폭력과 법의 피안: 정치적 주체의 탄생 = Beyond Violence and Law: Making of a Political Subjectivity

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The notion of violence becomes a hot catchword in the terrain of recent political and theoretical discourses, seemingly culminating in the proliferation of filmic representations. Behind such ardent interests in violence lies a common conception that violence is, in itself, not a matter of theoretical concern: there is no outside of violence. It is the very prevalence and the inevitability of violence in modern society and the concomitant inability of the resistant subject not to he violent that dominate the question of violence. Furthermore, violence in reality always manifests itself through the medium of law and moral relations. Whether in the subversion of state power, a prevailing and exclusive agent of legitimate violence, or in the rightful revenge against individual violences, every radical effort necessarily confronts the ambiguity of law and justice. What is at stake concerning violence is threefold possibilities: to think violence without a binary frame of just means and just end, to escape from the vicious circle of revenge and resentment, to figure out a really political subjectivity beyond the realm of law and legitimate violence. Walter Benjamin`s concept of divine violence, unlike Arendt`s distinction of violence as a means from proper political power or Sorel`s advocation of proletarian general strike as truly revolutionary, suggests a possibility of political subject whose sovereign violence goes beyond all kinds of mythic manifestations of violence via law. Slavoj Zizek`s hold identification of divine violence with actual historical movements of exemplary violence follows, in essence, the spirit of Benjamin but diverges in his configuration of abstinent subject in capitalist society. But as is represented in Boknam`s murder in a recent Korean movie Bedeviled, we can often configure a process of making a truly political subject. Her relentless acts of murdering makes her a sovereign subject who neither resorts to law and legitimacy, nor becomes a tragic hero, nor succumbs to sensational joy of revenge. She signifies an act of disturbing and demolishing the very network of violence and law, thus nullifying the whole social system of signification itself. She turns herself into a symptom of violence in its pure extremity, telling that the only solution to violence is to oppose it with divine violence.