화이트헤드와 바디우의 주체 개념 비교 - 창조성의 주체와 공백의 주체 -

Abstract

This is an attempt to suture the subject of A.N. Whithead to that of A. Badiou by medium of the notions of creativity and the void, and thereby to find a model of subjectivity for our present age. Both creativity and the void are tangential to each other in that they refer to a halting and breaking point of our established system of thoughts and at the same time in that they lure the subject beyond itself. They enable each actual entities to advance in terms of a truth-event of actual entity, but it is so only by bringing the breaking point(s) into our present thoughts. Thus, the suture of Whitehead's subject to Badiou's subject means an attempt to explore some breaking points in the former's notion of subject and thereby to connect it to the latter's. The breaking points refers to hiatus(es) that does not mean logical contradiction or separation, but rather conflict and tension for the emergence of a new creativity. In short, the subject is not an endurance or permanence of self but an aleatory and excessive event to the established situation. It is not by a continuous and smooth endurance but by a temporary and discrete momentum of hiatus that the subject adds some novelty to the established system. As a world view to overcome the modern inhuman, materialistic and mechanical one, the ideal of organic harmony based upon organic relationality has been suggested, but what really matters is rather our violent grasp of the other(s) when our sticky human relations turn into a form of political relationship so that organic relationality deteriorate into a blind theory of harmony, which never allows any form of conflict in our society and which after all becomes a totalitarian. This article attempts to depict a structure of the subject, which to see via Badiou's theory of the subject the notion of organic harmony in Whitehead as a creative harmony overcoming conflict and tension. What it wants to draw is the structure of the subject to break through and go beyond the established discourses of power that have sought to cover up the contradictions and injustice of our age. In the meantime, Whitehead and Badiou become harsh critiques to tackle to their respective weak points instead of being a pair, which supplement the respective logics. They seem to disharmonize, but they could be a perfect pair exactly in that they are subtracted from each other and seek a chance to overturn the other. Their disharmony could hear a harmony harmonizing the disharmonized sounds, the dis/harmony.