투사를 위한 시학 — 김남주와 사회적 주체화의 문제

“Warrior for Democracy,” “Poet for National Liberation,” Realist of the People“, and many other labels suggest that Kim Nam-joo is a mythical hero who lived through the harsh 1980s. At a time when social speech was banned and violence and torture were commonplace, he fought dictatorship through poetry and opened the spiritual horizon for democratization in Korea. The Poetics of the Warrior refers to this literary Idea and methodology, but it has been increasingly historicized since his sudden death in 1994. The changes in world history, such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Globalization, have left his agenda buried in the twilight of Modernity. Our inquiry begins with the question of whether a new definition of Kim Nam-Joo’s poetics is needed. In other words, the image of the warrior, which is formed through the poet’s existence and activities, rather than the image of the warrior as an absolute and unchanging transcendent ideology, should be the starting point of a new poetics. In particular, it involves a process of social subjectivization, in which the poet continually transforms his identity through his tendentious pursuit of revolution. The subject is not an a priori Being, but a situational existence that emerges through the process of subjectification. In capturing this social process, Kim Nam-joo’s literature can be reoriented. A literary movement that changes the world by ensuring social subjectivization is established here. In short, “Poetics for Militants” is the literary task of our time left by Kim Nam-joo. This article is an attempt to draw a new literary outlook by identifying the transition from the “Poetics of the Warrior” to the “Poetics for Militants” in Kim Nam-joo’s life and literature.