School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemTerra nullius : Lacanian ethics and Australian fictions of origin( 2005)The fiction of terra nullius, that Australia was 'no-one's land' at the time of British colonisation, was confirmed in law in 1971. At precisely this moment it had begun to fail as the ballast of white Australian identity and the fulcrum of race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Where white Australia had historically produced a gap, an empty centre from which the white Australian subject could emerge, fully formed, there was now a presence. The emergence of the Aboriginal subject into this empty space inaugurated the anxiety of white Australia that has characterised the period from the 1970s to the present. During these decades of anxiety, the story of this nation's origin-the story of 'settlement'-has retained its pivotal part in the inscription and reinscription of national meanings. Each of the three novels analysed in the thesis is a fictional account of the story of 'settlement published during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of all the contemporary Australian fiction written about 'settlement' and the race relations conducted in its midst, these texts have been chosen because each is emblematic of a particular national fantasy, and, as is argued in this thesis, a particular orientation, to the tale it tells. The structure of each fantasy-of the frontier, of captivity, of the explorer and of the Great Australian Emptiness- offers particular opportunities for the refantasisation of that national story. The thesis asks how each novel is oriented towards the national aim of not failing to reproduce a satisfactory repetition of the story of national origin and the inevitable failure of that project. All of these questions are framed by an overarching one: what is an ethics of interpretation? The thesis offers a Lacanian response. Interpretation, for Lacan, is apophantic; it points to something, or lets it be seen. It points beyond meaning to structure; it alms to show an orientation not to a 'topic' but to a place. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers an ethics of interpretation that includes and accounts for that which exceeds or escapes meaning, and it does this without rendering that excess irrelevant. That something remains constitutive yet enigmatic, making interpretation, in turn, not merely the recovery and rendering of meaning but also a process which seeks to understand the function of this enigmatic structural term. Through its theory of repetition and the pleasures that repetition holds, Lacanian theory offers an approach to analysing the pleasures for the non-Indigenous Australian reader in hearing again the fictions of the nation's founding. It now seems possible for a white Australian encountering any such retelling to ask how our pleasure is taken, and to see the intransigence of our national story, its incapacity to respond to its many challengers, as a particular mode of enjoyment that is too pleasurable to renounce. A Lacanian ethics of interpretation opens up the question: what are the possibilities of re-orientating ourselves in our relation to our founding story such that we did not simply repeat what gives us pleasure?