ABSTRACT
Discovery, tabula rasa, mixing labor with dead matter, terra nullius. These are the traces of ex nihilic logic that come together in an erasure of place and time of “the other” and an assumption of new beginnings for the European/Christian mind-body. If discovery implies that what was there, created ex nihilo in the beginning by one God lies in wait of the European Christian to uncover it, then terra nullius goes further in denying the place, lives, and histories of “others” that were ‘already there.’ The concept of terra nullius, I argue, depends upon an origin story such as provided by creatio ex nihilo. Such an origin story provides a metaphorical/theological support system. It also builds off of the understanding of the tabula rasa mind, which as I argued in the last chapter creates the universal subject by detaching that subject from its material body, as the God of creatio ex nihilo was detached from the creation. Furthermore, and more directly, it depends upon the Lockean concept of property, a concept that regards humans as stewards/managers/owners of the earth, which I argued in the
last chapter mimics the logic of God creating out of nothing and thereby owning all of creation. As stewards, the highest form of living up to the imago is cultivation and management of wild lands.
