KJC Korea
Journal Central

Here, Gaby represents the modern city Paris, and this is the reason Pépé became disillusioned with Casbah, which gave him shelter. That means he suffers from nostalgia for a modern nation (or city), and Japan replaces Pépé ’ s nostalgia with homesickness. It’s only possible to empathize with a modern nation. Because modernity is not completed in the colonial Chosun, however, modernity occasionally is understood as a consequence of the colonization. In this context, the study focuses on the mutual negotiation of literature and film on the path of cultural acceptance in the colonial era of Chosun. In contrast to the pursuit of Eurocentric identity revealed in the film, Lee strove to create characters who were excluded from the severe competition among empires. As a result, the narrator of “Yeo Su” identifies himself as a traveler because he projects himself onto stateless people. As well, the nostalgia of the empires is switched to traveller’s melancholy.

This article aims to shed light on the situation of the knowledge-field in modern Russia, especially on the debates of historical philosophy between Westernizers and Slavophiles in that period of history. According to Foucault, the knowledge-field is formulated with the propositions and thesis, composed mainly of semantic concepts that have been believed as “knowledge” in certain communities. “Discourse” means that there are people who believe in some kind of an absolute or stable truth that can be proved in linguistic forms. From this, the representational space appears in a particular period of history, and we can find its extraordinary cases in the debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles in nineteenth-century Russia. The Slavophile philosophers argue that Russia’s own way is very different from that of modern Europe, because Russians have some special traditions with which they could overcome the Western historical errors. Ironically, these kinds of beliefs on their own historical vocation turned out to be influenced by the German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel. Vissarion Belinskij, a representative Westernist literary critic, was also deeply impressed by Hegel, but he believed that Russia’s future was located in the more accelerative Westernization of Russia. So-called “debates on historical philosophy” were some sort of critical touchstones, which illuminate how the modern knowledge-field works in concrete historical situations. This is the reason why we chose the case of Belinskij, the Westernist literary critic to survey the structures and the functions of the knowledge-field in modern Russia.

Organicism has long been considered as a subcategory of social Darwinism. However, admitting that organicism is intimately connected with social Darwinism does not mean that there is any necessary connection between organicism and authoritarian or totalitarian discourse. These misunderstandings are based mainly on the belief that organicism cannot be compatible with individualism. This alleged incompatibility, however, rests on the confusion about the viewpoints on the body. It is the aim of this article to reexamine Spencer’s logic through the history of medicine. Cell theory can illustrate that independent units constitute the body in cooperation with other units without the centralization of control and the subjugation of the parts to the interests of the whole. In this view, the reception of the meaningn of organism in Japan cannot be irrelevant to the conception of the body in Japan. Consequently, organism and its Japanese equivalent, “yukitai” (有機體), cannot have the same meaning and the same result. When Spencer’s social organism was translated in modern Japan, Japanese translator agreed with Spencer that there is the same logic between the biological and social body. Nonetheless, Spencer’s organicism rather than his individualism was appropriated to support the introduction of the parliamentary system. This discrepancy may be based on the difference of the perspectives on the body.

In Japan, poetry and novel have been recognized as “Art” since the mid- 1880s. However, in the field of the “study of national literature,” it is after the 1920s that artistic value came to be established as a criteria for assessing literature. Mainstream academic methodology of the Department of National Literature at the Tokyo Imperial University, the stronghold of Japanese “study of national literature,” had its foundation in “Philologie.” On the other hand, the stance that set store on literature’s aesthetic value became founded as an academic methodology through the introduction of Deutsch “Literaturwissenschaft” in the 1920s, and the establishment of Okazaki Yosie’s “Japanese Literaturwissenschaft” in the 1930s. This science of literature that values “appreciation” made its appearance as a resistance to the empirical Philologie. But it would be a simplification to state that the two were constantly in opposition. In the 1930s, there was an attempt by scholars of philology to combine the “appreciation” concept of the Literaturwissenschaft with that of the objective method of philology. Okazaki Yosie himself, who was critical of ideological influence on literature, participated in an government-run academic movement led by philologists. Okazaki focused in analyzing the particularity of Japanese literature in the late-1930s, but shifted to emphasizing its “universality” in the 1940s. His claim was that the wait-and-see aesthetics of Japanese literature, as it did not favor severe strife and struggle, was “purer” than that of Western art. He saw the literature as essentially unrelated to the teleological point of view. His theory of Japanese Literature is considered to be an example of “aesthetic Japan-centrism” as separate from political Japancentrism.

The Graeco-Roman thinkers and dramatists played a significant role in Europe, providing an important source of raw material for modern arts, science, and literature. Their influence in modern appropriation continued developing and postulating comparative relationships between the original, pre-existing objects and the newly adopted forms either in the same area or in an interdisciplinary one. In this article, I try to show a case which created distorted perceptions of comparative relationship in terms of appropriation: the Freudian theoretical formulation of the “Oedipus complex” based on Sophocles’s Oedipus the King within the framework of family relationships. Firstly, I examine how Freud formulated the metaphoric nature of oedipal concepts from a Greek tragedy to assume that his scientific field will have its ‘universal’ interpretive framework with respect to the “Oedipus complex” occurrence conditions of in-family relationships. Secondly, I’ll examine how Freud’s premise of the theory is misplaced in light of the Greek tragedy to demonstrate the analogy between the plot of Oedipus the King and his theoretical framework of psychoanalysis as inappropriate to be defined as scientifically “universal.” Finally, I’d argue that how this intercultural, interdisciplinary appropriation can be read as false analogy in which Freudian claims, defined as scientifically “universal,” are presented in an inappropriate context. Thus, a conclusion may be obtained for further possible arguments in the interpretation of the theory by looking at another facet of the problem: we discuss how the act of a Freudian formulation of the “Oedipus complex” may be observed in terms of human desire (“machines désirantes”).

Ahn Kyuchul’s exhibition, Invisible Land of Love, can be classified as a kind of poetic conceptual art. The artist murmurs a complaint that poetry might be superior to the visual arts, because the power of an artwork is measured by the minimal use of materials for the maximal expression. In extending Sartre’s thesis on literature into the arts, we can affirm that the poetic conversion means to turn things into wild natural objects by virtue of irony. Artworks become capable of reflecting spiritual essences in breaking off relations between images and concepts that have been fixed by commercial advertisements, and the like. While the exhibition explores more and more immaterial and spiritual levels, it is the scattering voice’s pure time which is discovered in its final stage. This is an “auto-affection” in a Derridian sense. This kind of temporality is not filled with a solipsistic consciousness, but with (re)inscriptions that transmit and transcribe texts. The artwork “1000 Scribes” is constructed upon a family scene in which a son looked at the back of his father who was writing. We understand that an ancient tradition, that is to say, the Confucian formation of the humanistic subjectivity and the moral relations work in the depths of this poetic conceptual art exhibition.

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear accident(3/11), there have been many discourses which compared Japan after 3/11 to postwar Japan. This is not only because the ruins after the disaster remind people of the postwar catastrophe, but because it is recognized as an opportunity to change current Japanese society. However, after the anti-nuclear movement cooled down and people began to talk about a way out of the Fukushima accident, Japan now seems to be on its way to restoration. Based on above consideration, this article analyzes some fictions that imagine the future after 3/11, for fiction or literature is a sort of practice which changes “the real” by presenting a possibility to imagine a different world. Reading Fukuichi Kanko Project as a work of literary imagination, we come to understand that the future Japan or Fukushima it suggests is an extension of postwar Japan. Not only that, the project starts from supposing a collectivity of the Japanese nation as its basic intention shows. By contrast, some literature after 3/11 visualizes gaps and splits in seemingly unchanged reality. God Bless You 2011 reveals differences between before and after “that thing” by juxtaposing these two, and The Island of Eternal Life and Kentousi go one step further to describe Japan as a “closed” nation following an imaginary earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident after 3/11. In particular, Kentousi questions if one imagines Japan and the Japanese language as completely closed boundaries. If it is possible to talk about “post 3/11 literature,” it would be a practice that can alienate so-called reality from itself and reveal differences in seemingly homogeneous collectivity.

The twentieth-first century we live in is called a “terror era.” As Baudrillard says, the governing system of this century tends to suffer from implosion as it is devoted to using all its power for the security to respond to the “terror era.” In this situation, power increasingly forms its surveillance system, and paranoia from the upper classes invades every corner of the society through a surveillance network. Simultaneously, most people suffer from depression caused by a change of the system into a capitalism of taste. And paranoia and depression are combined in acts of terror by individuals. Such an act tends to aestheticize terror, mixing reality with poetry. The paper calls this phenomenon “poetic terror” or “aestheticization of terror.” This corresponds, in Walter Benjamin’s words, with an “aestheticization of politics.” This correspondence can be understood easily, considering that terrorists are currently often into right-wing ideologies. Importantly, as is well-known, Benjamin set the politicization of art against the “aestheticization of politics.” The violence of poetry is what can be set against “poetic terror,” which is the aestheticization of politics in our times. The pure violence of poetry, which is “means with no ends,” stands against the symbolic violence of a system that leads to depression and fascism. This violence of poetry also generates and forces the formation of other life ― animal becoming. This is a violent process of changing that other life into an unknown being, deconstructing the life hardened by the systemized symbolic violence. Therefore, the images of poetry resulting from this process are inevitably violent. Furthermore, the “collective innervation” created through the violent images of poetry opens a possibility of politics that can stimulate and organize a new desire.