개발독재 시대의 윤리와 부(富) -광주대단지사건의 텍스트들과 ‘이웃사랑’의 문제

Abstract

The Gwangju Housing Complex Incident was an uprising of residents which occurred in the process of the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s plan to relocate the urban poor to Gwangju, Gyeonggi－do Province (currently Seongnam). Previous studies highlighted the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident as a case through which the right to live and human rights of the urban poor was grossly violated under the governing ideology of the ruling government. This study focuses on the hidden side of the relocation of displaced people and the urban poor’s right to live. In other words, this study examined the facts which paradoxically had to be erased from the text on the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident to put emphasis on the main theme. Although the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident was an altercation surrounding the urban poor’s right to live, it was also a site of fierce speculative investment in real estate, and an epitome of the 1970s. The main agents of the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident were the people, classified in the low－income bracket, who joined the speculative investment market with desires for land and houses, whereas those without properties who did not have the property rights to wield in the first place were excluded for being unqualified, even in the uprising of citizens. In short, behind the fight for the urban poor’s human rights and the right to live were also the inner discrimination between the residents of the grand housing complex, which made the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident into an altercation between conflicting interests. By focusing on the reportages and novels on the Gwangju Housing Complex Incident, this study connects the entities that were erased from the narrative and connected their characteristics with the keyword “petit bourgeois.” This leads to the following question that the Korean literature had to answer in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the frantic economic development which started in the mid－ to late 1960s : do “the people” fall into the same category as the petit bourgeois or not? The people and the petit bourgeois were initially distinguished but the identity of the people, which becomes obscure in the face of the equality of desire, becomes a vacuum in the narrative. This study suggests that the question stemmed from the vacuum in the narrative, that is, the question on what being “petit bourgeois” is, leads to the issue of one’s attitude towards one’s “neighbors” in everyday life. The issue at hand, therefore, is “who is one’s neighbors and how can one love them?” This is an important question, because the love towards others is not merely given as a normative virtue, but becomes something that could be likened to a commandment, with self－denial as a cost.