자갈, 대벌레 그리고 인간: 『마이클 K의 삶과 시대』에서 윤리적 저항

Abstract

This paper examines how Michael K resists the authorities oppres sion by identifying himself with objects and animals and intends to reveal its ethical value. The South African government and the white in the novel imprison black vagrants in concentration camps. As Michael travels to his mothers birthplace without a permit, he soon gets arrested and is sent to a camp. The life in a camp is that of a Homo Sacer, who is banned from society and thereby all their rights as a citizen are forfeited. These abandoned people, however, should not be excluded from the society completely but come into the social hierarchy again in order to demonstrate the sovereigntys superiority. Michaels metamorphosis into a non-human being in such a condition is significant because it is not forced as in the case of a Homo Sacer but voluntary act. He does not yield helplessly to the authorities desire to define him as a lesser human. He rather confuses them and recovers the materiality of his own body by becoming a non-human which is not explained by human language. Neutralizing their power and disrupting the hierarchy between the sovereignty and a Homo Sacer, Michael attempts more fundamental resistance. Michaels resistance is not only radical but ethical since he embraces the existence of the Others. Rather than privileging himself as a subject of representation, who totalizes the otherness, Michael chooses to live like a discarded object or a petty animal to which the black vagrants in camps have been compared. He just accepts their existence as they are, stripping away negative cultural codes given by the sovereignty.