ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This paper focuses on Kim Hye-soon’s poetry from the 1990s and discusses how “noise” creates cracks in the capitalist system and order through the bankruptcy of the subject. Driven by the critical awareness that recent discourses on new materialism and posthumanism risk losing the momentum of their systemic critique by focusing primarily on non-human agency and harmonious symbiosis, this paper highlights noise as a form of disorder emerging within the “smooth” relations sanctioned by the capitalist system. In Kim Hye-soon’s poetry, Seoul—the emblem of capitalism—is portrayed as a digestive machine with a closed circular structure of infinite production and consumption, where the poetic self is deprived of its sovereignty of speech and reaches a state of isolation. This isolated self receives uncontrollable noise from a “something” other than itself that parasitizes within. Through this internal parasite, the self’s body is transformed into an impersonal “interchange” zone where noise flows in and out. The impersonalized interior of the self is further deformed and bent into a “whole-body-ear” that resonates with noise at an inaudible decibel levels. Such a transformation generates a community of “extimacy” that resonates with heterogeneity rather than intimacy based on homogeneity. This carries profound political implications, as it creates a space of “nothingness”(nullity) that violates the capitalist laws of exchange, possessing a subversiveness that constantly bores holes of disorder within the system. As such, the noise in Kim Hyesoon’s poetry originates in the 1990s and becomes more concrete in her subsequent poems and poetics. In particularly, noise functions as a prototype of political subversiveness in her work by embodying the ethos of passivity and the “inability of the subject” who yields the place of the ego to the other. Ultimately, this provides a crucial discussion of Kim Hyesoon’s unique literary capacity: The resonance of an “empty square” that transcends human-centered solidarity and remains uncapturable by the established system and its order.

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