Bad Habits

Abstract

This article considers how racialised discourses of addiction have been mobilised in debates over the lawfulness of the Australian government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response Act 2007 (NTERA), or ‘Intervention’. After showing how academic support for the Intervention has become linked to questions about the legitimacy of Indigenous Knowledge, it considers whether the treatment of addiction is being posited as lying within or outside of values of justice and institutions of law. To address this question, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s essay, ‘Force of Law’. His reflections on Walter Benjamin’s writing on ‘bloodless genocide’ are used in conjunction with Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, ‘Epidemics of the Will’, to illuminate the racial politics of ‘intervention’. The conclusion turns to creative works by Fiona Foley and Romaine Moreton to engage with Indigenous Knowledge about willpower on the ground of Australian race relations - both past and present.

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