2025, Vol., No.

Cross-Cultural Studies 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.49

pISSN : 1598-0685 / eISSN : 2671-9088
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ccs

In this article, I conceptualize the solidarity protests of marginalized groups —such as those at Namtaeryung following the December 3 self-coup—as a form of “democracy of testimony,” guided by the philosophical insights of Judith Butler. The significance of the Namtaeryung Daechup (“great victory”) lies in the fact that marginalized individuals, who had previously fought in isolation within their respective domains, came together in mutual solidarity. I refer to this as a “solidarity of mutual testimony,” wherein each participant becomes a witness to the struggles of others. This form of solidarity exemplifies the anarchist characteristics theorized by Jacques Rancière and Catherine Malabou. It also signals that the current impeachment crisis must not remain at the level of the 2017 impeachment but should instead advance toward a deeper realization of democracy—one driven by such acts of collective resistance. However, I argue that a Derridean aporia exists between this mutual testimony and democracy itself. Paradoxically, solidarity that resists the state may end up legitimizing the state’s oligarchic power. Therefore, the critical task for a democracy of testimony is to engage in an impossible dialectic grounded in the aporetic tension between democracy outside the state and democratization within it.

In today’s new version of the neoliberal system, the tendencies of post-fascism are becoming more intense. Post-fascism takes as its fundamental principle the competition among independent individuals according to social Darwinism, and its core characteristic lies in depriving others of their citizenship based on the illusion of a homogeneous society. This paper focuses on the absence of critical thinking as one of the elements that has made such tendencies possible, centering on the intersection between the thoughts of H. Arendt and J. Butler. Both thinkers share the concern that the absence of critical thinking makes possible not only hostility toward others but even genocide. For Arendt, plurality—the very condition of thinking—is also the condition of both political and human life. Butler reformulates this as the condition of cohabitation, in which we live together with others on the earth, and argues that this condition makes social bonds possible. Critical thinking means thinking heterogeneity on the basis of the principle of interdependency. The moment such thinking ceases, the citizens of a homogeneous society are likely either to tolerate or to participate in acts of hostility toward others.

This paper aims to examine Butler’s assessment of Levinas. Specifically, it focuses on clarifying where Butler converges and diverges with Levinas’s philosophy, and how her appropriation of Levinasian thought manifests in her own philosophy. Scholars who found important philosophical insights in Butler’s feminism theory and gender theory have expressed deep concern about her focus on ethics and Levinas. They argue that she substitutes ethics for crucial political issues, uncritically adopts Levinas’s concept of the face. So, was Butler duped by ethics or Levinas? No, she is not. Her interest in Levinas merits an effective critique of Enlightenment rationality, more precisely of the atomistic, autonomous subject. What she sought to discover in Levinas was a fundamental orientation toward others, that is, the interdependency among me and the other, among ethics and politics. She aims to extend Levinas’s concept of responsibility into the realm of politics. Thus, Butler grounds the ethics of asymmetry in reciprocity. Whereas vulnerability in Levinas is essentially the subject’s vulnerability to the Other, in Butler it is defined as the common nature of the subject in general. If Levinas sought to argue for the ‘vulnerable subject,’ Butler seeks to speak of the ‘vulnerable humans.’ And through these vulnerable, interdependent subjects, she seeks to devise ways to resolve the unjust forms of inequality accelerated by neoliberalism. So, we can say, borrowing Derrida’s terms, as follows: Levinas did not visit Butler. He was invited by her.