'삶의 시 되기'와 '시의 삶 되기' - 영화 <시>와 <하하하>를 통해 본 미학의 정치

Abstract

This paper analyzes the poetry in the movies, Poetry and Ha Ha Ha by drawing on the theory of aesthetics, as proposed by Jacque Rancière. This paper terms the poetry in these two movies “the poetry of post-autonomy”, which cannot be identified by the social topology submitted by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This paper investigates the function and value of contemporary poetry and its accompanying subjectification and social relations from the perspective of the politics of aesthetics -that is, thoughts or practices, according to Rancière-which or reformulate the common by questioning the distribution of the sensible. The poetry in Poetry reveals itself to be a tool that aestheticizes the life of an old woman who would be unable to write poems given her position outside the autonomous literary field. The politics of aesthetics performed by the poetry in this movie can be called “life becoming poetry”. However, the politics of aesthetics of the poetry in Poetry abandons the promise of liberation when the movie ends with the testimony of the force of the other who is, in this case, a dead girl, an unrepresentable non-being or an empty agent who, lacking her own voice, reads the protagonist’s poem. The poetry in Ha Ha Ha is non-authentic, written by the members of the literary field. The politics of aesthetics performed by the poetry in this movie can be called “poetry becoming life.” Its function and value lies in its capability to construct the common symbols of life. However, the politics of aesthetics performed by the poetry in this movie cease when the formation of community turns out to be the formation of private friendships and affairs that finds only “good things” from one another approving their beings as they are. This paper ends with an analysis of the limits of the politics of aesthetics performed by the poetry in the two movies in relation with “the ethical turn” mentioned by Rancière as the core characteristic of the depoliticizing world. The poetry in the two movies, in the end, reduces the political imagination of the rights and future to the ethical norm that insists we stay within the given reality and condition of being and, thus, stops the process of the politics of aesthetics. In conclusion, this paper reveals both the possibility and the limit of the poetry in the two movies to argue that the politics of aesthetics is a permanent pendulum swinging between the form of life and the form of beauty without being subsumed into a single complete form and perpetual, impossible struggles to replace the actuality of the “now and here” with the possibility of the “not now or here”.