반복과 종언 혹은 1960년대 문학/문화연구의 문제들 －권보드래․천정환의『1960년을 묻다』를 읽고－

Abstract

This paper discusses Ask the 1960’s written by Kueon Bodrae and Cheon Jeonghwan. The authors of this work pay attention to dialectical relations between the 4․19 Revolution and 5․16 Coup d’État which developed their own spirits, while struggling and against each other constantly in the 1960’s. The authors’ view is that the 4․19 Revolution betrayed itself and was finally drawn into the 5․16 Coup d’État, as seen in their propositions that “4․19 […has] become 5․16”. This was the result of the opposition of “Bread” and “Liberty”, a false dichotomy which dominated people’s consciousness, and group psychology and led the revolutionaries to betray themselves out of fear of war and communism. The 1960’s as a period is defined by the historical developments of the 5․16 Coup, which subsumed the 4․19 Revolution under the proposition of national development and modernization. The 4․19 (democratization) and 5․16 (industrialization) changes in regime resulted in the aporia contradictions and antinomy of the 1960s, while displacing and interpenetrating each other, and overdetermining the situations. That is the dialectic of the 1960s turned from politics to intelligence and culture. Likewise, the 1960s was the time in which developed the dialectics of under-development that took shape from the coexistence of various opposing values, such as liberty and anti-communism, nationalism and Americanism, materialist ideology and the search for refinement. The work Ask the 1960’s explains entertainingly the dialectics of underdevelopment in the 1960s by examining copious resources.