earticle

영어

This paper explores Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of two different forms of life—“bare life” defined in Homo Sacer and “happy life” in Coming Community—discussing their relationship with Michael K’s identity in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. Michael’s solitary yet sufficient life as a gardener offers us a more extended way of understanding Agamben’s notions of “happy life,” or “form-of-life.” Throughout the novel, Michael undergoes a significant transformation. At the beginning, his life in many ways resembles Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” but soon new form of life begins to emerge in his deserted condition of life. In other words, Coetzee later in the novel shows us a touch of hope and political futurity through Michael’s passive-active resistance against the government’s identity politics. However, Agamben’s “pure potentials” should not be confused with moralistic values such as will power, faith, and determination. Rather, it is achieved when one’s state of abandonment is pushed to the extreme beyond any light of humanistic values. Both Coetzee in Life & Times of Michael K and Agamben in his theories well demonstrate what it means to live as a “bare life” and what mode of being inaugurates the true “form-of-life” in today’s global biopolitical system.