earticle

영어

Living in a ‘culture of analgesics’ characterised by complete departure from a belief in the value of suffering, we experience loss of the ability to face life. By offering theoretical and ethical responses to ‘meaningless’ affliction, injustice and suffering, a ‘theodicy’ seeks to validate a cultural reality which sustains a way of life. Salvation religions which find most of their adherents amongst the underprivileged strata of society prescribe that the unequal distribution of chances in life are results of the sin of the privileged, which is to provoke God’s vengeance. This essay attempts to construct a social biography of the Korean discourse of han. First it demonstrates a kind of family resemblance between the discourse and the Nietzschean concept of ‘ressentiment’. In this discursive nexus, a discussion follows on the idiosyncrasies of han and its metamorphosis from victimology to soteriology in distinct but mutually overlapping stages. In a seemingly unescapable circumstances of indefinitely prolonged psychosomatic sufferings, the essay observes, the motif of han discourse moves from resignation via reservation to commitment. The han ethos, initially a state of individual psychology, proves in this way to be plastic enough to find its way towards collective as well as individual affirmation. Then the innately dynamic master narrative of han is wont to be shared and negotiated towards what Nietzsche has called a ‘slave revolt’. The essay concludes that the basic experience of shared han of Koreans is a sense of suffering as a people, and this soteriological appropriation of han theodicy has acted as historical memory and anticipation of suffering and therefore may deserve the term ‘unique’.