Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE STATE OF FANTASY IN EMERGENCY

2013; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502386.2012.738706

1466-4348

Soyoung Kim,

Cinema and Media Studies

Abstract Looking at contemporary South Korean films, this essay mobilizes the conceptual double structure of the ‘state of fantasy’ (as articulated in cinema) and the ‘state of emergency’ in South Korea's history in order to explore the engagement of those films with a set of global–local issues of corporeality and migrancy that arise in the age of cognitive capitalism. Keywords: South Korean cinemastate of emergencyfantasycognitive capitalismaffective labourmigrancyvampirism Notes 1. Derived from the Greek drómos (a race-course), dromology for Virilio is the science or, as in my usage here, the logic of speed. 2. Benhabib suggests a shift from the politics of the subject to a politics of empowerment in late capitalist society. 3. This would be consistent with the arguments made by Boutang (Citation2007), Hardt and Negri (Citation2004), Negri et al. (Citation2005), Virno (Citation2004) and others that post-Fordist capitalism has moved beyond the exploitation of workers’ labour-power alone and is now also extracting a surplus from general intellect. 4. In Hollywood action cinema the Bourne Identity series intensively mobilizes the cognitive mapping capacities of the protagonist (Jason Bourne) played by Matt Damon. Bourne could find any place wherever he was. However, Bourne tends to draw more on techno-cognitive mapping. His oblique counterpart Kunam (Ha Jeong Woo) in The Yellow Sea uses only his brain to map. 5. My discussion of Thirst in this section elaborates material outlined in Kim (Citation2011), pp. 296–298. 6. As the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) explains: Tartan Films, established in 1984, was a UK-based film distributor. Founder Hamish McAlpine is credited with creating the term ‘Asia Extreme’ and making films under this genre accessible to the masses. It also owned the US-based Tartan USA and Tartan Video. It was notable for distributing East Asian films, especially those in the horror and thriller genres, under the brand Tartan Asia Extreme. Between 1992-2003 Tartan Films operated under the name Metro-Tartan Distribution before reverting back to Tartan Films. More recently, it gained a reputation for releasing horror films of other origins, under its Tartan Terror brand. Such films include Battle Royale, the Whispering Corridors trilogy, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Last Horror Movie and Oldboy. http://www.imdb.com/list/PA5TWU2DVBI/ (accessed 4 July, 2012) 7. The following three paragraphs draw substantially on Kim (Citation2003), pp. 16–18.