“아 바틀비여! 아 인간이여!”

정진만(Jin Man Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2012 비평과이론 Vol.17 No.1

This essay aims to investigate the diverse aspect of “negativity” and its ethico-political potentialities in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek focuses on the negative preference in Bartleby’s motto of refusal (“I would prefer not to”) arguing the significance of Bartleby’s ethical and political act to affirm “negativity.” For Žižek, negativity as a reconceptualization of Hegel’s dialectic signifies the incessant negation of the self-sameness (synthesis) that is assumed to be achieved by the negation of thesis, and works as the only hope of redemption. This study would explore Žižek’s such an idea of negativity, insurmountable gap and antagonism within itself, in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by examining the mutual relationship between Bartleby and other characters (lawyer-narrator, Turkey, and Nippers). In doing so, this approach would find Žižek’s idea of negativity at various levels, which is not fully explored by his own analysis because of his exclusive attention to Bartleby’s representative motto. First, this essay refers to Sigmund Freud’s metapsychology and Žižek’s another notion of the “parallax gap,” a key term in The Parallax View, in order to find the multiple aspects of negativity within the text. Arguably, the relationship between the lawyer-narrator and Bartleby can be understood as the relation of the parallax gap: the Ego/the Id, the pleasure principle/death drive, and repression/satisfaction. In this relationship, the latter is not simply the negation (resistance) of the former but the fundamental excess or “negativity,” as a (im-)possible condition of it. Next, this essay would focus on the narrator’s possibility of change from a flat character into a round (complex) one, as an evidence of the ethico-political impact by the Bartlebyian negativity. The narrator’s observation of the green and soft grass growing through the chasms at the Tombs and his remarks about his “emotions” in the grammatically plural form with regard to Bartleby implicate his self-distantiation from his previous egotistical and defensive attitude toward Bartleby. More important, the narrator’s belated disclosure of Bartleby’s past career at the Dead Letter Office suggests not only Bartleby’s own ethico-political identification (subjectivization) with the Dead Letter, an excess reminding us of the malfunction of the socio-symbolic network, but also the narrator’s similarly ethico-political awareness of the event, another basis of his possible sympathy with Bartleby.

테네시 윌리엄스의 『욕망이라는 이름의 전차』에 나타난 향유의 환상과 궁지, 그리고 남성 가부장중심주의

정진만(Jeong, Jin-Man) 한국현대정신분석학회 2021 현대정신분석 Vol.23 No.2

테네시 윌리엄스의 『욕망이라는 이름의 전차』에서 상실의 견딜 수 없는 현실로부터 도피해 환상에 의존하는 병약한 블랜치와 대조적으로, 스탠리는 의문의 여지없이 강건한 현실주의자로 받아들여져 왔다. 그러나 이 글은 향유를 다루는 데 있어서 스탠리가 블랜치보다 크거나 같은 환상을 품고 있다고 주장한다. 이 새로운 해석은 우리가 주이상스(향유)에 대한 라캉의 개념을 염두에 둘 때 가능하다. 라캉에게 있어서 주이상스는 상징계 안에서 주체의 지위를 떠맡는 대가로 금지된 것으로서 실재계에서는 애초부터 불가능한 것이다. 충만하고 완벽한 주이상스는 불가능한데도 불구하고, 역설적이게도 주체는 장애물만 제거하면 그것에 도달할 수 있는 것처럼 위장하기 위해 그 주이상스에 대한 장애물(금지)을 고안해 낸다. 따라서 장애물은 주이상스에 접근하는 데 필수적이게 된다. 여기에 주이상스의 환상과 궁지가 존재하며, 『욕망이라는 이름의 전차』의 스탠리가 그런 점을 예시하고 있다. 스탠리는 블랜치(주이상스와 남성 지배에 대한 장애물)를 자신의 남성중심적, 가부장적 영역에서 제거하기만 하면 블랜치의 달갑지 않은 개입으로 인해 잃게 된 것으로서 스텔라와의 결혼관계에서의 이전의 주이상스를 되찾을 수 있다는 환상에 빠진다. 이런 라캉적 접근은 나약한 블랜치가 패배하고 스탠리의 강건한 마초적 세계가 다시 안정을 되찾는다는 윌리엄스의 사회진화론적 재현이 향유에 대한 대중의 환상에 호소하는 사회-심리적 전략을 통해 남성 가부장중심주의를 떠받치고 있음을 밝힐 것이다. In Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley has been unquestionably accepted as a sturdy realist, as opposed to invalid Blanche who resorts to fantasy escaping from the insufferable reality of loss. However, this essay argues that, in his treatment of enjoyment, Stanley has fantasy either more than or as much as she has. This new interpretation is possible when we are reminded of Lacan’s notion of jouissance (enjoyment). For Lacan, jouissance, banned at the price of one’s assuming the subject’s position in the symbolic, is initially impossible in the real. Notwithstanding the impossibility of a full and perfect jouissance, paradoxically one elaborates an obstacle (prohibition) to jouissance so as to believe it as reachable if only one removes the obstacle. Thus, an obstacle becomes prerequisite to access jouissance. Here lie the fantasy and stalemate of jouissance, and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire exemplifies them: He fantasizes that he can recover his former jouissance in his marital relationship with Stella that is lost by Blanche’s unwelcome intervention, if only he gets rid of Blanche—an obstacle to jouissance and male dominance—out of his male-centered patriarchal territory. Such a Lacanian approach to the text would illuminate that Williams’s Social Darwinist representations of fragile Blanche’s defeat and the re-stabilization of Stanley’s robust macho world sustain male patriarchism through the socio-psychological strategy appealing to the public’s fantasy of enjoyment.

허먼 멜빌의 『사기꾼』에 나타나는 외양의 균열

정진만(Jin Man Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2011 비평과이론 Vol.16 No.1

This essay investigates Herman Melville’s epistemology of subjectivity and the world, revealed in his representations of “appearance” in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Unlike his previous work Moby-Dick, engaged significantly in Kantian philosophy despite the author’s cautioning against Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the transcendental truth, The Confidence-Man shows the author’s striking turn from his previous metaphysical, hierarchical, and binary frame of truth/appearance, embracing the latter as a new embodiment of truth, as implied in the subtitle of the work: “masquerade.” However, Melville’s recognition of appearance differs from postmodern simulacrum because his portrayal of “appearance” features its own inconsistency “immanent” in it. In order to explore pertinently the complexity of Melville’s epistemological implications of “appearance” in The Confidence-Man, this study is largely indebted to Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic arguments of “minimal difference,” commonly emphasized in their theories of (1) the inner disparity of eye/gaze, (2) the difference between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation, and (3) the logic of signifiers. This study helps recognize the author’s insightful perception of subjectivity and the world entangled with ideology as a veil covering the uncomfortable but undeniable real of antagonism and the relation of nonrelation.

루이스 어드릭의 『사랑의 묘약』에 나타나는 에로스의 정치성: 룰루와 마리를 중심으로

정진만 ( Jeong Jin Man ) 경희대학교 비교문화연구소 2018 비교문화연구 Vol.51 No.-

이 논문은 루이스 어드릭이 널리 호평 받은 소설 『사랑의 묘약』(1993)에 등장하는 두 여성인물(룰루 나나푸시와 마리 라자르 캐시포)에 초점을 맞추어, 북미 원주민이 ‘사라지는 사람들’이라는 오래되고 위험한 관념을 심문하고 와해시키는 저자의 정치적으로 저항적인 목소리를 탐구한다. 우선, 이 논문은 정부정책의 실행, 법, 종교, 문화 면에서 드러나는 미국 백인의 식민주의적 지배에 대항한 치페와족의 다층적 저항을 살펴보면서, 어드릭이 ‘사라지는 사람들’(‘명백한 운명’의 또 다른 표현)에 대한 의식이 근거 없음을 이야기하는 방식을 탐구한다. 둘째, 이 논문은 프로이트와 마르쿠제가 ‘에로스’(억압적 문명이 야기하는 위기에 대한 대안으로서 삶을 통합하고 유지하려는 에너지)에 대해 제시한 성찰을 참조하여, 룰루와 마리의 사랑의 포용력을 중심으로 치페와족의 삶과 유산이 유지되고 부활하는 것에 대한 저자의 비전을 밝힌다. 치페와 인디언보호구역에 가해지는 파괴적이고 억압적인 식민주의적 상황에도 불구하고, 룰루와 마리가 이들 자신과 더불어 부족공동체의 사랑과 유대를 강화하고 상호간의 갈등을 봉합하는 통합력은 역사의식에 기초한 어드릭의 ‘에로스’의 정치성을 밝혀줄 것이다. This essay explores Louise Erdrich’s politically resistant voice which interrogates and disrupts the long-lasting, pernicious misbelief about Native Americans as ‘vanishing people’. This essay chiefly focuses on the two female characters―Lulu Nanapush and Marie Lazarre Kashpaw―in the author’s widely acclaimed novel Love Medicine (1993). First, illustrating the Chippewas’ multifaceted resistances against white Americans’ colonialist dominance disclosed in their enforcement of governmental policy, law, religion, and culture, this essay investigates how Erdrich does not stop telling her story that the idea of ‘vanishing people’―another version of ‘Manifest Destiny’―is unfounded. Second, by referring to Freud’s and Marcuse’s speculation on ‘Eros’―the great unifying energy that preserves all life―as an alternative to the predicament caused by an oppressive civilization, this essay illuminates Erdrich’s vision of sustaining and regenerating the Chippewas’ tribal life and heritage that center on the embracing power of love reified in Lulu and Marie. Their undying energy consolidating their communal love and ties, despite the destructive, oppressive colonialist milieu inflicted on the Chippewa Indian reservation, sheds light on the author’s politics of ‘Eros’ predicated tightly upon her historical consciousness.

적극적 생존을 위한 뫼비우스의 띠: 어드릭의 『라운드 하우스』에 제시된 법과 아니시나아베 정의의 관계

정진만 ( Jeong Jin Man ) 경희대학교 비교문화연구소 2021 비교문화연구 Vol.63 No.-

이 글은 루이스 어드릭의 『라운드 하우스』가 북미원주민 아닌 남성들이 원주민 여성들에게 가하는 성폭력으로부터 이 여성들을 보호하는 문제와 관련해 미국의 법처리 절차에 존재하는 사법권의 혼란을 어떻게 심문하는지, 그리고 어떻게 법적 환경의 변화를 통해 원주민 여성들의 능동적 생존을 그리는지 탐색한다. 주장하건대, 어드릭은 린든(제럴딘을 강간한 백인)에 대한 결함 있는 법적 처리에서 드러나듯이 정의/법의 양립 불가능함에 대해 경고할 뿐 아니라 전통적/현대적 부족법의 조정, 그리고 불의의 연방 인디언법들을 바꿔야 한다고 압박하는 것을 통해 법적 환경을 변화시키는 비전을 그린다. 이 연구를 위해, 우선 이 글은 오지브웨 부족 판사 바질 쿠츠(현대부족법을 대표하고 그 법적 권한이 일련의 연방 인디언법들에 의해 심각하게 약화된, 피해자의 남편)와 조(어머니를 보호하기 위한 불가피한 선택으로서 전통적인 아니시나아베 정의 혹은 위인디구 정의에 호소하는 피해자의 아들) 사이의 긴장 관계에 초점을 맞춘다. 이는 린든, 즉 식민주의적 탐욕과 폭력을 구현하는 만족할 줄 모르는 백인 위인디구를 제거해야 한다고 느끼는 조에 대해 저자가 공감하는 태도를 이해할 수 있게 해준다. 둘째, 이 글은 조가 법적 관점의 차원에서 바질과 연결되었다고 느끼게 해주는 뫼비우스의 띠로서의 타이의 은유를 밝힌다. 이 은유를 통해 독자는 공동체의 지원 속에서 향후 부족 법률가로서의 조가 미국의 입법자들로 하여금 북미원주민의 적극적 생존을 위한 목소리를 들을 수 있도록 모든 노력을 기울이는 것을 상상해볼 수 있다. This essay explores how Louise Erdrich’s The Round House interrogates a jurisdictional maze in the US legal procedures concerning the protection of Native Women from pervasive non-Indian male sexual violence against them. Moreover, it also explores how the novel envisions their active survival by transforming the legal milieu. Arguably, the author questions the incompatibility of justice/law as shown in the deficient legal treatments of Linden (a white rapist of Geraldine). Furthermore, she advises how the legal environment should change through the negotiation of traditional/modern tribal laws. In addition, the author mentions why the unjust federal Indian laws should be altered urgently. For this study, first, this essay focuses on the tension between an Ojibwe tribal judge, Bazil Coutts (the victim’s husband, a representative of modern tribal law, whose legal power was severely declined by a series of federal Indian laws) and Joe (the victim’s son who appealed for traditional Anishinaabe justice or Wiindigoo justice, which was an unavoidable solution for protecting his mother). The author shows a sympathetic attitude toward Joe as he seriously wanted to remove Linden, the insatiable white Wiindigoo with colonial greed and violence. Second, this essay elucidates the metaphor of tie as a moebius strip, which allows Joe to feel connected to Bazil in terms of their legal perspectives. Through the metaphor, the reader envisions Joe as a future tribal lawyer, who is supported by his community and will do his best to make American lawmakers hear his appeal for restoring the Natives’ sovereignty.

“아 바틀비여! 아 인간이여!”: 허먼 멜빌의 「필경사 바틀비」에 나타나는 부정성

정진만(Jin Man Jeong) 한국현대정신분석학회 2012 한국라깡과현대정신분석학회 학술발표대회 프로시딩 Vol.2012 No.6

19세기 마운틴 맨 유령의 현대적 귀환: 『레버넌트: 죽음에서 돌아온 자』에 나타난 백인 남성성

정진만 ( Jin Man Jeong ) 서울대학교 미국학연구소 2017 미국학 Vol.40 No.1

This essay explores racism, male-centrism, and nationalism (un)covered in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant, focusing on its way of invoking white masculinity. Portraying the hero, Hugh Glass, romantically as a white affectionate toward Native Americans and mixed-bloods, The Revenant is reticent in expressing the historical reality of Glass as an aggressive Indian fighter who contributed to westward expansion. Even worse, the film silently instills the long-lasted racist (mis)belief about Native Americans (plus mixed-bloods) as the ‘Vanishing People’ by making an unbridgeable distance between Glass and his Pawnee wife (and his mixed-blood son). This essay would allow us to see the film’s strategy forging white Americans’ masculine robustness within the levels of gender, race, and nation, where other racial and national groups are characterized as effeminate and immoral in a complex way.

허먼 멜빌의 『타이피』와『오무』에 나타나는 “고상한/천한 야만인”의 수사학과 국가주의, 식민주의의 목소리

정진만 ( Jin Man Jeong ) 미국소설학회 2015 미국소설 Vol.22 No.3

This study aims to explore how Herman Melville`s early travel writings, Typee (1846) and its sequel, Omoo (1847), on the one hand, contribute to the consolidation of American national identity as democratic people and, at the same time, appeal to contemporary colonialist impulse, focusing on his usage of two contradictory conceptions-the ‘Noble Savage’ and the ‘Ignoble Savage’-in representing the natives of the South Seas. First, this study investigates in what way Melville`s seemingly sympathetic portrayals of the aboriginal people in the South Seas are employed not only to criticize the imperial decadence, but to ingest and appropriate the virtues of so-called the “Noble Savage” as republican virtues. This study would uncover that the strategy of white Americans` association with the natives along with primitivism undeniably plays the significant role in forging national selfhood as democratic people of freedom, innocence, and simplicity, while negating European corrupt civilization and imperialism. Next, focusing attention on Tommo`s racially-charged colonialist usage of the rhetoric of the ‘Ignoble Savage’ which regards the natives as the animalistic, threatening Other, this study inquires how the previous association with the natives is in turn, or simultaneously, disapproved as a negative way of constructing American identity as civilized people. This study would allow us to comprehend Melville`s self-contradictory association and dissociation with the natives in his early novels are imbricated in a complex way concerning the matter of establishing national consciousness of the United States predicated on nationalism, and are not safely removed as well from his contemporary impulses and ideas of colonialism.

어드릭의 『비둘기 재앙』에 제시된 부족 정의와 역사적 정의: 회복적 성격을 중심으로

정진만 ( Jeong Jin Man ) 경희대학교 글로벌인문학술원 2022 비교문화연구 Vol.67 No.-

이 글은 루이스 어드릭의 『비둘기 재앙』이 오지브웨족이 겪은 식민주의 역사와 관련해 정의의 문제를 어떻게 다루고 또 그것의 의의가 무엇인지 탐구한다. 이 글은 이 소설이 사법적 차원뿐 아니라 역사적 차원에서 주요 모티프로서 ‘회복적 정의’를 제시한다고 논의한다. 이 논의를 위해, 우선 이 글은 아니시나아베 부족 정의의 근간으로서 ‘미노-비마디지윈’(좋은 삶)이라는 아니시나아베 전통의 사유를 참조하면서, 이 부족 정의가 오지브웨 부족 판사 쿠츠의 조정법정에서 어떻게 실현되는지 살핀다. 둘째, 이 글은 이 소설이 오랫동안 오인된 역사적 진실을 드러내기 위해 그리고 북미원주민에 대한 백인들의 집단적 폭력을 비판하기 위해 기억의 중요성을 어떻게 강조하는지 밝힌다. 『비둘기 재앙』은 회복적 정의에 대한 다층적이고 복합적인 접근을 통해 원주민의 주권 회복, 치유, 끈질긴 생존의 비전을 그린다 할 수 있다. This essay explores how Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves deals with the issue of justice concerning the colonial history of the Ojibwes and what its significance is. This study argues that the novel provides ‘reparative justice’ as a leitmotif at an historical level as well as at a judicial level. First, this study explores how Anishinaabe tribal justice is carried out in Ojibwe judge Coutts’ peacemaking court, using the Anishinaabe traditional concept of mino-bimaadiziwin (the Good Life) as its foundation. Second, this study elucidates how the novel highlights the importance of remembering in order to disclose long-misconceived historical truth and to accuse whites of “mob violence” against Native Americans. The novel’s multifaceted and intricate approach to reparative justice anticipates the Native Americans regaining their own sovereignty, healing, and persistent survival.

경계 넘어서기의 한계 : 차일드와 쿠퍼의 소설에 나타나는 이종혼의 가족형성과 혼종성 신화

정진만(Jin Man Jeong) 19세기영어권문학회 2013 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.17 No.2

This essay investigates the politics of cultural and territorial expansionism in the representations of miscegenation and cross-cultural hybridity, in Lyida Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823). In Child’s Hobomok, in the early colonial period Mary’s seemingly radical choice of intermarriage with Hobomok, a native in Massachusetts, cannot transcend safety the taboo of crossing the racial/ethnic boundary prevalent in Mary’s and/or Child’s age. In terms of mutual acculturation between Hobomok and Mary, the author biasedly foregrounds that Hobomok is Europeanized rather than the other way around, which means crossing the boundary does not make white Americans’ identity unstable at all. Additionally, Child portrays Hobomok’s later renunciation of his marital status as an inevitable course prepared for a doomed Indian. Little Homomok, a hybrid progeny symbolizing the (imaginary) reconciliation between the two racial parties, eventually loses his Indian heritage. In The Pioneers, similarly, unifying myth in the formative period of the United States in provided not only in the symbolic miscegenation between Elizabeth Temple (a representative of white pioneers in newly-built New York) and Oliver Edwards (a symbolic descendant of the vanishing Delawares) but also in the hybridization of several figures like Natty Bumppo, Oliver, and Indian John Mohigan. However, it turns out to be a rhetorical gesture imaginatively solving some historical tension from the whites’ encroachments of Indians’ lands. As in the case of Hobomok, crossing the boundary in The Pioneers does not actually endanger white Americans’ identity in terms of blood and culture, which testifies the author’s valorizing of asymmetrical and hegemonical relationship between the two racial groups. More than that, Cooper’s portrayals of symbolic intermarriage between Elizabeth and Oliver elaborately pave way for rationalizing white Americans’ entitlement of Indians’ land. Besides, this essay identifies that Indianized Natty’s romantic impulse to escape from the restrains of the Eastern civilized world is weirdly converted into a pathfinder’s desire for westward expansion. Also, this essay examines how Natty’s ostensibly sympathizing attitude toward a degenerated Indian John is involved with expansionist rhetoric often employed by a lot of Jacksonian politicians who campaigned for Indian removal into the West. This study would help us to understand that Child and Cooper conceal and reveal simultaneously expansionist rhetoric in diverse ways, in conformity with their contemporary (mis) belief of Manifest Destiny, in spite of (or more precisely because of ) their construction of unifying “myth” between white Americans and Native Americans.