ABSTRACT
Scholars writing on the importance of saying “sorry” for the crimes of the past in nations described as Australia, Canada, the US and South Africa, recommend such a mourning process for the goodness of western imperialist projects and their genocidal outcomes. Guilt is a legal category which denotes, at least in western legal terms, responsibility. And mourning is a necessary relinquishing – a detachment of the libido – from the lost object; let us call that lost object “australia”. A quality that supposedly inhabits the generations born after the fall of apartheid, the “born frees”. But, “to be born free is meaningless” Rose tells us. The failure of haunting is a feature or a symptom of colonial settler states, and their inhabitants. Guilt, however, despite the protest, is caught in Lacanian terms, in the shadows of the signifier. It cannot be eradicated by the careful repetition of state violences.
