Agamben, Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

Abstract

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non-Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.

Reregulating for Freshwater Enclosure: A State of Exception in Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Thus feminist geographers have specifically expanded notions of exceptionalism to expose the differentialisation, and particularly the double desubjectivation that occurs through biological markers of gender and race (see Mountz ; Pratt ; Sanchez , ; Secor , ; Wright ). These analyses highlight exception as both process and as a technique of government, as “intrinsic to the very logic of modern political sovereignty” (Lee et al :656). As Belcher et al (:500) argue, in this frame “exception is emergent, which is to say, it is not a preformed category but a dynamic set of techniques of power”.…”

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

“…In the latter, such politics pits conservative or royalist city dwellers in Bangkok against the countryside, often relying on romanticised and depoliticised and therefore disempowering representations of the peasant and the countryside to do so, as in the case of the "sufficiency economy" (see Connors 2003;Glassman 2001;Hewison 2008). Unlike in Thailand, voters in the South Korean capital city of Seoul tend to vote liberal-left while rural areas, especially the south-eastern province of Kyŏngsang-do, more often vote for the conservatives, with the exception of the southwest which tends to vote liberal-left, and thus gets its own chongbuk-style smear such as Cholla-do bbalgaengi, linking the term bbalgaengi (red or communist) to the name of the south-western province (Lee, Jan, and, Wainwright 2014). Furthermore, post-democratic politics in Thailand does not use anti-communist discourse in the name of public security as much as it uses the royalist discourse of lèse-majesté to silence popular, egalitarian forces.…”

Population geography III

“…The insights of Agamben (1998: 115) are instructive but incomplete -as recent geographical work has highlighted (Minca, 2006;Barkan, 2009;Hagmann and Korf, 2012;Lee et al, 2014). Notably, Agamben's inability to engage seriously with gendered and racialized differences, for example, forces him to collapse a qualified vulnerability to death into a shared mortality; as when he (in)famously writes that, '[i]f today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man [sic], it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri'.…”