"I am not yet satisfied": Desire and Violence in the Works of Christos Tsiolkas and Roberto Bolaño. Issue 1 (2nd January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Piccini, Mark
• Is Part Of: Journal of Australian studies. Volume 46:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 19
• Page End: 30
• Publication Date: 2022-01-02
• Subjects: Christos Tsiolkas -- Roberto Bolaño -- Global South -- violence -- psychoanalysis; Australia -- Civilization -- Periodicals; Australia -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; 994.005
• DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2021.2006265
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1444-3058

Abstract

ABSTRACT: From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against, and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals such as communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. With particular attention to Dead Europe (2005) and Merciless Gods (2014), this article considers Tsiolkas's work alongside that of Roberto Bolaño, particularly 2666 (2004). Tsiolkas and Bolaño unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. Their work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence, such as the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas's characters populate. This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine how Tsiolkas's work redistributes the violence from the pathological and geopolitical peripheries to the centre, disrupting Australian narratives of innocence and isolation and bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.