doug wrote, quoting meaghan morris
> "...a society that has produced its own identity historically by
> dispossessing
> others now finds itself subject to fears, and sometimes enjoyable
> fantasies, of displacement."
this is very astute. the right has been spewing forth the fantasy that aborigines are getting 'things for free' and want to steal 'everyone's backyard'. this was pretty much what has maintained and constituted the constituency for the liberal-national govt, and has made the real rift between large agribusiness/mining and that (again, quaint) figure of the rural folk (which invariably includes only the white folk, and no mention of the centuries of indigenous labour which actually built the pastoral industry) 'disappear' - after all, there are no differences in this white family of ours. disappear it doesn't of course, just gets projected onto the 'other' as 'their' desires of 'our' dispossession.
here's a question then for butler, lacan, etc reading. is this 'thing' that 'we' are afraid 'they' will steal for 'us' something - as in, a particular thing, with partiular and recognisable content (say, land, as in the example above), or is it enjoyment, or is it no thing (void), or is it a complex of all these? butler would - as i read her thus far - go for the performative reading, the emptiness of the thing, which nonetheless cannot be declared empty without engaing in its performance. (is that right?) zizek would go for the enjoyment, the 'our way of life', the kernel which resists sheer performativity. (is that how others read him?) myself, i'm still thinking this one through. and whilst i can sit back and know - according to a marxian rationalism - what is actually going on, that does not make it go away, that does not make this particular fantasy disappear as a constitutive moment of australian politics.
angela