. The emergence of the Cold War was the emergence of the fight between socialist and communist modernity. And Japan had to be rehabilitated as a bulwark against the rise of communism. And how is it that that happened? Because, you know, Japan was always the model minority among east, among Asian countries, right? It was an imperial power. It defeated the West. Japan did to Asia what Europe did to the world, which is colonize it. So, you know, it's those kinds of historical realities that also frame the vicissitudes of reparations and the human that I explore in part two. But that resignification right of Japan, as I said, is both a legal project and a psychic project and a social project and a cultural project. And therefore, in that section, I look not just at law, in particular the Nuremberg trials and the international military tribunals of the Far east, the Tokyo War Tribunals, but I also look at reportage and I look at literature working in this kind of resignifying and identificatory project.
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Deep Acharya
Well, amidst all these different kind of projects that we are discussing about for some time now, we've tried to. One of the ways we've tried to settle the history of the atomic bomb is through narrative. But even those narratives do have, like, complicated effects on our empathy. Like you offer this provocative reading of John Hersay's 1946 essay on Hiroshima, and you suggest that For Western readers, the inhabitants of the city only became human once they were reduced to slimy bodies and suppurated creatures in the wake of the bomb. So what do you think are the stakes of this human in ruins? Do you think the human emerge in your work only through the specter of its total destruction?
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Professor David Ng
So there's a big chunk of the second chapter on Hiroshima that looks at John Hersey's article. Just a little background. Hersey was a war correspondent in China during World War II. After the war, he was posted by the New Yorker to go to Hiroshima and to get the human angle of the story. And so he wrote a 31,000 word essay that for the first and only time took the entire issue of the New Yorker from COVID to cover. And when it was published a year and a week after the bombings, it went viral, like in today's terms. It just rocketed off the newsstands. And in that article he follows six individuals, all civilians, no military people, two doctors, two priests, a seamstress, a widow seamstress, and a young female secretary clerk. And it's really just the most magisterial weaving together of the moments before and after the atomic bombing. And what is so fascinating about the article, I guess I'll raise two points. The first point is that, you know, Klein says we're only able to disregard or to some extent sacrifice our own feelings and desires and thus put the other person's interests and emotions first if we have the capacity to identify ourselves with a loved one. Right. So she really talks about being able to identify with the other as the prerequisite for repair, for love, for putting aside one's own feelings and desires. And I think that Hersey's article really does that by portraying these ordinary people to a Western readership. The article not only rocketed off the newsstands, it was read on national radio, was translated into dozens of languages immediately, and became a kind of sensation. So when I talk about the historical contingency and the reframing of a population, I think Hersey's article in the New Yorker really jumpstarts that project, you know, toward what we might think of as the exclusion of Asia to the inclusion of Asia in another area of Asian American studies, we might call this the transformation of yellow peril into model minority citizenship today. And so the, the other point that I want to make is that the passage you're referring to with Revan Tanimoto, it's in the middle of the article, and, and he. It's the aftermath, the evening after the bombing and he is in Asano park, which is the gathering point for people were the city to be bombed. And he's almost like, you know, Sharon, he's ferrying these bodies that are injured and decaying and their limbs are falling apart and their skin is sloughed off. And he's just carrying them from one side of the river to the other and trying to drag their bodies up to safety. And the next day, of course he wakes up and the tide had risen and all the bodies that he had tried to save were drowned. Okay. And the line that is so amazing in that passage is that he kept on having to remind himself because he was so sickened by these bodies and these images, he kept on reminding himself that these are humans. And I think that that's the moment of irony, right? Which is humanity only emerges in Japan after destruction. Humanity only emerges after humanity is obliterated.
- [35:05]
Deep Acharya
Right.
- [35:05]
Professor David Ng
So what does it mean that that production of the human, it's not that human is again a universal given. It's the production of the human as an after effect of this unspeakable violence.
- [35:20]
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- [35:47]
Deep Acharya
moving thought to linger onto. And I think we can come back to that when we end our conversation. But what I want to talk about this third half, your book then takes a turn towards a very physical link that connects the indigenous disposition of the first chapter with the nuclear devastation of the second. So you bring us to this Satu Dene people of Canada and it's a tragic irony that the uranium for the little boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima was mined by the Dene who were unaware of its purpose and later suffered from terminal cancers, becoming known as this village of widows, which you call. So could you talk about the material and historical link that connects indigenous disposition in Americas to nuclear devastation in Japan? Sure.
- [36:38]
Professor David Ng
As I was doing the research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I couldn't help but start doing research on uranium mining and on environmental studies and the devastation that irradiation has caused in the post war period. And of course I was doing this research actually on a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, which of course was run by Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb. So it was a little ironic for me. I came across a story about the Satudene, who are an indigenous first nations group in Northwest Canada. And Peter Blow, who is a documentary filmmaker, has an incredible film called A Village of Widows, which is about the Dene. And so as I was doing the research, I came to discover that the uranium for the Manhattan Project came from three sites. It came from the Belgian Congo, it came from the southwest area of the United States, Navajo Nation, and Northwest Canada. The Dene region, the Dene, they were called coolies. They helped to mine and transport the ore. They suffer high, high rates of malignancy in the community. The land on which they live and the water on which they are sustained, as well as the animals and the nature, everything sustained from the water, all of that is irradiated for eternity. They had no idea what their mining efforts were being used toward. The mine was shuttered in the 60s, I think, and it wasn't until 20 years later that they discovered that the ore they were mining was part of the Manhattan Project. And they felt very implicated. So they sent a delegation to Hiroshima to apologize. And that was just an incredible story to me, because in a way, it came full circle. Like the book begins with colonization of the Americas. It moves to the atomic bombings in Asia in the post war and under decolonization, and then it returns back to the New World, right? So it's very cyclical in that sense. But it's also not cyclical in the sense that the Dene, who could in some many ways claim to be the most victimized in this chain of the atom, don't play that kind of identity politics. They, their implication makes them feel as if they are perpetrators and they have to go to Japan and explain themselves. And so to me, you know, the book is called Reparations the Human. Each of the sections takes up a key word in liberal theory. So, you know, we have repair, we have trauma, we have sovereignty. But each of the chapters is actually named Beyond Repair, beyond trauma, Beyond Sovereignty. And I think that if all of these sovereign nation states are continuously producing bad objects, unthought subjects, you know, to be left in the dust, then what the Dene really show us is how these bad objects can move beyond sovereignty, how they can choose to address another who has been injured without the sanctioned legitimacy or approval of the sovereign. And there's one section in Peter Blow's film that I also found incredibly moving, like Reverend Tanimoto's passage, where the Dene go to Hibakusha Hospital. Hibakusha are the people who survived the atomic bombings. They go to Hibakusha Hospital. That is for Zainichi. These are Korean colonial subjects who to this day don't have citizenship in Japan. They're permanent residents, even though they've been there for generations. So even to this day in Japan, the Japanese hibakusha and the Korean Hibakusha are segregated. And so they go and they talk to that group. And I really started thinking back to Klein this. If the. If the paradox, right, in reparations is that, you know, it's not how you repair a good object. Reparation creates the good object.
- [41:19]
Deep Acharya
It's the.
- [41:20]
Professor David Ng
The paradox is, how do you repair a bad object? That scene of the colonized Dene and the colonized Zainichi Hibakusha addressing each other was almost like two bad objects addressing each other. And I think that those are the kinds of, again, historical contingencies, the historical examples that really inspire hope and a different framework for understanding reparations in the human. Yeah.
- [41:52]
Deep Acharya
I'm thinking how this apology of the Satudene seems to be rooted in, like, a very different understanding of relationality than the one we see in Western law. And so, building on this idea of the absolute apology, you mentioned that Satudeni elders were at first mistaken for Japanese by the survivors in Hiroshima. And you talk about George Blonde and how he noted that in Indian law, there is no stranger in the world. So how does your model of these implicated subjects taking responsibility for pain that claims us all offer a way to apprehend humanity without the suspension of judgment that liberal law requires?
- [42:33]
Professor David Ng
Yes. So, I mean, there are a few things to say about this moment where the elder says, you know, we don't. There's no stranger in this world. We're all one. That's a universalism.
- [42:45]
Deep Acharya
Right.
- [42:45]
Professor David Ng
As well. I don't want to idealize it, but clearly the, I think, theoretical lesson to be drawn from Blondin's statement. Not just theoretical, the moral lesson. This is something that I say you can never repair something that's broken. You can't repair violence. The only thing that you can repair are your relationships. Right? So another way of saying this whole dynamic is that we only repair that which is valuable to us.
- [43:17]
Deep Acharya
Right?
- [43:17]
Professor David Ng
We only repair the relationships that we feel are important to us. If we have no relation to an injured other, then. Then we just ignore that person. Right? That person disappears or becomes unthought in your consciousness, in your politics. And so I think what is really key about Blondin's statement, but also the fact that they face each other is that their version of repair in relation to there's no stranger in this world world is to maintain a relation to another that may not even be known to them yet.
- [43:59]
Deep Acharya
Right.
- [44:00]
Professor David Ng
That's, I think, the truly inspiring thing. And again, it's historically contingent. When I really thought about this example, I was really excited by it. But then later I learned that the Dene, who have very few resources, who are suffering a lot of medical and poverty in their community, the younger generation has reopened the mines, they're back to rainy mining. And the nuclear arms build up, especially in post 9 11, has gone unabated. And it's even being more accelerated today because the nuclear disarmament treaties are expiring and the governments are not renewing them. Right. So unlike chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, the one area that's not outlawed by international laws is nuclear weapons. So back to Ange says nuclear weapons is sovereignty today. And so the Dene territories have been reopened for uranium mining as an economic necessity. And so again, I don't want to over idealize this moment, but it is a historically contingent moment that imparts an important lesson to us all.
- [45:20]
Deep Acharya
So this brings us to a critical distinction to make throughout the book regarding the very definition of repair as a process. So throughout the book, you distinguish between reparations as a noun, a settled payment or a legal event, and also making reparation as a verb, like a continuous process of mediation. So I'm wondering how these different semantics, like the distinction between these two, like, how critical are they for keeping a space open for new victims to be apprehended, especially in an era of irreparable environmental and radioactive damage.
- [45:58]
Professor David Ng
Yeah. So back to the beginning when I was talking about being a scholar who has one foot in law and another foot in psychoanalysis. In law, reparations really is thought more of as a noun.
- [46:15]
Deep Acharya
Right.
- [46:15]
Professor David Ng
It's thought of as a payment, an account or history that's meant to write violence into the past. In psychoanalysis, reparation, or making reparation, is really thought of more as a verb. So as long as you and I are in human relations with one another, we will be continuously aggressing the other and then choosing to repair it or not to repair it. And so the difference between reparation as a noun and reparation as a verb, the disparity between them, the discrepancy between them, keeps open a space they'll never fully align with one another. Right. Which is not to say that Reparation as a noun, as a payment, as a historical account is unnecessary. It's absolutely necessary. The need for moral clarity and legal judgment. The naming of a victim and a perpetrator is absolutely imperative in the law. But the discrepancy between the law and psychoanalysis is to say that there will always be a gap between them and therefore always a space for other victims to claim rights and recognition. And I think that's the real key to understanding how those two concepts work in tandem and against one another. To concretize that example, you could say that today, psychoanalysis and law work together insofar as in order to make a legal claim as a victim, you need to be traumatized, and trauma is the primary vocabulary of victimhood, and that psychoanalysis is the primary vocabulary for trauma. And so law and psychoanalysis work together to produce a victim and a perpetrator under the law. But unlike law, which is a moral discourse, psychoanalysis and trauma that goes beyond good and evil, it goes beyond judgment. Anybody, in other words, can be traumatized. And the example I always use is that when Freud writes about the emergence of trauma, and beyond the pleasure principle and shell shock, he's writing in relation to German soldiers, they Axis power, right? And. And when we talk about ptsd, Post Traumatic stress disorder, which was a diagnosis that came in the wake of the Vietnam War, we're talking about us white soldiers, right, returning from Vietnam. So the question of who's the victim and who's the perpetrator there is legally, it's very complicated. Whereas what you come to see is that psychoanalysis doesn't care, right? If you have been a witness subject, a perpetrator, a victim of violence, you can be traumatized. And so their law and psychoanalysis don't work in tandem. They actually work at odds with one another. And that's another way of thinking that there's a gap or disparity that is really useful for trying to work out these moral versus these, let's say, ethical distinctions.
- [49:44]
Deep Acharya
To close our conversation, I want to look toward the just futures you envision in your conclusion very quickly. So you draw on Sylvia Winter to argue for a redescription of the human outside the terms of man. If, as you suggest, we have never been human in the way the Enlightenment defined it, how does the politics of redress help us finally, like, unsettle the coloniality of power and build a relationship to an injured other that isn't really based on a very sovereign identity?
- [50:19]
Professor David Ng
Well, deep. That's like the trillion dollar question. It's something that we're all working on. Yeah. I turn to Winter. I turn to Latour. We've never been human. And clearly the problem of the human and the problem of repair is something that is both the effect of colonial modernity and something that it continues. It needs to address. It continues to need to address. I think that here I would say psychoanalysis is really key because in a way, if you can't repair violence, you can only repair relationships. Repairing that relationship depends on a psychoanalytic axiom, which is the recognition of dependency. Right. So that there are no strangers in this world. We're all interdependent on one another. And, you know, I'd mentioned Ed Cohen earlier in his book A Body Worth Defending, where he talks about the rise of individualism in relation to biopolitics. He says, you know, the. The antonym to immunity. Right. So immunity, both as a medical and a legal concept, in its evolution. The antonym. I always ask this to my students, and I didn't know it myself. The antonym of immunity is community. Right. The antonym of immunity is community and dependence. And I think that we have to understand how we are interdependent on one another, but not just on one another as a human species. We're interdependent on the planet. And that's really what gets us from the human and the legal histories to this problem of the planetary history and to the problem of the environment. And so I guess, you know, the. I don't have a solution, but I would say the book points us in that direction to really reconceive the definitions of the human and human dependency, not just on one another, but on all the creatures and things in this world.
- [52:33]
Deep Acharya
Well, that was a great conversation, David. Thank you so much for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [52:41]
Professor David Ng
You're very welcome. Thank you for talking with me, Deep, and for drawing attention to this new work.
- [52:49]
Deep Acharya
Thank you. So the book is Reparations in the Human, published by Duke University Press in 2025. You've been listening to the New Books Network. I'm Deep Bacharya, and we'll see you next time.