![]() Paradoxically, The End of Dissatisfaction? shows how the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.įeminist theorizations have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that shame operates not only as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion but also as a primary affect of intersubjective life. Discussing these various symptoms, he examines various texts from film, literature, popular culture, and everyday life, including Toni Morrison's Paradise, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and such films as Dead Poets Society and Trigger Effect. McGowan identifies many of the social ills of American culture today as symptoms of this transformation: the sense of disconnection, the increase in aggression and violence, widespread cynicism, political apathy, incivility, and loss of meaning. The chapter will then consider whether Jacques Lacan is right in suggesting that one ‘never died of shame’, when in fact there is a great deal of death being produced in the efforts not to expose that which is shameful in non-indigenous Australia.Įxploring the emergence of a societal imperative to enjoy ourselves, Todd McGowan builds on the work of such theorists as Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zoizuek, Joan Copjec, and Theresa Brennan to argue that we are in the midst of a large-scale transformation-a shift from a society oriented around prohibition (i.e., the notion that one cannot just do as one pleases) to one oriented around enjoyment. I ask what is it that cannot be exposed in the contemporary nation called Australia? And what are the stakes of this exposure? The chapter will briefly map the process toward constitutional change in Australia, and examine the many sites of exposure that appeared in this process. This chapter is concerned with the non-act of re-writing the Australian Constitution to reflect the existence of Indigenous people as Indigenous people, that is, in the mode that they demand through the ‘black process’. In line with Freud’s discussion of shame as the exposure of genitals, I suggest, something cannot be seen in non-indigenous Australia, something for which the large part of the nation feels ashamed and something for which another part of Australia is dying. ![]() Adam Goodes, it was said, was behaving like a black man. At the same time, celebrated Indigenous footballer Adam Goodes was being publically admonished for performing a ‘traditional dance’ on the football field. Then Prime Minister Tony Abbot refused the existence of a ‘black process’. In 2015, Indigenous leaders wrote to the prime minister to say they wanted to advise on the terms of that change. In 2011, an expert panel of Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars sat and recommended change for 2013. The discussion collapsed with the ‘no’ vote in the referendum on the possible move to a republic. In 1993, discussion began about the changing of Australia’s Constitution to reflect the existence of Indigenous people.
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