법, 몸, 공간: 《헝거》와 《남영동 1985》에 나타난 예외상태

Abstract

This article examines how Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger and Jiyoung Jeong’s 2012 film National Security (Namyeong-dong 1985) intersect in terms of Agambenian concepts of the “state of exception” and “homo sacer.” Based upon real political events in Northern Ireland and South Korea during 1970s and 80s, which could be referred to as “state of exception,” the films commonly highlight the images of the “bare life” of the protagonists, Bobby Sands and Jongtae Kim, as “homo sacer” that oscillates between bios and zoe. The films represent the featured spaces, HM Prison Maze and a torture room in Namyeong-dong respectively, as metonymic ones where biopolitics work surreptitiously and the protagonists’ bodies are both included and excluded by lawful violence of the sovereign power apositioned in-between the exercise and suspension of the law. Despite such similar thematic concerns, however, each film employs a different cinematic technique in embodying the effects of the metonymic spaces and in focusing on the featured biopolitical bodies. McQueen’s Hunger frequently utilizes structural-filmic images and shots, which contain the abstract and symbolic aspects of time-space setting, to represent the naked bodies of the incarcerated IRA members, particularly that of Bobby Sands, as a signifier of Irish anti-colonial struggle. Jeong’s National Security, on the other hand, presents relatively more chronological narrative and realistic shots that detail the process of how Jongtae Kim is included and excluded by the inhuman tortures committed by police officers, the agents of the sovereign power, during the military dictatorship.