국가 이상으로서의 자본을 찾아서

9/11, National Security, and the Masculine Capital

This paper aims to explore the way how national identity has been conceived in post-9/11 discourses. The main tenet that this paper focuses on is the concept of ‘enemy within,’ which is a way to cope with the fear of national insecurity by assuming that part of the nation hinders the nation from materializing liberal democracy as national ideal. In doing so, the enemy-within concept reveals the desire to purge the nation of its internal ills and thus tries to rescue the endangered national ideal from its compromised status in reality. As a way to examine the significances that this post-9/11 attempt to re-harness national identity implicates, this paper turns to the movie Iron Man and its sequel Iron Man 2. Given that cinemas are one of the crucial factors that, as a form of cultural artifact, often reflects socio-political meanings and ensuing emotional affects of a nationally significant incident, it is hardly surprising to see that these films reproduces not only anxieties of national insecurity but also desires to reclaim national ideal, which seem to reveal a strong parallel with the social atmosphere of the post-9/11 American society. The desire of what David Brion Davis calls “self-purification” in the enemy-within theory is channeled in the films exclusively toward the need to purify the nation’s capital, or in a larger sense, capitalism itself. Based upon the-logically flawed -assumption that the ‘authentic’ national identity is and can be represented by capital, these films posits two kinds of enemy-within antagonistic to this so-called ‘good American’ capital. One is a capitalist who represents interest-based capital, which attempts to threaten the legitimacy of capital in charge of national security. The other internal enemy is very much in the same line with gendered Other, who tries to emulate the capability of security-based capital. Throughout these processes, the idealized image of capital that the films ultimately depict is very much masculinized one, whose legitimacy as well as moral justification is tantamount to its ability to retain this gendered image and thus to deliver the task of national protection.