1970년대 생명정치와 한센병 관리정책: 김정한의 「인간단지」와 최인호의 「미개인」을 중심으로

Abstract

Michel Foucault coined the word biopower(or bio-pouvoir in French) to explain the mechanism of the modern politics which found a fundamental power strategy: Governing not the territory but the population. Giorgio Agamben, accepting Foucault’s theory, argued that involving the homo sacer in politics was the primary activity of Western sovereign power. In this paper, referring to the theories of them, I reflect back on the biopoltics(or bio-politique in French) under Park Chung-hee regime to trace the origin of the power governing and controlling Koreans to their very foundation. Korean literature in 1970s perceived sensitively the relation between the birth of sovereign power above the constitution and the politicization of life. There were several authors who depicted such an invisible but actually working phenomenon against the sovereign power which invented a new constitution to abolish the old one. This paper examined Kim Jeong-han’s the Human Estate and Choi In-ho’s the Uncivilized among them. They detected the relation between bare life(or la nuda vita in Italian) and the governance of developmental dictatorship and thus reconstructed the context in which the life of patients with Hansen’s disease was politicized, based on true stories. The Human Estate questioned the settlement project for the people healed from Hansen’s disease, enforced by Korean government. It also criticised that the leprosy control carried out by the developmental dictatorship was not to abolish the leper colony but to invisualize it, through examining the continuity with the politics of leper deportation implemented by the Japanese empire. The Uncivilized reproduced the commotion of rejecting the children of patients with Hansen’s disease in a public school, which aroused social criticism of the day, to expose how civil society conspired with biopolitics. The novel, meanwhile, clarified there were neoliberal power techniques behind such a conspiracy, which govern the life of population in the form of economy. On the threshold of Yushin, the revitalizing reform, these texts gave attention to the power over life and urged us to change the given conditions of life by describing the escape and the resistance of bare life called the patient with Hansen’s disease, who was excluded by the power. It is significant that they clearly grasped the symptom of such resistance when we recall the fact that popular movements, in the time that anti-Yushin resistance hardened, were provoked by the ‘biological resistance’ of oppressed and exploited lives.