고귀한 엄숙, 고요한 충성: 이광수의 예의작법과 감각적인 것의 나눔

Abstract

This article tries to explore the specific relations between ‘affection’ and ‘love’through gestures and behaviors of characters of Yi Kwang-su(李光洙)’s fictions,to contemplate the virtue of Sophrosyne on the level of the manners and to revealthe meanings of the distribution of the sensible that Yi Kwang-su’s imagined communityperformed. Sophrosyne was often represented by characters’ gestures and behaviors. The powerof Sophrosyne, derived from a sort of cultural order, governs the internal desireand need and works even on the formation of the private/public relationships atthe same time. In Yi’s vision of a new community, Sophrosyne would be performedthrough the indirect and formal conduct of the manners. Based on the promiseof a moral dividing line between human and animal, Yi’s ‘affectionate community’could be made by suppressing the animalistic in the self and deleting the privateand become stronger and solider by performative practice of the manners. Themanners as an indirect act, which could be relatively formalized, would reveal theactivities of ideological practical system in which the subject were living with theimaginary relations to the reality. Through the mechanism of self-alienation resulted from the anxiety about theexcessive intimacy, we can ascertain the ontological site of the pioneers in Yi’sworld. The practice of the manners of this solemn being, who pursues the self-sufficiency by isolating oneself from the instinct or the private interest, comes to gestures ofloyalty to organizing power of the world that he/she wants to escape from. The bodies in Yi’s fiction world has been organized by stable borders. Theyindicate that disputing over a given social relationship and transforming it is questioningan existing (b)order on physical senses and inseparable of its reorganization.