The purpose of this article is to analyze Aerin 1 ·2 (1986), published by Kim Chiha after his transition to the theory of life, as a case that reflects the ‘impossibility of mourning for the martyr.’ In contemporary Korean political history, a ‘martyr’ refers to a person who becomes a historical hero by sacrificing her or his life to accuse the authoritarian regime. Important to note here, studies focusing on the aporia embedded in the ‘politics of martyrs’ have been recently published. Aligning with these previous studies, this article performed a symptomatic reading of Aerin based on the proble matic awareness that Kim Chiha’s transition to theory of life in the 1980s was related to the aforementioned aporia. Aerin is the text that represents the transition to the theory of life. It is well known that Kim Chiha declared life as the ‘source’ of everything. The movement toward the origin represented in Aerin is driven by the ‘impulse toward novel life.’ The impulse toward novel life drives the poetic subject of Aerin to become a novel subject by returning to the origin, and such process of becoming a new subject is portrayed in Aerin as an encounter between Aerin and the poetic subject. Therefore, with a critical distance from previous studies that discussed Aerin as the text in which the poetic subject finds the absolute truth, this article analyzes the impossibility of meeting Aerin with the poetic subject. Therefore, this article presents that Aerin is the text paradoxically requires to deconstruct the literary history of 1980’s in Korea by mirroring the symptoms of the era.

Kim Chiha , Aerin , Poetic Subject , Impulse Toward Novel Life , Repression , Incorporation , Transcendence , Politics of Martyrdom , Impossibility