초록
This essay aims to provide a critical view of South Korean intellectuals and unification policy makers who stress the undisputed role of nationalism, across the diverse ideo-logical spectrums, in constructing ‘inter-Korea’ reconciliation in South Korean society. They contend that meanings of counter-hegemonic practice against anti-North Korean ideology are already determined within the politics of national identification. However, this mode of thinking remains a predicament of the South Korean public’s critical engagement with the way in which a moral claim to national identification is conflated with inter-Korea economic collaboration along the lines of neo-liberalism. But I also want to illuminate the connection that neo-liberalism and new conservatism in South Korea make in the attempt to help anti-North Koreanism survive democratic challenges. My critical evaluation of the connection suggests a discursive condition of what I call ‘inter-Korea sociability’, in which the South Korean public can appropriate social and historical claims about the inter-Korea relationship that range from the atrocious and violent events in the war to the so-called North Korean human rights crisis. I argue that two Koreas’ reconciliation can come through resisting the romanticization of Koreans’ own normative commitment to idealized national authenticity and liberal human rights.
키워드
National Reconciliation, North Korea, Nationalism, Otherization, Human Rights
RECONCILIATION AS A COMMITMENT TO CRITICAL ANALYSIS FROM WITHIN US
A challenge to anti-North Koreanism in South Korea has still been an obviously daunting political-cultural project in spite of the political liberalization of South Korean society since the late 1980s. Whenever any radical democratic politics is posed, its legitimacy and acceptability is measured by an ideological ruler of the reified collective memory politics of the Korean War that prescribes the reasoning of waging a war with communist North Koreans. The ideological integrity of any thought and activity related to North Korean issues is still censored through a very limited access to the historic event of the war. Those who want to challenge the ideological manipulation inevitably have to rely on the manipulated contents, because we would otherwise always have to be in an endless pursuit of truthful contents. This Nietzschean metaphor of a confrontation with our world speaks not to the pessimism that we do not have a truth about our history but to a commitment to critical analysis from within us.
Drawing on the critical endeavor, this essay aims to provide a critical view of South Korean intellectuals and unification policy makers who stress the undisputed role of nationalism, across the diverse ideological spectrums, in constructing ‘inter-Korea’ reconciliation in South Korean society. They contend that meanings of counter-hegemonic practice against anti-North Korean ideology are already determined within the politics of national identification. However, this mode of thinking remains a predicament of the South Korean public’s critical engagement with the way in which a moral claim to national identification is conflated with inter-Korea economic collaboration along the lines of neoliberalism. But I also want to illuminate the connection that neo-liberalism and new conservatism in South Korea make in the attempt to help anti-North Koreanism survive democratic challenges. My critical evaluation of the connection suggests a discursive condition of what I call ‘inter-Korea sociability’, in which the South Korean public can appropriate social and historical claims about the inter-Korean relationship that range from the atrocious and violent events in the war to the so-called North Korean human rights crisis. Here, I define inter-Korea sociability as the making of diverse discursive spaces that do not undermine or exploit our abilities to challenge anti-North Koreanism and to offer opportunities for Koreans to inquire into the established status of inter-Korean historical, political, and cultural events. By breaking down the questionable aura of self-evidence explaining inter-Korean relations, the idea of inter-Korea sociability helps Koreans expose themselves to, and participate in, the pluralized narratives of the inter-Korean relationship.
The South Korean public has realized and challenged the problems of neoliberalism in domestic economic reform, especially since the national economic crisis in the late 1990s
We can certainly create a new environment of unification through the two inter-Korea projects, in which the Kaesung Industrial Park in North Korea [the joint venture combining North Korean labor with South Korean capital] is made as environment-friendly residential and industrial manufacture space as well as a site of cultural civil society. In the North-South free trade area, owing to the transfer of knowledge and skills by South Korean experts in business management, engineering, and socialcultural administration, North Koreans can transform themselves into technocrats who can facilitate the transition of North Korea from a closed society into an open society. (
This proposition is implicitly predicated upon the smug idea of ‘soft power’, in which knowledge and values in cultural and economic practice as ‘global public goods’ come to be the best means of rehabilitating ‘a more general inability to respond to modernity’
The traces of the Korean nation manifested in the politics of national identification are integral to maintaining the territorial boundary through which North Korea is undoubtedly yet problematically imagined as a geo-political space of uncivilization
TWO CRITICAL DIMENSIONS OF ‘INTER-KOREA’
If we continue to be obsessed with the idea of recovering the project of building up a nation-state for the purpose of recasting the meaning of ‘inter-Korea’ in national reconciliation, we will confront two critical problems among others. First, especially, South Korean critical intellectuals and policymakers who draw on
When we say that we should overcome the regime of the national division, it does not necessarily mean that we must get out of the capitalist world-system, because it is unthinkable that forms of our existence are possible outside the world-system.
Although explicitly this meaning of ‘inter-Korea’ seems not to subscribe to the authoritarian anti-North Korean ideology that prevailed during the cold war decades, its emphasis on the institutionalization of a (neo-)liberal economic regime in a future unified Korean nation-state sidesteps problems fundamentally embedded in, and persistently emerging from, the world-system. The
As a consequence, it is no surprise that this political claim of ‘inter-Korea’ carries with itself a serious problem when the South Korean public engages in the so-called North Korean human rights crisis. Far from making a progressive agenda of the human rights issue, it would only help to leave little opportunity for the public to critically respond to the neo-liberal reality that North Korean settlers in South Korean society have faced in the flexible labor market in South Korea
Second, the idea of reconciliation cultivated through critically engaging with political violence materially manifested in historical tragedies
For example,
As Andreas
Walter Benjamin (1979, 129) was one of the critical thinkers theorizing the enactment of self-experience, posing the idea of ‘more sober children, who possess in technology [of war] not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness’. Out of devastating material and moral havoc, such as the cult of war from the First World War, Benjamin was calling for, as an ethical attitude toward post-war life, ‘the great opportunity of the loser…to shift the fight to another sphere’ (Benjamin 1979, 124). For Benjamin, ‘another sphere’ does not suggest an idyllic terrain in which the distinction between the past and the present as the act of reflecting on the pain of war is dissolved, but it would be rather a distinctive place of hope for historical redemption to intransigently resist a mystified reconciliation between the past and the present.
As Martin
2 It is instructive to point out that the reification of ‘inter-Korea’ under the economic arrangements of national collaboration has, to some extent, resulted from a critical effort of selfexperience whose main collective manifestation was the Minjung movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The democratization movements helped the South Korean public create spheres to reclaim their experience with North Korea and unification issues. But it also produced normative discourses prescribing what the nation should be and how two Koreas could fit into the principle of national identification. It is true that this self-experience began to be institutionalized for the economic arrangements, especially when many activists from the democratic movement came to power in the Kim Tae-jung (1997–2002) and No Mu-hyŏn (2003–2008) governments that intensified the economic policy of transnational capitalism
TOWARD A POSSIBILITY OF INTER-KOREA SOCIABILITY
My challenge to the neo-liberal and new conservative politics, with respect to the historical tragedy and political violence, is concerned with the reclaiming of inter-Korea sociability through which the Korean public can be discursively engaged in a politics of reconciliation. I argue with Benjamin, as discussed above, that this politics of reconciliation involve a deliberate discursive space in which the public can effectively enact and expand the practice of self-experience about historical claims by tracing historical events. The enactment and expansion can be explored through discovering a mode of contemplation outside the universe of the archival—ideologically institutionalized—knowledge of North Korea and tragic historical/political inter-Korean events. It can also be examined by claiming space in which Koreans can gather to share happiness of life, engage in political debate, and develop ethical accountability for life—not in the way in which North Koreans turn into a permanent enemy anomalous to the authentic national culture including the idea of the inheritance of pure bloodedness. In short, selfexperience invokes an alternative, testing ground for inter-Korea sociability. For this, one may want to suggest recent non-governmental, inter-Korean collaborations that aim to restore historical heritage from the Koguryŏ and Koryŏ periods. While attempting to refute China’s claim to its ownership of the history of Kojosŏn, which is called
(1) The Otherizing of North Koreans
I would like to elaborate on the notion of self-experience in terms of how it can be used to articulate a claim of inter-Korea sociability resisting the Otherizing of North Koreans. I define the Otherizing of North Koreans as the discursive formation of the incessant purification of
As such, the Otherization in the preoccupation with the nation’s authenticity intrinsically implicates a strong presumption that the recovery of national authenticity is the unitary precondition for inter-Korea reconciliation. The idea of the Other of North Koreans is a manifestation of the South’s political desire to restore the loss of the northern land of the Korean nation
The greater motivation for national authenticity in the photographical and textual representation of North Koreans in the 1972 inter-Korea talk events in P’yŏngyang provided the South Korean public with exclusive purview over the Other of North Koreans. For example, in travelogues after the visit to P’yŏngyang, eyewitness reports displayed moral authority and nostalgic authenticity of the nation while conjuring up an exotic curiosity about the scenes:
In this idiosyncratic city in which there are apartments opposite the government office buildings and again apartments opposite the theater and again and again...We were anxiously driving down the street through the monotonous repetition of urban design. However, we were still busy photographing them. (“Ikŏt i Pukhan ida! [This is North Korea!]”)
We have a striking anxiety about North Korea as a military camp society…Uniformly styled apartments, no sign posts and advertisements on them…[This all seems to amount to] North Koreans’ communist consciousness, which is devoid of something we [the Korean nation] should share, but with that consciousness, they would look always prompt and mindful of public orders imposed by the government. (“Pukhan esŏ 101 sigan, 5-hoe [101 hours in North Korea, no. 5]”)
The striking contrast between the restless eyewitnesses who are aroused by the desire for snapping something like rare wildlife and the character of lifeless North Korean reality gives rise to a narcissistic mode of cultural differentiation. This narrative refutes the trace of modernization or social mobility in North Korea and relocates it onto a discursive terrain of cultural immutability. The politics of national identification, made in the visualization of the nation’s characters, operates deep anxieties and fears about the very essence of the nation that the eyewitness accounts willfully pursue.
This is an act of closure in which such an exclusive desire prevents other parameters of national reconciliation from enacting themselves to play off of one another. Challenging this arbitrary and self-contained act, reclaiming selfexperience aims to maintain discursive realms of inter-Korea sociability so that they can be opened up to contingent strategies, gaps, failures of voices and memories in order to better facilitate reconciliation. I want to call this act of selfexperience
(2) Reconciliation in the North Korean Human Rights Crisis
This rhetorical claim of national reconciliation—we can survive only when we are formed into a unified nation-state under national authenticity—is strikingly ambivalent, because simultaneously it must ideologically prioritize the (neo-)liberal capitalist institutionalization of political consensus over cultural assimilation. In doing so, the ambivalent characterization of reconciliation crystallizes the discursive realm of inter-Korea relations at the institutional level; in this process, economic arrangements in inter-Korea relations are incontrovertibly conceived as a more progressive force in challenging deep-seated anti-North Korean sentiments among the South Korean public than any other arrangement. This valorization of reconciliation discourse hampers an adequate understanding of creating a possibility of inter-Korea sociability.
First,
Second, the identity politics of national reconciliation is vulnerable to the depoliticization of humanitarianism, wherein civic virtues of humanitarianism are merely reduced to a major site of neo-liberal market reasoning to cure the lack of self-autonomy and self-promotion in individuals. The politics of national identification appears to be seen as if it welcomes North Korean refugees in South Korea without condition. But once it finds the lack of national authenticity suffered by those settlers who are supposed to be classified as part of the Korean nation, as
At this point, it is worth referring to what Slavoj
Muslim women who wear the veil [are] acceptable if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality. In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself; it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a veil that effectively chooses a choice.
As Hannah
Many scholars have cast serious doubts upon what is considered liberal human rights discourse. For example, Jacques
This process is what is known by the name of
The idea of human rights consensus is bound to explicitly make its own claim on a universal status self-contradictory, especially in that human rights in this formulation end up being ‘boiled down to a distribution within which each part of the social body would obtain the best share that it can obtain’
This is a very important questioning of the liberal authorization of human rights as consensus. First of all, such questioning is significant in the light of articulating the crisis of human rights as a citizenship politics but not without leaving a solution in the realm of institutions that limits the problem of displacing human rights to a formal process of legislation. The view of human rights as the source of consensus for the democratic polity imposes a moral command of human rights as the common ground of democratic process on which criteria of human dignity must be agreed upon and stipulated in accordance with the premise that the sacredness of the human cannot be possible without recognizing the significance of the rights-holding individual
3 Testimonies of surviving victims and perpetrators of war crimes, such as the No Gun Ri massacre, can be a good example of the enactment and expansion in a collective memory politics that unfolds the historical atrocities of the Korean War
4 This television documentary featured a group of five female North Korean settlers who are working hard to become successful celebrities in the South Korean entertainment market. In doing so, they are resolutely working to demonstrate that they have changed their North Korean characters of personality and attitudes toward society.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Freeing up possibilities of inter-Korea sociability would rely on how we challenge the persistent reduction of an intolerably threatening political and culturing being to the ambivalent zone of inclusion and exclusion of the bare life of others
A desire to redistribute [rights and responsibility] is not the unproblematic consequence of a well-fed society. In order to get that desire moving by the cultural imperative of education, you have to fix the possibility of putting not just
In a landmark study of the origin of totalitarianism, Hannah
no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feebleminded hypocrisy.
Such a vivid illustration of the crisis of the modern nation-state can also be terrifying to entitled citizens themselves in the nation-state, because the crisis is no other than ‘the obsolescence of [the Rights of Man]’, under the condition of which the citizens can no longer be legitimately protected. For the disquieting fact that denationalized minorities were forced to the ‘conditions of absolute lawlessness’
In the crisis of the modern nation-state, not only are the rightless minorities propelled to the status of exclusive alienation outside the nation-state, but they are also discursively exploited within the nation-state for an impending scene in which anybody, no matter to what category they may be attributed, can be rendered vulnerable under the disguising banner of the Other. The crisis of the modern nation-state magnifies the ominous categorization of unwanted minorities such as refugees, the stateless, and the rightless, imploding the dichotomy of wanted and unwanted into the single category of life threat under the utilitarian gesture of tolerance. If we understand the crisis of the modern nation-state in this ontological trap of the Rights of Man, how can we encounter, but not flee from, this radically suspending political space? The two Koreas’ reconciliation can come through resisting the romanticization of Koreans’ own normative commitment to idealized national authenticity and liberal human rights.
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1 The North Korean regime has also lent itself to its own essentialist ethnic idea of the nation. SeeB. R. Myers (2010) .