1970년대의 비상사태와 근대성

Abstract

The South Korean government recently tabled an 'anti－terrorism bill', a move that triggered a prolonged filibuster in the National Assembly, and in response the government threatened to invoke some long－forgotten provisions intended for a "State of Emergency" in a bid to justify the urgency of the proposition. In 1971 the Park Chung－hee regime was the first to declare a state of national emergency in South Korea, and then martial law in 1972, which led to the establishment of the so－called Yushin Regime. From this time until another state of national emergency was declared when the Park Chung－hee Regime eventually collapsed in 1979, the state of emergency pervaded all aspects of everyday life. Thus, developing an understanding of this state of emergency is an instructive approach to comprehending the 1970s, with the Yushin Regime as the archetypal template for all such state of emergency. Although a state of emergency arises at a specific point in time as an exceptional contingency, it can also be understood as a latent element that persists throughout modern history, as implied in Agamben’s thesis of "the normalization of the state of exception”. It appears that capitalist modernization, and also modern sovereign power, structurally encompass the state of emergency. In order to fully understand the implications of the 1970s state of emergency, it is therefore necessary to also consider a deeper layer in which the state of emergency is intrinsic to and embedded within modernity itself. This paper, by referring to the theoretical analysis of the state of exception, and also to discourses on the primitive accumulation of capital, seeks to understand the historical semantics of the state of emergency through a multi－layered approach, intending thereby to gauge the historical significance and continuing relevance of the 1970s.