여성짐승과 남성주권자: 자끄 데리다의 늑대와 D. H. 로렌스의 뱀

Abstract

Jacques Derrida, opening up a series of speech entitled “The Beast and the Sovereign,” declares and repeats a puzzling sentence, “We’re shortly going to show it,” of which the echoes would last throughout the thirteen lectures from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002. “It” is a kind of manifestation of what he names différance, which is both differed and deferred from apparent identities and enclosed systematic world of presence. “It,” therefore, is far from conclusive and definitive, as any other Derridean languages are; nevertheless, he makes one thing unexpectedly clear on the matrix of the beast and the sovereign, by proceeding somewhat oversimplified remarks that the beast [feminine] and the sovereign [male] are one, an ontological copula; the beast is the sovereign, the sovereign is the beast. However, at this seemingly definitive point, he deconstructs the self-reflective couple of the beast and the sovereign in order to reveal the invisible, unheard, absent, yet haunting and oscillating image of “it,” which he promised to show in the first lecture. As an example, he suggests to re-read the Biblical image of an evil creature, a snake, in his recital of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The Snake.” In the poem, the snake arrives at the narrator’s water-trough before the narrator; and he, “like a second comer,” submits his sovereignty and ownership, and waits for the snake to drink first. Derrida, reading this poem line by line, highlights the scene of hospitality to show the overwhelming—fearful yet honoring—experience of facing the other, which is presented in the brief encounter of the narrator and the snake. Yet, the reading of this poem ends with an unanswered question: as Derrida ends the speech saying “there is no woman here, no woman, just a man and a snake,” the female beast is still absent. This paper is an attempt to find the absent being, revive the scene of its arrival, and restore the voice of the invisible spectre, the female beast. To examine the female beasts is to resist the umbrella of secured values and ideals and acknowledge a burden placed on us without impunity. It is an uncomfortable and uneasy, even unheimlich experience to defer the possibility of pure justice, welcome the “trial of undecidability,” and raise responsibility for the other by realizing the haunting, “demonish” (in Lawrence’s term) presence. In doing so, a fissure might be found to uncover the long mystified amalgam of the rogue and the sovereign state, the colonized and the colonizer, the dominated and the dominator, in short the beast and the sovereign, and reveal the plethora of suppressed unheard voices that have been exiled and will now arise beyond the monotonous rhetoric of difference to the height of différance.