‘붕괴’를 통해 형상화되는 타자윤리의 실패: 영화 <헤어질 결심> 내 주체의 욕망과 현실원칙 간의 충돌 = ‘Shattered’ as a Signifier and the Failure of Otherness Ethics: The Conflict between Desire and the Reality Principle in Decision to Leave

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study analyzes the narrative structure and its subjects in Decision to Leave(2022) by foregrounding the signifier ‘shattered’ as the central axis through which the failure of ethical relation to the Other is articulated. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to reduce ‘shattered’ to either the tragic end of love or a form of psychological breakdown, this study argues that the term generates multilayered meanings at the point where the subject's desire diverges from his ethical self-conception. Drawing on Freud's concepts of the reality principle and the pleasure principle, the study positions Jang Hae-jun as a divided subject situated at the boundary between these two principles and examines the structure of his desire and perception. On this theoretical basis, it further explores how a subject who foregrounds an ‘ethical self’ attempts to subsume the Other within his normative order, thereby suppressing the Other's alterity. In other words, the subject's gaze and identification with the Other—though grounded in his self-image as a moral agent—ultimately function as mechanisms of incorporation and control that confine the Other within his own interpretive framework. Moreover, within the relational tension between subjects, ‘shattered’ does not remain fixed in a singular meaning but emerges as a signifier that produces differentiated meanings according to each subject's position and structure of perception. For Song Seo-rae, ‘shattered’ is affectively embraced as an act of love and understanding that entails the dissolution of self-identity. For Jang Hae-jun, by contrast, it signifies the intrusion of repressed pleasure into the order of the reality principle and serves as a language that confesses the impossibility of fully reaching the Other. Through this asymmetry of signification surrounding the same term, the film reveals the ethical limitation of the modern subject who, governed by the reality principle as a principle of performance, ultimately fails to affirm the alterity of the Other. In Decision to Leave, therefore, ‘shattered’ functions as the linguistic marker of a moment in which love does not culminate in genuine understanding and acceptance of the Other but remains suspended in a state of frustrated relationality. By tracing this semantic and relational dynamic, this study proposes an interpretive framework for reconsidering the structural limits embedded within modern subjectivity and its ethical orientation toward the Other.