On the second day of the 3rd International Conference, held by the Seoul National University Contemporary Korea Research Group on August 21 and 22 under the theme “Korea as Method,” the session “A Thanatology of Contemporary Korean Society” took place in Room 230 of the SNU Asia Center. Chaired by Jaeho Kang (Seoul National University), the session featured presentations by Hang Kim (Yonsei University), Seung Cheol Lee (Seoul National University), and Dongshin Yi (Seoul National University). Addressing state mourning, the catastrophic imaginaries of capitalism, and South Korea’s ppalli-ppalli culture, the three presentations explored how death can serve as an analytical lens through which to understand the political, economic, and temporal structures of contemporary Korean society.
Hang Kim (Yonsei University), in “Political Theology and Permanent Melancholy: A Consideration from the Commemoration of Gwangju May 18 Uprising,” examined the relationship between political theology and state mourning through the commemoration of the victims of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising.
Kim began with the principle of the separation of church and state, which emerged from the historical experience of religious conflict in modern Europe and became foundational to the modern sovereign state. As Thomas Hobbes distinguished between internal faith (fides) and external worship (confessio), the modern state came to refrain from intervening in inward belief while claiming authority over external conduct and public order. As this principle became constitutionally institutionalized, the Christian political theology of salvation and eternal life was separated from the realm of secular politics. Religious rituals that endowed individual death with meaning in relation to salvation or the completion of the world were likewise expected to become depoliticized.
Against this backdrop, Kim asked how mourning conducted by the state itself should be understood. The question becomes especially significant in Korea, where Christian political theology did not form part of the genealogy of modern state formation in the same manner as it did in Europe. Through the commemoration of the victims of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising, Kim examined the political significance of a Christian political theology that remains embedded, in an already effaced form, within the organizing principles of the modern state. Drawing on Freud, he argued that state mourning does not necessarily culminate in successful “mourning work” (Trauerarbeit). Instead, it may result in a condition of “permanent melancholy,” in which loss is continually reproduced and made present.
Seung Cheol Lee (Seoul National University), in “Capital’s Two Death Drives: Post-Apocalyptic Imaginaries in Snowpiercer and Concrete Utopia,” compared two Korean post-apocalyptic films in order to identify two distinct but intertwined death drives of capital. Both films imagine a “second catastrophe” that unfolds after the destruction of an already existing world.
Building on Fredric Jameson’s observation that imagining the end of the world has become a way of imagining capitalism itself, Lee argued that the two films dramatize different modes of capitalist self-reproduction. In Snowpiercer, the train constitutes a system that can survive only by remaining in perpetual motion through recurring crises, sacrifice, and managed revolt. This corresponds to the Freudian notion of repetition compulsion, capturing a form of capitalism that sustains itself by repeatedly producing and managing crisis.
Concrete Utopia, by contrast, portrays an apartment community that attempts to restore an imagined state of stability by exhausting resources outside its fortified boundaries. Lee connected this logic to recent discussions of “rent-seeking capitalism” and “neo-feudalism.” The two tendencies correspond respectively to exploitation and expropriation, but, drawing on Nancy Fraser, Lee suggested that they should not be understood as separate systems. Rather, they operate as foregrounded and backgrounded dimensions of capitalist reproduction. At the same time, the endings of both films provide fragile openings toward a political rupture capable of moving beyond both perpetual repetition and fortified stasis.
Finally, Dongshin Yi (Seoul National University), in “Framing K-Time: Prolonging the Death of the Ppalli-ppalli Life,” explored the paradoxical fate of South Korea’s ppalli-ppalli (“hurry-hurry”) culture in the digital age through recent Korean films and television dramas.
The ppalli-ppalli culture has often been associated with the extraordinary speed of South Korea’s economic growth and social transformation since the 1960s. In the twenty-first century, digital technologies appear to have accelerated almost every aspect of Korean life still further, from finance to food delivery. Yi, however, drew attention to a fundamental paradox: technological acceleration may ultimately bring about the death of ppalli-ppalli as a distinctly human form of life. Digital technologies operate at speeds that humans cannot match and, more importantly, increasingly function through systems that require fewer human beings. The very technological acceleration that seems to intensify ppalli-ppalli culture may therefore be making the human life on which that culture depended obsolete.
Yi argued that anxieties surrounding this transformation underlie several prominent ways in which time has recently been framed in Korean popular culture. The nostalgic returns to the 1980s and 1990s in Reply 1988 and Reply 1994, as well as time-slip narratives such as Lovely Runner and Mr. Queen, can be read as attempts to return to and preserve forms of temporality that appear to be disappearing. Drawing on Heidegger’s proposition that Dasein discovers its own temporality—and ultimately its being—through the experience of death, Yi interpreted these cultural texts as a collective yet ultimately futile effort to prolong the life of ppalli-ppalli. Its impending death, he suggested, raises an existential problem not only for contemporary Koreans but potentially for human life more broadly in the twenty-first century.
Taken together, the three presentations approached death not simply as the biological end of life, but as a moment through which the limits and contradictions of the state, capital, and social temporality become visible. In state commemoration of May 18, unresolved loss persists in the form of permanent melancholy; in post-apocalyptic cinema, the intertwined death drives of repetition and stasis sustain capitalist reproduction; and in ppalli-ppalli culture, technological acceleration threatens to extinguish the very human form of life that once enabled rapid development. The session thus reconceptualized death not as a definitive ending, but as an unfinished political and social process. In doing so, it demonstrated how Korean experiences can provide a point of departure for rethinking the modern state, capitalism, and technological temporality themselves.