바라티 무컬지의 『 재스민 』: 벌거벗은 생명들과 부정의 존재 윤리

Abstract

This paper is to examine an interstitial subjectivity in Jasmine by Bharati Mukerjee in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophical framework. Agamben defines bare life, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), as “a life that may be killed by anyone—an object of a violence that exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice” (Homo Sacer 86). Agamben, who indicates that “today we are all virtually homines sacri” (115), takes Herman Melville’s Bartleby as a proper example of homo sacer’s positionality of double exclusion and its strongest resistance to the principle of sovereignty which creates homo sacer. The interstitial subjectivity, which has been molded by Jasmine’s diaspora and adjustment to a new country, implies the ‘in-between’ space that opens the way to conceptualizing the formation of heterogeneous, multiple subjects, a multifaced cultural cartography in the postmodern society, and its political performance. In interpreting the interstitial subjectivity of Jasmine, previous criticisms of Jasmine are divided into two: one is political like a feminist or postcolonial approach; the other is unpolitical like postmodernism criticism. I pay attention to the fact that the postmodern characteristics of interstitial subjectivity such as fluidity, ambivalent positionality of decentered subject in Jasmine have something in common with Agamben’s main concepts of political philosophy; contingency, ambiguous status of homo sacer on the border between inclusion and exclusion. Also the de-centerality of multiple subjects can be read to be homo sacer’s negative ethico-ontology based on negative potentiality. Therefore, this reading of Jasmine through Agamben’s concepts presents a new way to clarify Agambenian political implications in a postmodern text Jasmine.