Five Bells: The Performance of Memory Essay -- Five Bells Australia

pentad Bells The Performance of MemoryIf we are to be conduct by the debate recently staged in Critical Inquiry, either Australian multiculturalism is crucially about justice, in some sense, or Australian justice is equally crucially about multiculturalism. As most of us seem to be aware, multicultural discourse on justice suffers from at least two key paradoxes. First, the desire to respect the absolute alterity of the other, and the synchronous desire for coexistence, for an equality implying the substitutability of subjects. In Specters of Marx, Derrida describes this aspect of justice as the uncounted promise of democracy, which, he says, is always untenable ... for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality mingled with anonymous singularities (65).1 The second paradox, which may or may not be in fact another form of the first one, is to do with the apparently necessary equivalence of deviation, the substitutability of various differences into various formulae as Frow and Morris summarize Povinellis argument, the unhappy paradox of difference theories posited as an alternative to the politics of identity is that they come to rely on the self-identity of the different (626).I do not pretend to have any sort of solution to these paradoxes in fact, to look for a solution, in that sense, is in all likelihood the wrong move to make. I want to start by distinguishing between two aspects of justice which tend to get conflated the synchronic element of justice, which seems to be most commonly implicated in the various discourses on justice, and the diachronic element. It seems to me t... ...rne Lansdowne P. 1963.Jameson, Fredric. Marxs Purloined Letter. New Left Review. No. 209 (Jan/Feb 1995) 75-109.Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition A Reply to John Frow and Meaghan Morris. Critical Inquiry. 25 (Spring 1999) 631-37.-----. The State of Shame Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship. Critical Inquiry. 24 (Winter 1998) 575-610.Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York Columbia UP. 1996.Slessor, Kenneth. Five Bells. Collected poems. Ed. Dennis Haskell and Geoffrey Dutton. Pymble, N.S.W. Angus & Robertson, 1994.Smith, Graeme Kinross. Kenneth Slessor Westerly A Quarterly Review. No. 2 (1978) 51-59. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard UP. 1999.