푸코를 읽는 김현-비평의 전회와 실존의 곤혹

Abstract

This article is about a conversion of Kim Hyun’s literary criticism in 1980s. Interpreting his reading of Foucault, it would be clear that this conversion was a symptom of perplexity of thoughts in criticisms and academia in 1990s, Korea. He was strongly shocked by Gwanju incident in May 1980 and, after that, tried to take a distance from an ideological and political antagonism which dominated the field of literary criticisms and theoretical discourses in 1980s. He read Foucault in this context, which showed us how his self-definition as belonging to the generation of April 1960 Uprising has changed since 1980. He had identified himself as a nationalistic literary critics who should think and write in national language before Gwangju incident in May 1980, however this self-identity could not help being changed because he saw in the incident a primordial limitation of humankind which was a gray zone between human and beast and one that could never be overcome by any kind of language or practice. His reading of Foucault was strongly predominated by this sentiment and he turned his literary criticism from modernistic way of thinking to literature of violation and violence. Foucault was a guide leading him to this direction. In so doing he foretold us how the scene of social theory and literary criticism in 1990s Korea should be perplexed by reading Foucault’s political insight in a ambivalent way as both politics of liberation and anarchic radical politics.