셸리의 『줄리안과 마달로』: 감성과 이성의 정치학을 넘어서

Abstract

This paper claims that Shelley's “Julian and Maddalo” intervenes a moment of political crisis in the early 19th-century Britain, when the public sphere, essential to the democratic society, started to be disintegrated. According to Habermas, the normative ideal of the public sphere in the 17th and 18th century was the space where a large number of peers came together to engage in reasoned arguments over the key issues of mutual interest and concerns. After the Revolutionary debate in the late 18th century, the foundation of the public sphere was severely undermined mostly because the rise of unpropertied mass public brought the degeneration in the quality of discourse and also because the rise of radical groups made it impossible to escape addressing the class divisions of civil society. Instead of searching for the common good or general interest, the public sphere had changed into a springboard for the diverse interest groups to demand social rights―the services or protections of the state. “Julian and Maddalo” is an attempt to install a new ethical basis for the degenerated public sphere, reflecting the increasing diversity in ethos of the period. In “Julian and Maddalo,” the conversation between the two friends over the possibility of social reform breaks down twice because they are incapable of looking at the world from the counterpart's perspective. In short, their communicative reason is predicated on the exclusion of alterity. However, the Maniac guides the friends to a moment of sympathetic reconciliation by providing a new language which acknowledges the authenticity of otherness and embraces the sincerity of the feelings. Nevertheless, Shelley carefully excavates the oppressive and conforming impulse in the principle of feelings by bringing into focus the social constructiveness of emotions and the disciplinary force of the society which makes the emotions. Accordingly, the diffuse sympathy of Julian does not have the social force to change the system, while rendering the existent factional and exclusive ties and emotions stronger. Just like the way that the disciplinary society incarcerates the Maniac inside the wall of the mental institution, the rational minds of the two friends keeps the feelings that the Maniac evokes within the private sphere. Only after the return of Julian to the Venice, Maddalo's daughter's refusal to reveal what has happened to the Maniac gestures towards a new subjectivity which resists both the egoistical desire of the rational subject and the futile sympathy of the emotional subject.