사이드 이후의 탈식민주의 동향 : 전유의 부메랑

Postcolonialism after Said : The Boomerang Effect of Appropriation

This paper starts with delineating the relationship Edward Said's postcolonial theory forms with the so-called French High Theory. For instance, Said in Orientalism appropriates the Foucauldian notions of power and discourse to a certain degree in order to effectively "interrogate" the complicity of the Western humanist discourse with European colonialism. However this appropriaton turns out to take a heavy toll since, when applied in turn to the colonized, notions like "the human subject as an effect of power" make impossible the autonomy of the colonized subject and, therefore, the possibility of resistance. I call this a "boomerang effect" in the sense that the weapon chosen to attack the opponent comes around and threatens its wielder as well. The solution that Said later adopts to this problem is a simple one: retraction of the poststructuralist position. The relationship between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism becomes "more intimate" with Homi Bhabha, who more enthusiastically embraces Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida in order to theorize such concepts as hybridity and ambivalence. Bhabha in a way succeeds in recovering the subversive presence of the colonized within the colonial discourse. Yet this move of uncovering the disturbing Other within the Self can undermine the very foundation for anti-colonial consciousness and activity as well. In this regard, Bhabha is not free from the threat posed by "the boomerang effect of appropriation." Gayatri Spivak prescribes a different solution to this problem. On the one hand she admits the necessity of deconstruction; on the other hand she refuses to be bound by the logical consequences of espousing deconstruction by asserting that the need for incessant deconstruction does not mean the impossibility of the essential but its inevitability. This delicate stepping between deconstruction and essentialism, it seems, allows her to freely wield the weapon of deconstruction and, at the same time, to retain an essentialist position which she deems necessary in keeping resistance alive. My conclusion on Spivak is that despite its apparently practical values, Spivak's theory is still problematic unless such issues as what kind of "political program" the compromise or affiliation between deconstruction and essentialism can support and how it can do so, are raised and resolved.