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Aesthetic jurisprudence must take seriously the myth of community,¹ the antagonistic of intimacy; love and death.² Myth, however, must also be seized in its peculiarity. Rather than affirming coherence or the pattern of the past, it is a discourse that undoes itself. Indeed, myth does not provide a comforting story of belonging and foundations, it reminds us of the antagonisms of the human condition and the problematic nature of thought itself.

This chapter is concerned with the question that is indigeneity, and its situation within literary and juridical imaginaries. As a persistently unsettling presence, indigeneity appears outside the law, before the law and beyond the law – indeed, in Derrida's terms, as an evocation of the unconditional. Whereas the law determines indigeneity to recognise it, I propose that its expression in Indigenous literature evokes a Derridean unconditional to which the law must perpetually, if momentarily, respond. This chapter elaborates a conception of indigeneity, as expressed in Indigenous literature, as disruptive and deconstructive of non-Indigenous law, opening its narratives to transformation.