한국윤리교육학회

In this article I pay attention to an ethical question reclaimed in the midst of the aporia that entails self-loss and world-loss and argue that this ethical question is centered on peace. The concept of peace as an ethical question is to demand how the impossible becomes possible by rethinking the limits of the possible and the impossible that have been codified by the logic of exclusion and division. Here peace is neither construed as the utilitarian imperative for social harmony and order for those who have power and authority nor as the sheer ideological trope of the weak and the excluded. Rather, peace is understood as a resistance and an adventure against depoliticization that renders uniformity and sameness to eradicate the negativity of difference and otherness. Thus the ethico-political discussion about peace demands our critical reflection of what it means to be ‘truly’ human. I first examine Ham Sokhon’s ‘Ssial’ in his philosophy of life and Slavoj Žižek’s ‘concrete universality’ that reveals the paradox of antagonism. Based on these important concepts, I attempt to do the cross-reading of both thinkers to explore the concept of ‘nothing-being’(Ham) and ‘impossible possible’(Žižek) and then to clarify ‘the whole’(Ham) and ‘the common’(Žižek) as the fundamental condition for being truly human. In doing so, I envisage a politico-philosophical vision for peace as the condition for the possibility of being truly human and envision a universal ethic reclaimed in the face of the Real as the void.