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The Politics of Time: The Sewŏl Ferry Disaster and the Disaster of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Hyun Ok Park Open the ORCID record for Hyun Ok Park [Opens in a new window]
Hyun Ok Park*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada
*
Email: hopark@yorku.ca
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Abstract

The vanishing critique of capitalism within the Sewŏl movement for truth finding has revealed the bare face of the current democratic order and its rule of law. This article presents the Sewŏl movement as the bellwether, in a synchronic sense, of the Candlelight Protests that have become a modality of direct action in South Korea. I seek to contribute to our understanding of the life politics that has become a key marker of struggles against the state-capital network since the 2000s. I ascribe the antinomies of truth finding and mourning and of massacre and accident in the Sewŏl movement to the democratic collective unconscious that regards the 1987 moment in South Korea as an irrevocable rupture from dictatorship to democracy. The Sewŏl movement illuminates how the axes of organization and spontaneity and of reformism and revolution in the Candlelight Protest movement are not so much binaries, or oppositions, as hieroglyphic signs of the democratic unconscious and its excesses that contest the temporalizations of the capitalist present.

Keywords

capitalismdemocracydisasterlife politicssocial movementtime and history
Type
Forum: South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 131 - 144
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2022

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