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

'Five Bells': The Performance of Memory If we are to be led 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 simultaneous desire for coexistence, for an equality implying the substitutability of subjects. In Specters of Marx, Derrida describes this aspect of justice as "the infinite 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 between anonymous singularities" (65).1 The second paradox, which may or may not be in fact another version of the first one, is to do with the appa rently necessary equivalence of difference, the substitutability of different differences into various formulae: as Frow and Morris summarize Povinelli’s 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 probably 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. "Marx’s 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.