근대적 주체 이후의 행위성: 주디스 버틀러의 행위성 이론

Abstract

This essay aims to seek an alternative agency theory which doesn't depend upon the notion of modern subject. This study calls into question the established notions of agency that are based on the concept of an autonomous and coherent modern subject, because those notions cannot account for both oppression and the resistance to power and thus, especially, not only cannot account for the agency of social marginalities or subalterns but also commit the epistemological violence that forecloses their agency. In an effort to challenge these notions, this study examines Judith Butler’s agency theory. First, Butler's agency theory rearticulates an agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression vs. freedom, and through deconstructing the epistemological frame that defines and regulates subject and agency, it reestablishes a theory for the agency of social marginalities which is produced as the excluded form from the contemporary hegemonic matrices of intelligibility. Second, Butler's agency theory is based on the repetition in structure. Butler demonstrates that new meanings and values can be created through suspending reiterations which sustain the hegemonic regime of power, and through redeploying and reappropriating power in the course of reiterating differently. This kind of agency is ‘the performative contradiction.’ We live and move on boundaries or gaps within the regime of power, and those acts can sometimes be seen as obedience, but can sometimes open some possibilities of subversion. Third, Butler reestablishes the subject as the implicated to the other. From the start a subject is formed in relationality. Thus a subject is redefined as a being who is ungrounded and incoherent, and thus have a partial unknowingness of the self, a primary opacity to the self. Starting with this concept of subject, an alternative agency escapes from the arrogance of modern subject which can know and control everything, and involves the ethical responsibility that is based on relations of dependency, and practices the representation that embraces and shows the failure of representation