Who’s afraid of Judith Butler?

Haeook Jeong(정혜욱) 새한영어영문학회 2021 새한영어영문학회 학술발표회 논문집 Vol.2021 No.10

EBS, Korea"s leading educational broadcaster, organized lectures called “Great Minds” by 40 distinguished scholars including Paul Krugman, Richard Dawkins, Judith Butler and so on and started airing on August 30, 2021. When the program schedule was announced, some conservative media condemned Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, the most influential book in the history of Gender Studies, as a pedophile and supporter of incest out of nothing. Based on the fabricated news stories, with passionate intensity, many people wrote on the EBS message board that Judith Butler"s lectures should be stopped. She is, however, only an academic expert, not a politician with power. What makes them afraid of Judith Butler? Are they trying to exorcise a spectre called precarity haunting 21<SUP>st</SUP> century Korean society?

혐오발언, 주체의 행위성, 몸의 수행성

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2023 비평과이론 Vol.28 No.1

혐오발언은 주로 개인이나 집단을 인종, 성, 민족, 종교, 성적 지향에 대한 편견에 근거하여 악의적으로 비방하는 표현으로 정의된다. 그러나 혐오발언은 단순히 개인적 감정의 표현이 아니며 어떤 사회 역사적 배경 없이 생겨나는 것은 아니다. 혐오표현의 대중적 확산은 종종 가짜 뉴스와 밀접한 관련을 띤다. 가짜 뉴스는 논리적이고 호소력 있게 사실을 재구성하여 혐오의 광범위한 확산을 목표로 한다. 그래서 거짓은 종종 진실보다 더 빠르고 더 호소력이 있다. 사실 검증은 시간이 오래 걸리고, 사실로 확인되는 경우라도 그 때는 이미 대중의 관심이 사라진 이후일 가능성도 높다. 따라서 이 글의 목적은 이 시대의 석학 중의 한 명이자 동시에 혐오에 노출된 취약한 성소수자로서 주디스 버틀러가 혐오발언을 어떻게 이론화하고, 이에 어떻게 저항하고자 하는지를 살피고, 궁극적으로 나쁜 삶에서 어떻게 좋은 삶을 끌어낼 수 있는가라는 문제를 고민해보고자 하는 데 그 목적이 있다. 이를 위해 첫째, 혐오발언, 가짜뉴스, 탈진실의 문제와 더불어 이성/감정이라는 이분법의 한계를 고찰하고, 둘째, 혐오발화의 문제를 다룬 『흥분할 수 있는 발화』(1997)을 중심으로 말의 힘과 말이 행위가 될 수 있는지의 문제를 발화수반행위와 발화효과행위를 통하여 살피고, 셋째, 『비폭력의 힘』(2020)의 프로이트 분석을 중심으로, 비록 말년의 프로이트가 어떻게 혐오를 넘어서고자 했는지, 혐오를 넘어서 정서적 연대를 주장하는 프로이트의 미완의 기획을 버틀러가 어떻게 보충하는지를 살피고, 이러한 시도가 혐오로 병든 한국사회에 어떤 시사점을 던져주는지를 검토하고자 한다. Hate speech is any form of expression that vilifies and discriminates against individuals or groups based on their identity, including race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and more. However, hate speech is not merely an emotional expression; it can often be intertwined with fake news and logical reasoning that appears convincing. This article explores Judith Butler's theories on hate speech, how she resists it, and how to draw a good life out of a bad life. Firstly, it examines the limitations of the traditional dichotomy between reason and emotion and how it relates to issues such as hate speech, fake news, and post-truth. Secondly, it analyzes hate speech as either an illocutionary or perlocutionary speech act, and reviews legal cases related to hate speech in the USA through Judith Butler's Excitable Speech(1997). Thirdly, it explores Butler's analysis of Freud's work in The Force Of Nonviolence(2020), including his ideas about the importance of emotional ties and communities of feeling, and how he aimed to overcome blind fury in his later years. The article also discusses how Butler supplements Freud's unfinished research and extends his ideas beyond their original limits. Finally, the implications of these attempts for Korean society, which is currently grappling with the problem of hate speech, are examined in the last section.

지젝의 외상과 바틀비의 정치학

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2012 비평과이론 Vol.17 No.2

This paper aims to explore Slavoj Žižek’s notion of trauma as a political category. Psychological trauma is usually interpreted as something one cannot assimilate into one’s consciousness. Therefore, it repeats itself indefinitely, returning to haunt the subject. Trauma and politics seem to have nothing in common, but Žižek shows the notional similarity between trauma and political revolution. To Lacan, the constitution of subject requires the entrance into the world of language and the symbolic order. These prerequisites cause the primary trauma and the barred subject. Spiltting(/) itself would be the very possibility of subject and the place of a void signifying nothing. Žižek thus defines “trauma” as a shocking encounter which disturbs the immersion into one’s life-world, a violent intrusion of something which does not fit in the existing symbolic order. Žižek’s trauma anticipates the rise of a post-traumatic subject as a new and revolutionary one, which is the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected and unintegrated. This notion of trauma has recently become more political with multi-level connotations, connecting it with political revolution. In its political mode, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is a kind of arche, the first stage to cause a real change and the underlying principle that sustains the entire movement. Although the figure of Bartleby falls short of a radical subject, it is true that Zizek’s new perspective is a significant shift in the way one interprets trauma.

집합적 주체와 몸들의 연대: 주디스 버틀러와 더불어 집회를 생각하기

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2018 비평과이론 Vol.23 No.1

Looking at recent assembles and mass protests, including the candlelight rallies over ex-president Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in the streets of Seoul, Korea, this paper aims to examine the performative ways assembling bodies claim rights and the roles of democratic assemblies in the making of a new collective, plural and relational subjectivity. I mainly refer to Judith Butler s recent books and articles for the development of my opinion. For this purpose, I investigate the roles precarity plays in various assembles and contemporary forms of economic abandonment that follow from the differential distribution of precarity. Then, after showing what separates the democratic assemblies of bodies from the U.S Tea Party crowds or Korean Taegeukgi Rally composed of far-right groups, I try to show lives and bodies are interconnected to one another and how bodily acts become performative. Finally, rethinking the bodily dimensions of the “becoming-collective-subjectivity,” I suggest the significance of assembly as performative and relational subjects in alliance in which people are “exercising a right to appear” and open up time and space outside and against the established regime.

주디스 버틀러와 몸의 정치윤리

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2024 비평과이론 Vol.29 No.1

이 글은 뉴럴링크나 생성형 인공지능과 같은 눈부신 과학적 발전에도 불구하고 ‘왜 몸이 여전히 문제인가’라는 주디스 버틀러의 문제의식에 공명하면서 시작된다. 9-11 이전의 초기작에 중점을 두고 주디스 버틀러를 읽을 사람이라면, 버틀러가 몸보다는 언어와 담론에 보다 초점을 맞추고 있다고 주장할 수 있다. 물론 초기작부터 버틀러가 몸에 관심을 기울이지 않는 것은 아니지만, 『젠더 트러블』(1990), 『문제는 몸이다』(1993), 『흥분할 수 있는 발화』(1997) 등에서 버틀러가 우리에게 고통을 주는 규범이나 강제적 호명을 어떻게 ‘재의미화’할 것인가에 보다 많은 강조점을 두고 있기 때문에, 2000년대 이후의 저작보다 언어적 영역이나 담론을 넘어서는 몸의 차원에 상대적으로 소홀했던 것처럼 보이는 것은 사실이다. 그러나 『위태로운 삶』(2004) 이후 버틀러는 신체적 차원을 상당히 명시적으로 강조한다. 즉 언어와 담론 차원의 ‘재의미화’를 넘어서, 몸이 이러한 언어적 규범을 초과하고 경합하며, 몸 자체가 어떻게 세계와 영향을 주고 받으면서 세계를 변화시킬 수 있는 가능성을 지니는가라는 문제에 보다 초점을 맞춘다. 따라서 이 글의 목적은 팬데믹이라는 전례 없는 사건을 통해 몸들의 정치에 대한 최근의 성찰을 보여주고 있는 『이 세계는 어떤 세계인가: 팬데믹 현상학』을 포함하여 최근작을 중심으로 몸의 열림과 취약성, 상호의존성, 상호얽힘, 다공성(porosity)을 통해 몸의 감각이 삶가능성(livability)을 위한 세계의 변화를 어떻게 이끌어낼 수 있을 것인지를 살피고, 프리케리티와 프리케리티의 불평등한 분배를 살피고 이에 저항하기 위한 몸들 사이의 가능한 연대 형태를 탐색하는 데 있다. 이를 위해 첫째, 버틀러가 팬데믹을 거치면서 사유한 몸의 문제를 메를로퐁티와 같은 현상학자들을 경유하여, 몸의 감각(senses), 상호의존성(interdependency) 및 상호 얽힘(entrelac, interlacing)을 살핀다. 둘째, 몸의 정치윤리를 사유하기 위하여, 프리케리티라는 개념을 도입하여, 몸에 대한 현상학적 논의를 어떻게 보충하는가를 살피고, 셋째, #흑인의 생명도 소중하다, #단 하나의 생명도 잃을 수 없다 등의 연대 형태를 살피고, 이를 통해 버틀러의 이론이 현 시대의 몸, 취약성, 프리케리티, 그리고 정체성주의에 사로잡히지 않는 열린 연대에 대해 어떠한 해석과 제안을 하는지, 그리고 마지막으로 이러한 제안이 위기의 시대를 사는 오늘날에 얼마나 시의성을 갖는지, 어떤 통찰력을 제공하는지를 살피고자 한다. 결론적으로, 이 논문은 팬데믹이라는 특수한 상황 속에서 몸의 위태로움과 연대의 필요성을 재조명하여, 인류가 직면한 공동의 위기에 대응하기 위해 어떻게 서로 연결되고 연대하고 연대할 것인가라는 문제를 다루고자 한다. This study commences by engaging with Judith Butler's critical inquiry into the enduring significance of the body amidst the rapid advancements in fields like Neuralink and generative AI. Butler’s early works including Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter, and Excitable Speech, extensively investigate the ‘resignification’ of oppressive norms and coercive interpellations, a focus that initially seemed to underplay the role of physical embodiment. Since Precarious Life(2004), however, Butler’s scholarship has notably shifted to more explicitly incorporate the bodily dimension. She extends her inquiry beyond the ‘re-signification’ in language and discourse to explore how the body itself can exert influence and drive transformative change in the world. This paper aims to explore contemporary reflections on the body's politics, especially in the context of global events like the pandemic. It examines Butler’s recent works, including What World Is This?, to understand how the body's openness, vulnerability, interdependence, entanglement, and porosity may catalyze transformative shifts towards a more livable world. The paper also examines the unequal distribution of precarity and potential solidarity forms among bodies as a form of resistance. To fulfill these aims, the paper first reviews Butler’s views on bodies during the pandemic, drawing on phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with a special emphasis on corporal sensory perception, interdependency, and interconnectedness. It then introduces the concept of precarity to deepen the discussion on the body’s politics. Furthermore, it evaluates forms of solidarity, exemplified by movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #NiUnaMenos, to explore how Butler’s theory advocates for an open solidarity that moves beyond identity politics. The study concludes by assessing how Butler’s insights provide timely and profound contributions to the current era of crisis.

데리다의 정치성

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2011 비평과이론 Vol.16 No.2

This paper explores Derrida’s politics by examining ‘she-wolf’ as ‘manifestation without manifestation’ and the pas de loup meaning ‘the stealthy step of the wolf’ in Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign I(2009). Even though he did not write explicitly about politics or political concepts before the publication of Specters of Marx, there have always already been the political implications in such concepts as différance and trace of Derrida’s early texts. Différance retains the sense of difference not only in language but also in ipseity or selfness. One’s home is always already haunted by the trace of the other, as secret or unheimlich space within home disturbs my being at home. ‘I’ am, thus, under the effect of différance. Just as the term différance has been displaced as hospitality, forgiveness, democracy to come, justice, spectrality and so on in his various texts, in this seminar, Derrida newly introduces the pas de loup, which announces the proximity of an animal or human: the wolf itself is named there in absence, as it were; the wolf is named where you don’t hear or see it coming; it is still absent, save for its name. In fact, the sovereignty in this text is part of the larger question of ‘ipseity’, the possibility of selfhood. Through a detailed reading of La Fontaine’s The Wolf and the Lamb, Freud’s ‘wolf-man’, Hobbes’s Leviathan, etc., Derrida argues the sovereign often takes the form of an artificial animal, a divine animal, a human who becomes a wolf or a werewolf, which leads us to call into question the distinction of human/animal, which shows ‘ipseity’ is a threshold space of the self(le souverain) and the other(la bête). Derrida further elaborates on the theme of pas de loup by suggesting that he would want to claim that a decision is always made in the name of the other, “of the absolute other in me or the other as the absolute that decides in me”. The living is, thus, a matter not of those who live but that which lives, or the absolute ipseity to live a politically responsible life. In this context, political responsibility is not simply a movement toward the other, but a movement toward the ‘I’, my responsibility toward the other. His conclusion is not “to pay homage to some obscurantism of nonknowledge, but to prepare perhaps a political event for ourselves between la bête and le souverain.

랑시에르의 미학적 공동체와 ‘따로 · 함께’의 역설

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2013 비평과이론 Vol.18 No.1

The purpose of this paper is to examine Jacques Ranciére's aesthetic community as the paradox of being together apart. An aesthetic community is not a community bound up with regionalism, school relations, and kinship but an infant community of sense produced through redistribution of the sensible to reframe a new and equal common space. Ranciére claims there is an 'aesthetics' at the core of politics, because the distribution of the sensible defines what can be visible or not Ⅲ a common space. A community can be political when it makes forms of subjectivation for the uncounted appear. This paper tries to show why Ranciére's thought is important to the contemporary community discourses, examining both contributions and limits of those community discourses which focus either on being apart or on being together. Within Ranciére's three schemes of art regimes, being together belongs to the "representational regime of art" which erases the gap between poiesis and aisthēsis. In the "ethical regime of art," the community of being together without mediation is celebrated by Plato. But Plato constructs a hierarchical opposition between activity and passivity, while the anti-representationists like Gilles Deleuze dismiss the real laws of our being together, celebrating the individuation and haecceities. Accordingly, both by questioning the ways in which the community is produced and by exploring the potentials of community entailed Ⅲ separation itself, I'd like to show the political efficacy and possibility of Ranciére's aesthetic community.

9-11과 우화-슈피겔만의『사라진 타워의 그림자』

정혜욱(Jeong Haeook) 새한영어영문학회 2011 새한영어영문학 Vol.53 No.1

I try to explore after-effects of 9-11 and its affabulation in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, a comix collage of 9-11. Though the text seems to be chaotic and fragmentary, Spiegelman tries to depict the hidden fault lines where his personal/collective experience or personal/world history collide and how past can be a cause of a future effect. While his Pulitzer winning work, Maus depicted the survivors of the Holocaust as mice, In the Shadow of No Towers shows anonymous private individuals through the fable of anthropomorphic mice equally terrified of their own government and of terrorism in post 9-11 era. As Spiegelman says in the text, they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. According to Derrida, a fable is a fiction supposed to faire savoir in a double sense: in the sense of bringing some knowledge to the awareness of the other, making the other know, and in the sense of making like knowledge, giving the effect of knowing, a false knowing, a simulacrum of knowing(34-35). This article examines what has been happening since 9-11 attests to becoming-fabulous of political action and discourse and how a fable can be a useful medium to show the invisible or unsayable which has not yet been carried off and inscribed in public memory in Spiegelman’s text.

라캉의 불안 정동을 넘어서

정혜욱(Haeook Jeong) 한국비평이론학회 2022 비평과이론 Vol.27 No.1

정신의학에서 불안은 정신병의 일반적인 증상 중의 하나로 걱정이나 두려움과 같은 정신적 현상과 호흡곤란, 두근거림, 피로, 어지러움, 식은땀 등과 같은 다양한 신체적 증상을 포함하는 개인적 질병으로 진단되어왔다. 그러나 라캉의 정신분석학에서 불안은 임박한 위험에 대한 경고이자, 간극에 자리하고 있는 대상 a가 주체에게 보내는 신호인 동시에 대상 a가 다른 대상으로 대체되어 구멍 마개처럼 간극을 메우려고 시도할 때 생겨나는 것으로, 우리의 삶의 욕망을 지탱해주던 판타지 구조의 붕괴와 밀접한 관계가 있다. 따라서 이 연구는 어렵고 난해하기로 악명이 높지만 동시에 불안에 대한 임상적, 사회적, 문화적 통찰력을 제공해줄 수 있는 라캉의 <세미나 10>에서 불안의 의미를 살피고, 그의 불안 분석이 오늘날 어떤 시의성을 지니는지, 기존의 판타지 구조 속으로 도피함으로써 불안과 같은 부정적 정동을 제거할 것이 아니라, 불안이 어떻게 사회의 환상을 가로지르고 상징적 좌표를 변경시킬 수 있는 신호가 되는지, 그리고 이것이 어떻게 새로운 주체의 발생으로 이어지는지, 그 긍정적 가능성을 도출하고자 하는 데 그 목적을 둔다. 이를 위해 2장에서는 대상 a와 관련한 ‘불안’ 개념과 그것의 위치, 3장에서는 그가 프로이트의 <억제, 증상, 불안>을 좀 더 세분하여 정교화시킨 불안 차트 속에 등장하는 억제, 장애, 당황, 정서, 증상, 좌절 그리고 행위화와 행위로의 이행 등의 개념을 살핀 후, 4장에 서는 자본주의 사회와 연결하여 결여의 결여로서의 불안을 살피고 5장에서는 불안과 치유의 문제를 불안 세미나를 전후하여 엄청난 불안에 시달리고 있었던 라캉이 자신의 불안과 대면하여 어떻게 대처해나갔는지, 그리고 그것이 우회적으로 치유와 어떻게 이어질 수 있는지에 대해 살폈다. Lacanian psychoanalysis accounts for anxiety as a warning signal for a coming danger, or an affect relevant to the encounter with the objet petit a in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety, while psychiatry diagnoses it as a personal disease with mental phenomena of worry and apprehension, accompanying physical phenomena of palpitations, fatigue, dizziness, breathlessness, and sweats. The emergence of overwhelming anxiety is closely related to the collapse of the subjective desire-based fantasy frame. This essay examines how the anxious subject encountering the object a can cross the fantasy structure and advance into a neo-natal subject. To this end, the essay clarifies the concept and status of anxiety related to object a, analyzing Lacan’s anxiety chart, consisting of such affects and acts as inhibition, impediment, embarrassment, emotion, symptom, turmoil, acting-out and passage à l acte, which he developed based on Freud s “Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety.” Grounded on such analyses, the essay further attempts to take advantage of Lacanian discourse on capitalism in order to illustrate that anxiety arises when lack lacks and by so doing, it gropes for Lacanian analysts’ roles for the society in spite of Lacan’s comment, ‘cure comes as an additional bonus.’

타나토이드와 기억의 정치학 : 토머스 핀천의『바인랜드』

정혜욱 새한영어영문학회 2000 새한영어영문학 Vol.42 No.2

In this essay, I aim at a comprehensive understanding of postmodern memory and its politics by rereading Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Vineland shows a much greater sense of new possibilities than Pynchon's ealier novels. Even if we can't say it exactly transcends the system, Pynchon tries to change it and develop new forms of subjectivity in Vineland. The politics and sense of history in this novel are not altogether different from Pynchon's earlier novels. But what is markedly different in Vineland is the popularized historical and political sense. From paranoia (in V. and The Crying of Lot 49), which depend on a reasonably coherent subject, Pynchon moves through schizophrenia (in Gravity's Rainbow) to Thanatoia (in Vineland). Thanatoia allows the possibility of some reconstruction In the face of the well-known "death of the subject" as well as the end of the old class system, Pynchon shows the formation of a differential politics of groups called Thanatoia who exist in a state between life and death. But They are not only ghosts. Actually they are so much like Preterites of Gravity's Rainbow. Near the end of Vineland, The Thanatoids all simutaneously wake to a promise of renewed life. In Vineland, the possibilities which transcend the going order In the present are rigorously limited by the existing historical conditions. But, pynchon seems to suggest that one of the jobs of the historian(the author) is to reconstruct the past possibilities which would have had to exit at the time in question in the text.