감정과 장소, 그리고 광주-완전성의 환상에서 벗어나기

Abstract

This thesis is a study that focuses on the emotional politics of the new military government and the emotional response of Gwangju and its citizens, looking at Gwangju before and after the May 18th as a place where the entanglement of various emotions worked. While previous studies on the May 18th literature focused mainly on the impossibility of reproducibility, guilt and shame, and political and historical meanings, this study examines how emotions such as disgust, anxiety, fear, insult, anger, and shame are produced, operated, and shared. There is a difference in that it is a plan to see if it is being done. Chapter 2 paid attention to the duality of anti-communism that the military operated with the production logic of hatred. The hate sentiment produced through anti-communism made Gwangju a place of exceptional condition exposed to ideological contaminants (North Korea, Reds). The neurotic rejection reaction to this abnormality is paradoxically like a confession that long-standing anxiety is inherent in the fact that the logic of anti-communism and hatred has been continuously written in places where state violence was committed after liberation. Just as citizens felt anxiety and fear in front of the possibility of everyday death, the military was also exposed to anxiety in which the legitimacy of power was threatened. Anxiety was shared. Chapter 3 paid attention to how feelings of disgust were shared through the scenes of vomiting that appeared repeatedly in early novels. In the narrative of the novel, the experience of state violence inherited by male characters in the family line made those who remember it immediately recognize Gwangju as a place of reappearance of anxiety. At that time, Gwangju was a place spit out outside of the normal subject defined by the state, and it was a gathering place of emotional politics where hatred, anxiety, fear, insult-cycle, and shame-cycle operated. Therefore, although vomiting is a response to this anxiety and fear, it is immediately captured in a paradoxical meaning. Referring to Sartre’s 『Nausea』, it is explained that it is reasonable to interpret the vomiting of the characters as a strong rejection against the epistemic violence that tries to define Gwangju as a symbolic order. Chapter 4 paid attention to the two <Aeguk>. Unlike <Aeguk>, which appeared as background music at the time of the military’s mass firing, <Aeguk>, sung by citizens, brought back the identity of the country that had been polluted by the military, and placed the place of Gwangju at the center of democracy. Through this, it was explained that citizens responded with legitimate feelings of anger in response to the military’s emotional politics of insulting and giving. In Chapter 5, the two ‘illusions of perfection’ critically checked the logic of excluding those who survived to the outside of the incident. The fantasy of completing the struggle by dying together drove the survivors to feelings of shame continuously after the incident. In addition, it was noted that the discourse on national and popular literature in the 1980s summoned the place and characters of Gwangju as an ideological place and subject that went through a rite of passage called dialectical consciousness growth. Through this, it was explained that the illusion of a perfect subject falls into the trap of arranging both the dead and the survivors outside of discourse. These logics emphasized that the place of Gwangju at the time of May 18th and the citizens of Gwangju are not free from the suspicion of an illusion of perfection as a result of violent discourse to monumentalize while placing them in a position of sublimity.