2024, Vol.17, No.1

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

This study seeks to analyze the meaning of marine plastic from a (post)humanistic perspective. In particular, I explore the relationship between marine plastic, humans, and the Earth through a new materialism approach, and examine how space and time are redefined in that relationship. To this end, I conducted field research at a marine conservation organization and research institute addressing marine plastic and looked at how marine plastic, the ocean, and the Earth are manifested. As a result, the dichotomous distinction between natural and artificial is the initial condition that causes research participants to begin their activities, but at the same time, participants experience the dichotomy being distorted through the fact that they are inseparable. Also, they embody trans-corporeality through the sense that plastic is crossing the human body. Additionally, as they investigate the relationship between humans, plastic, and the Earth, participants realize that beings have different temporalities, forming a new ethical sense. This study is original in that it does not view marine plastic as just a problem that takes the position that we can learn about the world 'through' marine debris, and through this, it seeks to awaken the politics and ethical practice of the everyday life.

This essay examines ways in which science becomes ehtical in relation to the human. The first is found in Edward Wilson’s concept of consilience, the case in which man as the subject of science aims to achieve the unity of man and nature by way of the rational human understanding of nature. The second is found in today’s brain science which tries to reduce human consciousness to matter, thereby aiming to achieve the nonhuman unity of the human and nature within the realm of the primary nature. The third is found in Slavoj Žižek’s reading of the Cartesian subject of science as a self-destructive instance of death drive which arises from within the scientific logic. The third approach is the other side of the first approach, which pursues the unity of man and nature via Logos, in that it shows how the cogito turns out to be the subject of the unconscious. The third one also differs from the second one, whose nonhuman aspect comes from its purely immanent approach to matter, in that it emphasizes the inhuman side of the cogito by bringing forth the God of the Real from within Logos. The argument of this essay is that science become ethical, not simply when the human and science are reconciled in the name of Logos, but when the existential, which is lost with the advent of science, returns in the form of the inhuman, the God of the Real.

In traditional aesthetics, the subject of aesthetic experience is limited to human beings, and nonhumans are seen as mere objects of appreciation. Recently, however, there has been a growing movement among scholars of speculative realism that questions Kant’s idea, arguing that nonhumans can also have aesthetic experiences and be the subject of aesthetic feelings. Kant’s human-centered interpretation of aesthetics is the most actively challenged and overcome by posthuman aesthetics of Steven Shaviro, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton. For these thinkers and Virginia Woolf alike, aesthetic experiences operate on an ontological level, not just an epistemological one. Accordingly, this paper aims to explore how the existence of all beings, which interact aesthetically with each other, is forged and altered by their aesthetic experiences in Woolf’s two short stories, “The Lady in the Looking–Glass” (1929) and “Solid Objects” (1920). Additionally, it examines how the boundaries between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate beings as aesthetic subjects are blurred, and at a deeper level, this aesthetic subjectivity of diverse species symbolizes women’s suffrage, thereby subverting both androcentrism and anthropocentrism. The aesthetic subjectivity of nonhumans and women is closely associated with their political agency, disrupting the society’s hierarchical structures.