MELANCHOLIA AND NIHILISM IN POST-KOREAN WAR LITERATURE (1950S–1960S): EXISTENTIAL-ANALYTIC APPROACH AND THEOLOGICAL POSSIBILITY

Abstract

This paper offers an existential-analytic approach to interpreting 1950s–1960s Korean literature (Obaltan by Beom-seon Lee, The Square by Choe Inhun, and A Respite by Oh Sangwon), employing postcolonial melancholia as an interpretative tool for discerning their theologico-political and ontological-ethical valences. Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia and Heidegger’s existential analytic, postcolonial melancholia is theorised as an existential attunement toward a world wherein the hope for redemption is grieved over as a loss. This melancholia confronts nothingness, revealing the absence of moral grounding in postcolonial liberation. Here, it is further contended that Walter Benjamin’s organized pessimism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilism offer resources for theological reflection in a world where hope is no longer viable for a melancholic subjectivity – one to whom hope appears nebulous, meaningless, and therefore undesirable. By engaging Benjamin and Nietzsche, it is argued that theological reflection in a postcolonial world need not repeat the exhausted rhetoric of hope tied to liberationist paradigms; rather, it may seek to articulate the dense and resonant rhythms of human life as it moves within a world approaching the end of all things.