The Subject’s Absence Or Absent Subject: Re-read Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron

초록

This article attempts to situate Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron within the Korean cultural context to explore how Kim constructs and represents the silent and speaking subject, the subject’s space, as well as the process of Sun-hwa’s subject formation. First, this article argues that Kim endows “things” and power-holding subjects with a speaking position; Sun-hwa has a speaking position only when she becomes a subject. Second, Kim presents the subject’s empty and heterotopic space—has been disintegrated and encroached upon by compressed modernity and the neoliberal capitalist system. Finally, Sun-hwa is successfully interpellated onto a subject and subject’s position (from a “whore” to a homemaker; from a being “looked at” and “desired” as well as a masochistic object to a speaking subject), filling the void of the empty house, filling the modern void; she turns the “empty house” into a home. In addition, the article also argues that Sun-hwa’s shift in identity seems to suggest that Kim has completed his transformation from an object to a subject; allegorically, it seemingly could also connote South Korea’s national identity shift from a divided nation to a new sovereign state, from a colonial object to a “subject” in its own right.

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