지젝의 외상과 바틀비의 정치학

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2012 비평과이론 Vol.17 No.2

This paper aims to explore Slavoj Žižek’s notion of trauma as a political category. Psychological trauma is usually interpreted as something one cannot assimilate into one’s consciousness. Therefore, it repeats itself indefinitely, returning to haunt the subject. Trauma and politics seem to have nothing in common, but Žižek shows the notional similarity between trauma and political revolution. To Lacan, the constitution of subject requires the entrance into the world of language and the symbolic order. These prerequisites cause the primary trauma and the barred subject. Spiltting(/) itself would be the very possibility of subject and the place of a void signifying nothing. Žižek thus defines “trauma” as a shocking encounter which disturbs the immersion into one’s life-world, a violent intrusion of something which does not fit in the existing symbolic order. Žižek’s trauma anticipates the rise of a post-traumatic subject as a new and revolutionary one, which is the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected and unintegrated. This notion of trauma has recently become more political with multi-level connotations, connecting it with political revolution. In its political mode, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is a kind of arche, the first stage to cause a real change and the underlying principle that sustains the entire movement. Although the figure of Bartleby falls short of a radical subject, it is true that Zizek’s new perspective is a significant shift in the way one interprets trauma.

“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.

The Dilemmas of the Border Theory of José David Saldívar and Gloria Anzaldúa

Myoung Ah Shin 한국비평이론학회 2011 비평과이론 Vol.16 No.2

The intent of this paper is to study how the border theory represented by José David Saldívar and Gloria Anzaldúa is criticized for its dilemma. Slavoj Žižek criticizes multiculturalists’ advocacy of cultural differences, which the border theorists emphasize. Žižek’s dissatisfaction lies in multicultualrists’ failure to focus on the economic class issues in their criticisms. Žižek regards multiculturalists’ openness and their critiques are in default due to their displacement of the issue of class struggle with cultural issues. This paper focuses on the ways this border theory is attacked for its culturalism. Just as Saldívar focuses on the borderlands of the Southwest as “the Lost Land” after the Guadaleupe-Hidalgo Treaty in 1848, Gloria Anzaldúa also regards this area as the homeland of the Chicano/s, the American people of Mestizaje. Saldívar is accused of lacking political awareness of class struggle with his praise of mobility and in-betweenness of the border. Lao-Montes specifically criticizes Saldívar for his lack of concern for the colored people in the States, thus committing the American mainstream ideologies of racism. As for the Chicano studies of Gloria Anzaldúa, she is a harsh critic of white supremacy of American main stream ideology and its gender biases as well. Anzaldúa’s use of mestizaje is a mode similar to Saldívar’s borderlands of in-betweenness. However, Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson regard that Anzaldúa commits colonialism by insisting on the Spanish American writing as “a final destination for all world writing” and “othering” the indigenous culture. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson also criticize Anzaldúa’s border theory for her “demonization and repression of a presumed white or Anglo culture”. The rest of the paper will pay attention to overcoming these dilemmas by way of the political logic of Zapatistas.

Traversing the Social Fantasy of Detective Stories in Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant"

김혜진(Hye jin Kim) 한국비평이론학회 2015 비평과이론 Vol.20 No.1

본 논문은 마크 트웨인의 "도둑맞은 흰코끼리"를 대상으로 탐정소설이 사회정의에 대한 사회적 환상을 조작함으로써 사회 부패와 불의를 은폐하는 역할을 수행하고 있음을 슬라보예 지젝의 "환상스크린" 개념을 사용하여 논의한다. 트웨인은 자신의 단편 소설 속에서, 존재하지도 않는 범죄, 무능한 탐정, 그리고 해결없는 결말 등을 통하여 전통적 탐정소설의 장치를 조롱하고 전복한다. 영국제국으로 보내는 국가간 선물로서의 흰코끼리의 실종/도난은 국제관계를 뒤흔들 수 있는 심각한 범죄행위로 정의되지만, 소설이 진행됨에 따라 실종된 코끼리는 그 의미가 고정되지 않고 끊임없이 변화한다. 결국 흰코끼리는 국제사회의 화해와 안전이라는 사회적 이미지를 파괴하고, 원래의 의미에 반복해서 구멍을 내는 텅 빈 기표이며 존재하지 않는 환상적 존재일 뿐이다. 그리고 소설은 코끼리의 소재나 범인의 처벌이라는 전통적인 탐정소설의 결말에서 떠나 부패한 경찰과 의뢰인의 파산으로 이야기를 마무리한다. 이러한 결말을 제시함으로써, 트웨인은 탐정소설에서 통상적으로 제시되는 범죄와 부조리의 현실에서 회복된 안정된 사회는 사실상 우리 사회 체제를 지탱하기 위해 위조된 것임을 세계이며, 19세기 말까지 듀팡과 셜록 홈즈로 대표되는 영웅으로서의 탐정의 이미지가 사회적 부조리와 폭력을 감추는 환상스크린에 지나지 않음을 드러낸다. 트웨인은 19세기 말 유행했던 탐정소설의 장치를 사용하여, 탐정이 구현해 낸 사회정의가 조작된 사회적 환상에 지나지 않음을 폭로하여 탐정소설의 환상스크린에 구멍을 내고 환상 가르기를 시도하고 있는 것이다. Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant" satirizes detective fiction to expose what Slavoj Žižek calls "fantasmatic screen," a hiding mechanism that conceals social disruption and injustice by creating a social fantasy about a just society. Unlike traditional detective narratives, this story is based upon a non-existent crime, incompetent detectives, and an inconclusive solution. Although the loss of the elephant, a royal gift to the British Empire, is considered a serious crime that would cause a discord in international relations, the narrative exposes that the elephant is only an empty signifier that is eventually reduced to an absurdity, creating a hole in the image of a perfect society. The ending even reveals the cruel truth that the perfectly restored image of society at the end of detective fiction is only fabricated to sustain our social system--a fantasmatic screen which hides injustice and mayhem. Twain also shows that the detective, usually a heroic figure that embodies social justice, is in fact an agent of the status-quo who fabricates the illusion of logic to prevent us from realizing that society is unjust. Twain borrows the conventions of the detective stories to deconstruct the purpose of the genre, thereby tearing down the fantasmatic screen and exposing that social justice is nothing but a social fantasy that is created by the genre itself.

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.

벤야민의 「폭력비판」에 대하여

김지영(Jiyoung Kim) 한국비평이론학회 2013 비평과이론 Vol.18 No.2

This paper explores Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and a few critical writings on it by Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek. Benjamin's essay on violence has been a seminal work influential to many scholars and all the more important to critics of postmodern society where state power and capitalism together contain people's potential to act. We can draw the answer to how to act from Benjamin's writing and various criticism on it. Benjamin distinguishes between mythic violence as the founding violence and divine violence as the annihilating violence of destructive law. Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake and divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. Žižek says the Benjaminian "divine violence" should be conceived as divine not in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision with no cover in the big Other. Butler argues that Divine violence is unleashed against the coercive force of the legal framework, against the accountability that binds a subject to a specific legal system and stops that very subject from developing a critical point of view on that legal system. Agamben says that what we can do is to have the door of law closed, like a countryman in Kafka's "Before the Law," and bring a real state of exception as opposed to the state of exception in which we live. In brief, we can know how to act only when divine violence annihilates mythic violence imprinted on our body and mind.

문학, 사회, 사회적인 것

김성호(Sung ho Kim) 서울여자대학교 인문과학연구소 2013 인문논총 Vol.26 No.-

In literature today, society is increasingly invisible. Apart from the neo-liberal drive to dismantle nation-states and prioritize economic efficiency, the disappearance of society has something to do with the historical inability of literary theory to imagine 'the social.' Lukács, for instance, articulated persuasively the characteristics of the artistic reflection of social reality, but he was inept at dealing with the social relations of artistic subjects. Žižek try to remind us of the sociality of art and literature while redefining the social. For him, the social presents itself as the Real that structures subjectivity. This implies an aesthetics which defies both reflectionism and expression-ism. A consideration of the collective agency, however, seems fatally missing. Rancière offers a plausible alternative when he holds that literature is about redistributing the sensible and rebuilding a common world. The social, in his perspective, is not so much a structure as a permanent process of reaffirming the 'intelligence of anybody.' The essence of the sociality of literature lies in its function ("liaison-function," as Leavis called it) of attaining what may be called an in-between universality of intelligence, as opposed to an overarching, homogenizing universality. In literature, our Mitsein is revealed; through literature, a community emerges.

유령과 정의

이택광(Taek-Gwang Lee) 한국비평이론학회 2009 비평과이론 Vol.14 No.1

It is not unusual to regard Jacques Derrida, the founder of Deconstruction, as de-Marxified philosopher, who attacks the any doctrine of politics, not to mention Marxism. However, the essay considers another aspect of his theory, related to the alternative politics in terms of the ethic. What must be stressed is that Derrida adapts Walter Benjamin's perspective and develops the political concept of justice in terms of the ethic. Therefore, the aim of the essay is to explore Derrida's conceptualization of justice in his formulation of the ethic. He involves the traditional discourse of politics by raising the argument of a spectre and claims that mourning, a spectre, and justice are relevant to each other, the binding those is the very point of thinking justice against the conventional concept of the relationship between justice and law. The essay shed light on the way in which Derrida reads Marx with this own perspective, and argues that the political, the one in which we can overcome the ossified status of politics by introducing the messianic dimension into the political discourse-it is the very attempt that Theodor W. Adorno defends the category of critique in terms of the aesthetic. From this perspective, it is not wrong to say that Derrida's politics is firmly constructed on the context of Western radical philosophy.

라클라우의 적대와 급진적 민주주의

양종근(Jongkeun Yang) 한국영미어문학회 2011 영미어문학 Vol.- No.100

The purpose of this paper is to trace Ernesto Laclau’s theory of ‘radical democracy.’ After the ‘Cold War’ the world is going straightly toward globalized capitalism, called New Liberalism. Under the global triumph of capitalism, democracy is on the skids, and freedom and equality is under threat. In the meanwhile, socialism is no longer accepted as an alternative social system of capitalism. It is this instance that Laclau intervenes in with his famous concepts such as ‘hegemony,’ ‘antagonism,’ and, ‘radical democracy.’ He attempts to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. On the one hand, he opposes persistently the global tendency toward capitalism. He also rejects the proletariat as a ‘universal’ class for the Revolution, on the other hand. In stead of the Marxist orthodox notions of class contradiction or class struggle, he introduces ‘antagonism(s)’ of the social. His ‘antagonism(s)’ reflects the over-determined social contradictions and various anti-capitalistic movements such as green, feminist, racial, local movements. He argues that ‘antagonism’ is constitutive of human society and that radical democracy is an effect(or a process) of its articulation. The model of radical democracy maintains the idea of an expanded version of democracy in more aspects of social life and of an attempt for constitution and multiplication of new identities.

최인훈 소설에 나타난 거울 모티프의 양상과 함의

김주언(Kim, Joo-eon) 한국언어문학회 2011 한국언어문학 Vol.78 No.-

This paper looks into the phase of development about the mirror motif from Choi In-hun’s novel, “The Gray Man” and besides explores the ultimate implications of it. It is hardly consider all problems causing from the process of subject’s subjectivation shown in “The Gray Man”, may begin with the failure of dialectical unification between ego and real world(or between person and society). The hero of this novel has dominant personality which desires to have more difference than dialectical identity. The aspects of split subject can be understood in the context from denial of these identity. The hero is the being who reflects himself through mirror or window from beginning to end. He, a prospective writer, is not only a split subject but also an aesthetic. The mirror is the something that expands his world by splitting. It tears into a pieces. And it faces to fate to be broken by increasing inner conflicts in him. However this broken mirror would also reflect the portrait of literature. In other words, it can reflect the literature itself which is layed as the others of general discourse outside of ideology. The literature would be shown as an another one from the outside of literature through mirror motif. This paper concludes the literature showed like this could agreeable by desire of hero's difference. It is because finally, the aesthetic subject looks into mirror which reflects himself from the outside of strategies of containment of ideology.