KJC Korea
Journal Central

Wars have long been important literary subjects. The war depicted in this work dealt with the historical transition of Korea in terms of its significant and overall influence on politics, economics, and culture. War experiences have been major literary topics throughout pre-modern and modern Korean literature. The Sword-monk Story, written by Shin Kwang-soo (1712-1775) is a work of war literature that deals with reminiscences by two Japanese survivors of a defeated army that had participated in the Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592-1598. The work describes the humane relationship between a Korean sword-monk and two Japanese soldiers who once fought against the monk in the war. The characters attempt to overcome hostility, establish amity, and reach peaceful harmony. Despite their attempts, however, they fail to overcome all of their conflicts, and the residual conflicts lead to a tragic result in the end. The writer, Shin, describes how war can destroy people’s lives and their divine character as well. Shin tells of the Korean sword master who makes an attempt to establish mutual understanding beyond national barriers between himself and the Japanese soldiers, who agree to serve him as master and live humane lives. The story can be understood as a significant work of war literature in that mutual understanding and humane affection are depicted as ways of overcoming the calamity of war and moving forward to a better future.

Uijeon Yuk Yong-jeong is known for his Uijeon Gisul, the collection of writings in which he systematically developed his thoughts on enlightenment. But his literary works nowadays have also attracted notice from academics. This study is an attempt to examine his five biographical writings. The reason that I decided to focus attention on these works is that they are noticeable in being distinctively different from other biographical writings of Chinese classics and that their aesthetic sensibility is unfamiliar and impressively strong. This study tries to find the meaning of Yuk Yong-jeong’s biographical works in the context of narratives in his era through analyzing those five works and deriving the crucial characteristics from them. His five biographical works -- The Life of Mo So-sa, a Soldier’s Wife, The Life of Song So-hab, The Life of Gaeja, Lee Suk-ju, The Life of Doja, Kim Dong-gan, and The Life of Lee Sung-sun -- are all about low-class people, among whom some had experienced social and economic failure. These works show a transformation of existing forms of biographical writings because they tend to only very briefly give a person’s genealogy and generally not offer any conclusive judgment about the person. Moreover, many of the episodes recounted in them presented dead drunkenness, money-oriented attitudes, homosexuality, and violence, all of which were far from Confucian virtues. Due to these elements, Yuk Yong-jeong’s biographical works offer characteristics of raw rhetoric and a coarse aesthetic sensibility in an atmosphere of vulgarity. These characteristics found in his biographical works demonstrate a tendency different from his other genres, such as epitaphs and records of a deceased person’s life, in which he told normative narratives conforming to Confucian values. In his biographical writings, his views on perverse and minor people whose lives did not conform to Confucian values are neither negative nor judgmental, but accepting. Yuk Yong-jeong’s biographical works are found to have much in common with contemporary narrative, such as the new novel, in that there appeared a lot of low-class people and sensational episodes about sex and violence. This kind of aesthetically coarse sensibility of his works can be interpreted as follows: first, it may express pessimistic views on an uncertain and unpredictable future depicted as distorted desire; second, it might result from the attempt to find an alternative way of life in society on the part of Yuk Yong-jeong, a frustrated intellectual who believed in enlightenment thinking.

This article traces the journey of two Chinese concepts, qi(氣) and li(理), from the brushstrokes of ancient Chinese paintings to Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema. Interestingly, these abstract concepts take a concrete form when translated into French. As we can see through François Cheng’s translation, qi turns into “souffles vitaux” (vital breaths), and li turns into “ligne d’univers” (line of universe). Henri Maldiney, a French phenomenological aesthetician, employs these Chinese concepts in order to develop an “aesthetics of rhythms” that focuses on the process itself in the artistic creation rather than its result. Thus, Maldiney’s aesthetics values the Chinese brush and its dynamic movement in East Asian art. These concepts allowed Deleuze to reformulate two forms of the action-image, namely the “big form” and the “small form,” in assigning the two East Asian concepts to them. He used these concepts to explain the structure of Japanese films, namely those of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

In this article, I attempt to interpret the Chan/Seon/Zen doctrine of non-discrimination of good and evil from the perspective of the politics of equality. To break away from distinction is to detach oneself from one’s own measure for distinguishing between ‘good and evil’ and ‘liking and disliking.’ To distinguish based on measure is to exercise “the power of measure” (Deleuze/Guattari), and to break away from it is to jump off all Grund (foundation/ground) and plunge into the Abgrund (abyss, no ground). Through this act of departure, it becomes possible to arrive at the ‘ontological plane’ that binds together as an ensemble (tenir ensemble) such binaries as music and non-music, dance and non-dance, and so forth. This type of equality is in accordance with Rancière’s concept of politics in that it suggests equality between the qualified and the unqualified. Seon Buddhism thus implicates a radical ‘politics of equality’ that has gained an ontological status.

Kant’s philosophy has had a decisive effect on the formation of contemporary french philosophy. Particularly in the school system, where the tradition of french reflective philosophy continues, the influence of Kant is very important. But a meticulous study of this theme is not emphasized. So in this paper, I try to explicate the effect of Kant’s philosophy on french philosophy of twenties by showing a concrete example. French philosophy of the twenties performed tasks of thought without certainty as the foundation of modernity but the ambiguity of human life. Since the concrete life of the human do not represent clarity or distinctness but complexity as ambiguity, reflective philosophers such as Sartre or Merleau-Ponty focused on the concept of ambiguity. However, this approach had a problem, for it was bears brunt of anglo-saxon philosophical camp based on logical rigor. How should we then solve this problem? In this context, Paul Ricoeur tried to save the French reflective philosophy by using kant. In conclusion, I attempt to shed new light on traits of contemporary French philosophy and Kant.

The purpose of this paper is to read Rancière’s “Aesthetics as Politics” in relation to Kant’s aesthetics. The relations between Rancière and Kant are found in two aspects. The first is the re-joining of two meanings of aesthetics. Following Kant’s terminology, aesthetics has been used in two different senses: as a theory of human sensibility and as a theory of art (more exactly, what he calls the “aesthetic regime of art”). Combining the two in his own way, Rancière argues that politics has a characteristic of the theory of human sensibility (aesthetics of politics) in the same manner that the theory of art has a political characteristic (politics of aesthetics). Especially for the latter, the politics of aesthetics, he makes reference to Kant’s “Analytic of Beauty” in the Critique of Judgment. Rancière defines it as a politics of aesthetic experience/ education, for which Kant’s concept of play is used as a theoretical model. In the Kantian sense, play means a sort of aesthetic attitude. It takes on a double role: The first is the transition from regulative judgment to reflective judgment. Through this transition, reason loses its control over sensibility. The second is the indifference of aesthetic judgment. Benefiting from this indifference, aesthetic judgment can assert its universality, despite being a singular judgment. Existing theories of modernism have explained the political function of art based on the autonomy of the artwork and the personality of the artist. Contrary to such theories, Rancière insists that the main point of his aesthetics is in the aesthetic experience/education (more exactly, the possibility of expanding a certain aesthetic attitude, i.e., play), not in the artwork or the artist. However, the thing with Kant is, he only rediscovers the order of nature in play. In contrast to him, Rancière expresses sympathy with Schiller’s view, insisting on the advent of renewed humanity through aesthetic experience/education. If a new distribution of the sensible (Le partage du sensible) can be established, it would be possible in the aesthetic experience/ education acquired and expanded in play.

This paper discusses the feminist motive to the Da Vinci Code, an extremely popular novel by Dan Brown. His reinterpretation of historical Christianity is a radically feminist one because of four reasons: 1) the biblical God Yahweh (Jehovah) was a bisexual (hermaphroditic) God; 2) Jesus was the first “feminist” and was married to Mary Magdalene, who was intended by Jesus to be head of the Church rather than the apostle Peter; 3) the Emperor Constantine consolidated male power in the Church and collated the Bible; and 4) the Gnostic Gospels suggests a feminist origin of Christianity. I think that there is too little substance or documentation for Dan Brown’s “feminist” theory. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the biblical God does not truly have gender, although he is represented as father, king, and husband, for he is not a physical creature that has male or female gender. There is no reliable document supporting the marriage of Jesus with a woman. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe Jesus a “feminist.” in the social context of the first century. It is not true that the Roman Emperor Constantine strengthened the male-dominated church. It is historically true that Constantine invited about 300 bishops from across the Roman Empire to the Council of Nicea (325 AD). But these bishops were already male, and women did not hold such positions. A common characteristic of Gnosticism is paternalism rather than feminism. Even if Brown’s feminist critique went the wrong way, the problems of paternalism in the Church should necessarily be examined through a genuinely biblical understanding of the Christian faith.

This paper examines the aspects of black people whose images have been projected through Korean novels written since the liberation of Korea. It is hard to find positive depictions of blacks in modern Korean novels. From the novel HonHyeol (Mixed- Blood) 1947, despite the author YoSup Ju’s attempt not to discriminate against mixed-blood people, blacks in Korean novels always took the role of diabolical figure in the binarism of Korean women and American men. From novels such as BeaungSu Song’s Shorikim 1957 and KeunDeok Choe’s serialized story, The Star Seat of the Earth 1957, SunNyeo Bark’s 1960s novel Elize's Portrait , HeaIll Cho’s 1970s America, SangGuk Jeon’s The Family of Abe, to JungHyo Ann’s 1980s The Silver Stallion, the setting of yellow/black and black/white has always been understood as implying antagonistic relationships, either consciously or unconsciously. The discrimination against people of different color was even more serious than what YoSup Ju’s Mixed-Blood portrayed. However, this doesn’t mean that the novels have shown no possibility of overcoming discrimination against people of different color. Although too little, the whore's Club (SSembagui ; Lettuce)'s solidarity in America and Mother's loving in The Family of Abe support the new possibility of the collectivities of the Global Age. In these novels, there are positive collectivities formed through the solidarity of 'subaltern women' a word used by Spivak. All of the women dream of a new family in reaction to their old egoistic family. Zelkova Tree and Mother, 2006, by Suntae Mun, stands as the only story that portrays a Korean man marrying a black woman. This tries to show a new possibility of change, not of identity, but about altruism toward the differences of multiethnic families. "Henri's logic of skin color" and the "diamond present" of the wife’s mother in Zelkova Tree and Mother drives a wedge between discrimination and color. Most Korean novels represented ironically the postcolonial contradiction between black people’s social status and Koreans’ obvious discrimination against them through the novels’ negative descriptions of blacks. The discrimination against black people in Korean novels reflected "mis-recognition", by Spivak, between globalism and post-colonialism. Koreans’ attitudes toward blacks sprang from the Confucian family system in Korea and the resistant nationalist retrospective during the American Military’s controlling age of the Korean Peninsula. A real identity forms and grows not from exclusive familism and nationalism but through self-controlling endeavor, compromise, and negotiation. Nobody can give anyone an identity through strength and threats. A real identity cannot come from one who believes in keeping pure blood and tries to advocate families. Correct formation of identities comes not from the “perhaps” of a strategic politician, but through “teleopoiesis” (Imaginative power transcending time and space) in Aristotle’s Poetics . Good poetic imagination can give a new sort of collectivity to family, such as a communicational multiethnic family. As in the emancipation of slaves and the gaining of women’s suffrage, all the right ideas become possible through teleopoiesis, imagination that works beyond boundaries. A new concept of family is possible through the new collective teleopoiesis of multiethnic families that The new idea, even though it has come neither gradually nor in purity, will pulverize the hegemonies of the old collectivities of binarism we once believed.