주체의 자기변형 가능성을 묻다

Abstract

This paper attempts to read J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K through Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘the care of the self’. To put it briefly, no subject is capable of truth only by the Socratic self-knowledge, expressed in the famous phrase ‘know yourself.’ In ancient Greek philosophy, the Socratic self-knowledge was just part of the theme of the self-care. According to Foucault, to be able to have access to the truth, a subject must be “changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself”(Foucault 15). Foucault genealogically explores the reason why the notion of self-care has disappeared while self-knowledge has gained some privileged status in the Western philosophy. The care of the self enables us to see how “the cult of the Other”(Eagleton 21), permeating postmodern theories of the late 20th-century, is related to the phenomenon of the disappearing subject in modern discourses.
 Both Foucault’s concept and Coetzee’s Michael K pay attention to the significance of the subject’s becoming other than oneself. Michael K transforms himself in his struggles to survive, whereas the medical doctor, the narrator of the second part, is trapped in his exaggerated self-consciousness. Going through hunger and gardening, Michael becomes “a different kind of man” from a ordinary city dweller of Cape Town. This change becomes possible in the process of deconstructing his old subjectivity through silence, gardening, and idleness as practices of freedom. This paper focuses on how Michael transforms himself and what his self-transformation signifies in an ethical sense.