루쉰의 귀신, 벤야민의 천사

Abstract

This paper examines similar images and concepts that Chinese writer Lu Xun and German critic Walter Benjamin emerge from their late works “Nüdiao”(1936) and “On the Concept of History”(1940), especially focusing on their common aspects about the sense of the time and thoughts on history. Specifically, this research reinterprets prominent images of ghost and angel in their works, while it also reconsiders intercontextually meaning of similar images of Lu Xun and Benjamin commonly recollected in the last moments of their lives. In the mid and late 1930s when fascism in China and Europe spreaded and progressive movement and revolution seemed impossible, they were not frustrated and incapacitated but desperately aimed at searching for the moment of overcoming difficulties. They found this moment by recalling and visualizing the heterogeneous existences, ghost and angel that they kept them in their minds for long time in the nearly last works. On the one hand, it discloses subject, revitalizing the ignored, displaced and repressed existence and take them to the real. On the other hand, it emerges new moment on revolution and history from the grim reality, inscribing their capacity and perspective into the real. In this regards, ghost and angel in their thoughts make them to confront impossibility of revolution, progress and politics and turn the impossibility of the situation into possibility of the real. In other words, ghost and angel are existences that pay more attention to the past than any other temporality and reconsider historical perspective by showing specific subject practice. Furthermore, they rapture thought on the concept of continuous time and causal relationship and search for the possibility of revolution. In this respect, Lu Xun and Benjamin in mid and late 1930s recalled the ghost and angel as the powerful images that stir up the possibility of history and subject from a new viewpoint.