Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay investigates the deification of Prabhakaran, the leader of the Sri Lankan Tamil insurrectionary group, the LTTE. I describe the centrality of death in the ideological economy of the LTTE, with the leader Prabhakaran as the love-object who consecrated and directed such death. Following Ernesto Laclau, I propose that a chain of equivalences is forged in LTTE ideology: to get to Tamil Eelam is to love Prabhakaran. While Tamil militancy’s common solution to the Tamil community’s malaise and suffering under state discrimination and violence was a self-described Tamil homeland, a ‘Tamil Eelam’, the LTTE came to actively create a set of equivalences that centered Prabhakaran as the name of the fullness of that community. This chain of meanings created a path dependency between Tamil Eelam and Prabhakaran, the former actualizable only through the latter. Thus, contemporary Tamil nationalism still labors under the Prabhakaran problem, even after his killing.
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