SF, 타자성을 탐구하는 사고실험의 미학: 스타니스와프 렘의 SF『솔라리스』(1961)를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper discusses the aesthetic significance of novelistic thought experiments on epistemological and ethical typologies, focusing on Stanislaw Rem’s SF Solaris (1961). Solaris is a masterpiece of modern science fiction that proves that it is a work of literature which invented a new world model. It is also a great achievement that SF works in literary formulas that are different from the work of traditional realistic narratives such as representation and reflection or world view. In science fiction, ‘science’ needs to be understood as ‘cognition’ to perform a creative approach to reality, and ‘novel’ as ‘defamilization’ to reconstruct a new world through the function of cognition. The planet ‘Solaris’ in the novel is an epistemologically unrecognizable ‘other’ from Descartes’s ‘res cogitans’ to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding an sich). At the same time, it also implies the concept of ‘sublime’ which is aesthetically reproducible, and at the same time unrepresentable. This paper argues that Solaris is a work that simultaneously performed epistemological inquiry into the outer world and ethical inquiry into neighborhood.