가정법의 제국의 윤리? —『로미오와 줄리엣』의 후기식민주의 텍스트

Abstract

Juliet’s monologue, “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet. . . .” in Romeo and Juliet, Act Ⅱ, scene 2 evokes some postcolonial problems of symbolic order of colonial modernity. Her rhetoric of subjunctive mood tries to express her domesticated desire and envisages her wish for the transformation of the Father’s law in Verona. Colonial discourses became the Father’s law constructed for the exploitation of the colonized, manipulating the difference of name, race or nationalty. A post-imperial text, Indian Ink appropriates some postcolonial arguments and intends to compromise ‘ethics of empire.’ Its plot mimics a post-imperial irony that needs circulating responsibility between the colonizer and the colonized. Flora, an English poet, plays the role of Juliet in Indian Ink, asking Das, an Indian painter, in a subjunctive mood to become more Indian and to draw her portrait with more Indian ink. Her rhetorical condition imposes the pronoun ‘you’ as the subject of her subjunctive needs, having Das meet the Imperial imperative. This kind of ironic compromise for the ethics of empire, however, rationalizes the historical violation of colonial modernization. Go is a film about Korean-Japanese of the 3rd generation who cannot but suspend confessing his nationality to his girl friend who is from one of Japanese elite families. Heroine of the film is a postcolonial Juliet of an age whose father has made her believe that the blood of Korean or Chinese people is rotten. And her spontaneous question should be where he was born and bred, however, she generates the subjectivity of ethics, not of ethics of empire. The plot of subjunctive mood develops the evolutionary desire of colonized Korean-Japanese boy and Japanese girl, attempting to lift certain pressures and limits of colonial domestication.