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An Essay on the “Aestheticization of Terror” in a “Time of Terror” and the “Violence of Poetry”

lee, seong-hyuk 1

1한국외국어대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

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.

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