안-아르케, 혹은 근대적 인간의 경계를 넘어서― 르네상스 민중문화에 나타난 똥과 오줌의 존재론

This paper critically examines the modern human arche established since the Renaissance, which idealizes reason, order, and aesthetic harmony while excluding bodily realities such as excretion. It argues that the abstraction of the human subject in modern humanism is grounded in a systemic erasure of the grotesque and the corporeal, particularly feces and urine. Through an analysis of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, the study uncovers how excrement becomes a symbolic site of resistance against normative anthropocentric ideals. The grotesque realism and carnivalesque imagination presented in Rabelais’s work challenge the fixed boundaries between human and nonhuman, high and low, clean and filthy. These dynamics are framed as expressions of an anti-arche―an ontological stance that disrupts the modern logic of identity, hierarchy, and purity. Ultimately, the paper suggests that revisiting the cultural and philosophical meanings of bodily waste opens up a post-boundary (non-)anthropology suited to a time of ecological and ontological transformation.