ABSTRACT

Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.

摘要

金·斯科特( Kim Scott) 的小说禁忌(2017) 以库克纳鲁普 (Kukenarup) 大屠杀为中心，紧随 1880 年约翰·邓恩 (John Dunn) 在维尔洛明·努恩加 (Wirlomin Noongar) 人的祖传土地上被刺死。Taboo追溯了大屠杀之后 Noongar 和定居者后裔的生活中的沉默动态。小说强调的是，虽然大屠杀可能发生在特定地点并通过公共姿态（牌匾、纪念碑和仪式）来纪念，但其现实最终无法与幸存者及其后代的内心生活分开。这篇文章认为，在斯科特的小说中，大屠杀的地形是典型的极端，这个词是雅克·拉康创造的，用来描述精神现实的亲密外在。作为一个概念，extimate 有助于命名自由资本主义秩序中因公共和私人领域的部署而经常被排除在外的空间，由此社会苦难被委托给私有化的内部，而私人暴力则因空洞的公开言论而变得平庸。