‘Success’: desire, prohibition and resentment
Ali Alizadeh My previous blogs questioned the goodness of such supposedly good things as ‘community’, ‘nature’ and ‘Australia’ as used in contemporary literary discourses. I believe the magical aura of these terms is most commonly activated to empower their ab/users. But if cherishing a community, singing the praises of Mother Nature, and paying homage to the Fatherland are symbolic means contrived for obscuring the Real – of careerist manoeuvres, economic transactions, strategic alliances and so on – in the sorts of text which, in the classic Foucauldian sense, constitute discourse (judge’s reports, book reviews, interviews, literary articles and cultural policy…