Love's Cruel Promises

Abstract

In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, human rights and security upon which the international community must act. Framed as such, Korean reunification and reconciliation are seen as desirable developments and compelling reasons for tackling the ‘North Korea problem’. Such framings, however, reduce North Korea to a problem that positions the ‘international’ and ‘South Korea’ as the source of its solutions. The assumption here is that a truer, more stable loving-relation between North and South Korea, and by extension the international, would improve the present situation in North Korea and the problems it poses to the rest of the world. This great optimism can be seen in popular South Korean films such as Shiri and JSA where love is deployed as a powerful agent of change. The argument of this article is that the idea of national reconciliation that intimately attempts to erase divisions and install (a redemptive) unity actually kills the embraced North Korea. To illustrate how alternative responses to North Korea are possible, I consider how love can be ‘a properly political transformative concept’ (Berlant 2011), through a reading of Hwang Sok-young's novel Baridaegi.