The Political Ontology of Division: An Aesthetic Theory of The Korean Division-System

Abstract

This dissertation introduces an aesthetic theory of the historical division between North and South Korea. I engage in different aesthetic approaches to Korean scholar Paik Nak-chung’s theorization of the politics between and surrounding North and South Korean relations as the “division-system.” I canvas photographic, literary, cinematic, critical, and aesthetic illustrations of the Korean division-system and argue that the Korean arts on division intervene in modes of perception and recognition that have primarily encouraged understanding relations of division through the metaphor of war and “mirror-politics.” Drawing on various neo-Kantian elaborations of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, visual perception and the role of art and media, and critically inflected readings of political subjectivities in Korea, I formulate a political ontology of division, where the relationship between North and South Koreans is framed as one of imitation, rather than of hostile opposition. This conceptual intervention aims to shed new ways of seeing and thinking about the unending Korean War. This project contests familiar modes of perception and reception of images on the Korean division and North Korea from the perspective of Korean activist artists. The works of art contemplate historical and political representations of North Korea that perpetuate ideological consciousness of division and consequently “division-images.” I argue that the critically and politically attuned arts contest ways of thinking that depend on practices of recognition and representation. They instead aim to intervene in how the image of post-war social life in Korea has become uncritically familiar to us, normalizing our relationship to the “division-system.”