자기 배려를 통한 인간주체성의 탐색과 생태담론의 새로운 가능성 -90년대 생태문학담론과 이문재의 시를 중심으로-

Abstract

Ecological issues have helped ones realize how money controls the whole globe with its power and our everyday lives heavily depend on capital. However, the monstrous nature of capital in the end includes all the logics against capitalism and uses them as its driving force, which makes it impossible to imagine another world out of capital. In spite of such impossibility, Lee Mun-jae’s poetics provides a new approach to ecological issues. His perspective is based on ecologism, but places “I, myself,” not Nature, in the center of thinking to look into our desire and helps explore a new subjectivity. This way of thinking on human subjectivity with a consideration of ecology can be named “the new anthropocentric discourse on ecology.” This anthropocentric discourse on ecology looks deep into the human desire for money, and in turn leads to discovering “me” as an independent man that cannot be alternated. This is an attempt to map human desire in a new way, and an imagination of a world out of capitalism as it imagines an outside world of exchange value. Poet Lee starts the imagination with a method called “walk.” A “walk” means to the poet a “boundary between walk and non-walk” as well as a “boundary between work and rest.” Walk as a boundary between walk and non-walk removes the potent force of capital while walk as a boundary between work and rest serves capital. Here since the boundary is blurred in the methodology of “walk,” the effort to get rid of capital power leads to a chance to lose one’s being. However, with his fourth collection of poetry Imperial Hotel (2004), he begins to embrace and take care of myself as a human being. This change starts with his unique way of thinking on time. My time is condensed in my body, and the body harboring the condensed time is not only an independent entity of a body but becomes part of Nature. My body as part of Nature represents the world of eternal recurrence of Nietzsche. In this regard, body and mind, me and the others, and earth and space are all closely connected. I am the others, the others bear me, and so I become a being of change and creation. Myself is recognized positively in the attitude of concerning for and taking care of my being, and my body grows a place that embraces all other beings including Nature. In eternal recurrence, mankind recovers its subjectivity, and furthermore the time of eternal recurrence helps move our recognition of humans from as an independent entity to as connected us in community. Still, capital places threats on us with its greed. Under such threats, the poet gives a poetic way of thinking for imagining outside of capitalism, in his attitude of self-consideration that accepts one’s desire and looks for a possibility for creation. This is Lee’s ecological thinking to explore a possibility of a world through creative desire.