KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper discusses the aesthetic significance of novelistic thought experiments on epistemological and ethical typologies, focusing on Stanislaw Rem’s SF Solaris (1961). Solaris is a masterpiece of modern science fiction that proves that it is a work of literature which invented a new world model. It is also a great achievement that SF works in literary formulas that are different from the work of traditional realistic narratives such as representation and reflection or world view. In science fiction, ‘science’ needs to be understood as ‘cognition’ to perform a creative approach to reality, and ‘novel’ as ‘defamilization’ to reconstruct a new world through the function of cognition. The planet ‘Solaris’ in the novel is an epistemologically unrecognizable ‘other’ from Descartes’s ‘res cogitans’ to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding an sich). At the same time, it also implies the concept of ‘sublime’ which is aesthetically reproducible, and at the same time unrepresentable. This paper argues that Solaris is a work that simultaneously performed epistemological inquiry into the outer world and ethical inquiry into neighborhood.

This paper tries to diagnose the meaning of the ‘world’ today. I sought to analyze the web drama Dramworld and the cultural, technological conditions surrounding it. Dramaworld is a type of time-slip drama in which two worlds, “reality-America” and “virtual-Korea(drama),” overlap. Here I have raised three questions and tried to approach the meaning of the world today. First, what is ‘Dramaworld’? Second, what is the meaning of the overlap between these two worlds, America(reality) and Korea(drama)? Finally, what is the relationship between new media, especially smartphone, and the world? In the technological conditions of new media, users resemble like Leibniz’s monad. It looks like a self-enclosed being with “no windows.” However, paradoxically, it results in a connection with the whole, not a separation from the world. The world today seems to have blurred the boundaries between the whole and part, universal and particular, and reality and virtual. Loss of standard usually leads to loss of stability. For that reason, the voices of far right-wing and fundamentalism are revitalized in some parts of the world. What they demand is a society/ state without “windows,” as a pseudo-monadic society/state, that has no relationship to the other. But that reactionary demand only causes the catastrophe rather than bringing stability. At the end of Dramaworld, the stage of the drama is switched over to the real world, not the virtual-drama world. The boundary between two worlds seems to have disappeared. It indicates that it is impossible to secure stability with a sense of the past.

This study explores the initial reception process of Nam June Paik in French public art museums during the 1970s. Paik’s video art was first introduced to French art museums in the mid-70s in a series of historical video art exhibitions held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (Art Vidéo, Confrontation 74, ARC2; Rétrospective de Nam June Paik, 1978– 1979) and at the Musée national d’art moderne - MNAM/CCI ( Jardin- Vidéos, 1978). The paper analyzes the historical contexts, characteristics, and socio-cultural meaning of these early video art exhibitions in relation to the French museum and artistic landscape of the 1970s. In particular, the study examines the favorable cultural and institutional context that fostered the historical reception of Paik’s video art in France: the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou (1977), a new type of museum that reserved specific space for new media and contemporary art, offering a desperately awaited new dimension to late modern and contemporary art. The paper also discusses the top-down intraduction process of Paik’s early video art in France as well as its significant influence in the development of early French video art history, specifically in relation to the environment of post-68 local artistic scene. In so doing, the study aims to deconstruct the somewhat monolithic and mythical existing historical discourses concerning the artist, suggesting the need for further studies of his work in relation to the cultural, social, political, and historical contexts of its emergence and institutionalization.

Narratives of historical shifts by a collective, united subject such as a class tend to denunciate small-scale, diversified struggles. But as we know, revolutions have no history of success and others have no history of being fairly evaluated. This article aims at examining and evaluating one of the ‘others,’ Temporary Autonomous Zones conceptualized by Hakim Bey, who proposed to give up a direct confrontation with the power which became a simulation and to constitute sporadic and temporary communities as a means of struggle. It has been criticized as an escapism by political critiques such as Bookchin and Armaitage, or even as giving up of the struggle itself. But opening up a T.A.Z. never amounts to a mere escapism, but an experiment with producing subjects outside the law who do not conform to the existing system. Conflicts and antagonisms which would remain even after a revolution around a single theme e.g. economic class could disappear in a T.A.Z. For example, people hanging together regardless of their ages are establishing a T.A.Z. which works outside the ageist system. Although T.A.Z. guarantees no utopia without any oppression, it shows possibilities of living alternatively. Rather than being a negation of the need for a revolution, even not of its possibility, T.A.Z. is an urge for a subject to revolutionize oneself first, which is possible now-andhere, even without a revolution. It is an experiment and an exercise for a total revolution which should abolish not just an economic oppression but also any kind of it.

In Muhak’s Diffuculty at Remaining Life is a work of drama that deals with the issue of permanent repatriation of Koreans in Sakhalin and when it was put on stage in Busan in 2016, it served as an opportunity to raise awareness of the magnitude of the problem in Korea. The significance of this work lies in the fact that it deals with the chain of historical events that were caused by the return of those who were deported to Sakhalin or were taken there for similar reasons. As the protagonist Won Sangmo was unable to fulfill the conditions for permanent repatriation, he had to employ many expedients in the process of solving the problem and returning to Korea. He had to correct his birth certificate that wrongfully certified that he was born after August 15, 1945 and got engaged in a disguise marriage in order to hide the fact that he was single. The circumstances of Kim Yonghee, the woman who agreed to get married to Won Sangmo in disguise, is not much different. In order for them to break away from their circumstances of having to wander Sakhalin as wreckages of history and their home country, they had no choice but to accept the conditions of permanent repatriation even if those measures might be unjust. The playwright, In Muhak, conveys the message of the dilemma that the Koreans in Sakhalin are faced with through these choices and contradictions. He makes a sharp remark regarding their current circumstances based on their history of being estranged and of being denied any chance of being saved. This is also a time of hardship that Koreans in Sakhalin had to endure as Korean nationals living abroad.

This paper examines the imperial ideology represented in Joseph Conrad’s work, Lord Jim focusing on Slavoj Žižek’s theory of reality as constructed fantasy, and investigates how Conrad’s Lord Jim discloses the contradiction of the ideology. The nineteenth-century Western European ideology at the root of Euro-Centrism and humanism, which Conrad often focused on, had a significant impact on forming the discourse of imperialism. The Inconvenient ghosts roaming in Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Žižek defines as Spectre, are the examples of the most important essence oppressed by ideology, returning in the guise of spectral apparition. This paper investigates the main character Jim’s feeling of guilt haunting him ceaselessly including the narrator Marlow and the compulsory repetitive action caused by it after jumping from the Patna and abandoning the passengers. I argue that “One of us” repeated by the narrator Marlow as a leitmotif represents the society of seaman and British imperialism at the same time, ironically the people who try to conceal the discrepancy and contradiction existing in the British imperialist society.