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Modernity, in Kant’s and Foucault’s understanding, takes the doublet of a man as a central feature. Stemming from Humean skepticism and the ensuing epistemological crisis, Kant posited the Man in a perpetual oscillation between transcendence and empirical ‘reality.’ The history of social science from Comte and Marx to Weber and Durkheim is continuous reformulation of Kant’s epistemology. Comte and Marx tried to evade the epistemological problem of doublet by recasting human phenomena through specific nomos: Comte by projecting onto them transcendental humanity that is transhistorically applicable; and Marx by reducing them to empirical reality organized by specific nomos. Though Both succeeded to a certain extent in creating viable and practicable social science, they created a whole new problem of normative science. Rejecting such nomology, Weber and Durkheim tried to base social science on a different epistemological percepts by recasting the object of social science. Durkheim re-imagined human beings in proto-structuralist postulation, hitting a delicate balance. Weber, on the other hand, returned to the idea of civilization, while taking great cautions not to project evolutionary bias. Still, both of them could not completely escape Eurocentric underpinnings, because their recasting of men still followed the basic presupposition of modernity, which is in turn product of the European historical experiences.

During the 1920s and 1930 in Korea, the concepts of “woman”, “man” and “heterosexual system” in a modern sense were being newly constructed while the colonial disciplinary power, medical power, and the capitalistic consumerism. By analyzing the representations of the typical features that constituted the boundary of the ‘Heterosexuality’ discourse―pervert, hermaphrodite, transvestite, and female homosexual’s, this study examines the dynamics of the construction of normal man and woman. Especially, this study focuses on the ways in which the discipline functions to produce the binary gender norms. Examining the construction of the boundaries of “heterosexual system”, “woman” and “man” by the matter of “pervert” sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s, this study reveals the historicity of “heterosexism” as a modern construction.

Who is the black man? Moreover, as questioned by F. Fanon, “what does the black man want?” No, not at all right. These questions are simply wrong: they commit the fallacy of complex question. Before asking these questions, the logically antecedent question must be asked: is the black man really “Man?” As for Toni Morrison, the answer is simply negative. To her, the black man is not “Man” at all. Moreover, in terms of the Western or the Enlightenment idea of “Self/Identity,” the black man does not have “Self/Identity” either. The black man has only “the otherness of the Self,” that is, in Fanon’s famous words, “Black Skin, White Mask.” To Morrison, this phantasmic depersonalization/alienation of the black people is eloquently but miserably condensed in an ardent eager for “the bluest eye” as shown by the girl named Pecola. A total distortion of beauty, identity, in the end, life itself. Then, why does this dislocation/displacement/defilement of the black people happen? Why all these interstices of Self/Identity? To Morrison, its main reason is the absence of history. “The Black,” as an eternal Otherness, has been regarded as a something devoid of name/ancestor/history. Simply as a “You-are-not-humanbeing” thing. What, then, has to be done? As a novelist, Morrison tried to compose her own history blues via her various novels. In other words, she has tried to return the name/ancestor/history back to the Black which has been violently plundered and erased by the White. So the true beginning of the humane life for the Black. But what then? If the hidden black history is revealed, will everything go well? What will happen, if the black history turns into the history with the capital H? In a word, what will happen if the “soft” history degrades into the “hard” myth? The main purpose of this paper is to answer these questions by envisaging Morrison’s novels from the perspective of her endless efforts for recovering the black humane dignity, first of all, by redeeming the black history. In doing this, the dangers as well as the importances of the so-called “making History” will be speculated.

In 1960~70s, when Korean society was filled with longing for being modernized country, Ham Seok-heon was a rebel of the time, who criticized Western civilization view itself which distinguished ‘undeveloped’ from ‘developed’ by material civilization. Unlike other intellectuals who were overwhelmed by modern civilization, introducing the West as being universal or standard, following it, Ham Seok-heon, while traveling to the West, met the capitalist modern civilization the West built with a critical eye. He recognized a trip as an act of crossing differences between ‘You and I’ and ones between ‘These people and Those people’. It was an experience of looking for ‘I’ deeper by looking at ‘You’. He visited America and Europe with a critical attitude toward western material civilization, but after seeing it himself, he gave an ambivalent response. He felt and criticized avaricious capitalism through the trip and recognized that behind spotlessness of material civilization, there was violent relationship between the center and surroundings, in which the West left dirtiness of material civilization with so-called underdeveloped country of non-western areas. On the other hand, he envied America and Europe their comfortableness and richness, showing a desire to imitate and learn ‘steadiness’ under the spiritual base. Sometimes, he expressed such a desire in a vagarious way like imaging a glorious past of the Korean people, seeing the broad plain of America. This reflected the post-colonial period’s intellectuals‘ psychological complex. Every time he crossed borders, he criticized contradiction of civilization that humans themselves made a boundary of discrimination. While he intensely criticized nationalism, he wanted the Korea to be strong nation in religious and ethical aspects. He emphasized that the Korean people should be at the head of making new world history as a religious and ethical subject by throwing away western old civilization, not want to be a developed country by just accepting western civilization resulting in imperialism. It showed trauma and distinctive healing method of the Post-colonial period’s Korean intellectuals.

The present paper intends to study the self-perception of collective victimhood of Serbs, by looking into the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia and Yugoslavia, held on 18 March 2006. Milošević died of heart attack in a prison cell at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia(ICTY) at The Hague on 11 March. The funeral of the former president served as a good occasion to understand political developments in the post-Milošević Serbia. Various controversies surrounding his funeral, from the cause of his death to his burial place, graphically demonstrated that Serbia was placed at a crossroad between old and conservative Serbia and new and more progressive Serbia. Thereby it was clearly shown that Serbia was divided by those who would consider Milošević as hero and those who as traitor. However, it should be mentioned that beneath the surface of the controversies and conflicts laid bare a general perception of Serbs which considered the former president as victim. The majority of Serbs appeared to consider him as the victim of western powers and later the ICTY. This phenomenon is closely linked with the self-perception of Serbs as a nation. From the mid 1980s, especially with Milošević coming to power, collective consciousness of victimhood has been developed in such a way that Serbs are loomed as a victim of big powers and history. There was a non-verbally delivered message that Serbs would be persecuted just because they wanted to live under the same roof of one country. This perception was developed and grew strong despite the fact that Serbia was not so much of a defender than an attacker in the context of the war of Yugoslavia’s dismantling. The funeral once again confirmed that the self-perceived collective victimhood of Serbs continued into post-Milošević Serbia. The implications from the funeral is that coming to terms with the past remains more of a task to complete that completed in Serbia.

At this article, first of all, I tries to trace and explain how the consumerism was born in the 1920s, and how the advertising and advertising agents had disclosed and made the desire of consumers. And then, I will try to show how the Coca-Cola Company had increased consumption, implant brand image through analyzing the advertisements of Coca-Cola published at the Saturday Evening Post which was a representative magazine for the American middle class. I also hope to show how concretely consumerism as an ideology of consumer society was expressed by the slogans, copies, and images of Coca-Cola. This will be a kind of work how Coca-Cola was positioned, as Harrison Johnson of vice president of the Coca-Cola Company nicely suggested, “within an arm’s length of desire” among the consumers.

This essay, in the form of the description of a journey to Naples in 2005, tries to catch a glimpse into the meaning of Memory of Giambattista Vico, which is in sharp contrast with that of Thomas Hobbes. Whereas to Hobbes memory is a decaying sense, to Vico memory is composed of memory per se, imagination and invention. They are the vivid faculties out of which human experience is formed. After expounding the meaning of Vico’s memory, the present essay then goes on to prove its connotations in the works of Jules Michelet and James Joyce, two fervent advocates of Vico and his philosophy. The difference between Descartes and Vico, a perennial problem facing theorists of history and historiographers alike, is expected to be made more tangible through the analysis of the function of memory in their respective philosophical systems.

Isaiah Berlin’s dichotomy of freedom is now the starting point of debates of freedom among intellectual historians and political philosophers. Berlin asserted that two sorts of freedom, negative one and positive one, were discerned in the Western political discourses. While negative freedom means the absence of other’s interference, positive one the realization of rational self through the participation in the course of communal decision-making of common goods. Berlin insisted that only the former was genuine freedom proper to liberal society. On the contrary the latter was the rhetoric of despotism and totalitarianism because it exacted sacrifice from individuals for community in the name of reason or common weal. We can agree with him on this dichotomy apart from his evaluation. The movie Matrix showed us two persons who represented these two sorts of freedom respectively. One is Cipher who pursued negative freedom to choose his own life regardless of reason or morality by betraying Mauphius. Another is Neo who practiced positive freedom to realize his rational self by taking part in Mauphius’s good cause of human liberation. Who is a really free person? Should one of them be ostracized in the name of freedom? The story this paper tells is to report how these two persons can be supported by two conceptions of freedom respectively. Cipher wanted to be free as we usually use the word free. Who could reproach him because he decided to live his own life if he did not commit a harm to Mauphius? Is it right to find out the dark side of freedom in Neo’s vita activa for common cause as Berlin did? How clearly can Berlin’s misunderstanding of positive freedom be evidenced by reading Spinoza and T.H.Green? The story does not end in concluding which freedom is real freedom only to open this question to readers.