【by Daae Jung, Dec. 2024】
A commercial illustration by GS25, a popular convenience store chain in South Korea, a few years ago sparked unexpected backlash from young men in their 20s and 30s. They argued that a seemingly harmless image promoting the chain’s camping event carried a hidden misandrist message, claiming that a particular detail resembled a hand-pinching gesture emoji used to mock the size of a man’s penis, and by extension, Korean masculinity. Despite the seemingly exaggerated nature of the complaint, the incident triggered a series of panicked responses. GS25 quickly apologized, withdrew the poster, and took disciplinary action against the marketing team responsible for its design. The paranoia escalated as men demanded the removal of similar gestures from various commercial and government images. Even the Ministry of National Defense altered a poster featuring a military salute that allegedly resembled the “humiliating” two-finger gesture.
These Korean men’s paranoid reactions to perceived mockery of their masculinity resemble Jacques Lacan’s figure of the “jealous husband”—a figure of paranoia who suspects his wife may be cheating. Slavoj Žižek explains: “Even if a jealous husband’s claim about his wife—that she sleeps around with other men—is true, his jealousy is still pathological.” If the husband’s suspicion has some factual basis, why isn’t his jealousy justified? According to Žižek, focusing solely on the factual aspect of the claim (“Did she really do it?”) overlooks the intensity of jealousy itself, which exceeds any empirical reality. Similarly, debating with these young men on a factual level—whether those two fingers truly convey a misandrist insult—misses the point. What’s at stake here isn’t the specific content of their complaint but its form—the intensity of desire that fuels their hostility.
The current discontent among young Korean men arises partly from a void in political leadership, intensified by South Korea’s expanding neoliberal order. This crisis of symbolic authority is tied to the fall of the regime of the 386 generation—liberal paternal figures once celebrated for leading the democracy movement in the 80s. Although initially hailed as champions of democracy, they are now criticized for perpetuating the inequalities they once opposed. Rather than promoting equality, the 386 generation accelerated neoliberal reforms that deepened economic disparities. The recent Me-Too movement in South Korea further exposed their hypocrisy, as women across diverse sectors challenged the moral authority these liberal figures once held.
Fair but Unequal!
As a result, both young men and women now appear to reject paternal authority altogether, whether from authoritarian leaders or hypocritical liberals. Korean sociologist Kyung-ah Shin notes that most millennial men in Korea no longer see a traditional father figure as a role model and reject the authoritarianism that once defined Korean patriarchy. However, psychoanalysis suggests that the decline of paternal authority does not inherently lead to liberation. In South Korea, this fall has led not to egalitarianism but to a culture of envy, paranoia, and depoliticization, where “fairness” becomes a new instrument of control, obscuring real antagonisms and economic inequality.
The popular demand for “fairness” reflects a political climate that prioritizes an expertise-driven approach to governance over leadership committed to universal emancipation and the fight against inequality. Here, leaders are regarded not as decisively engaged subjects but as experts and managers, whose political decisions are ostensibly issued through rational calculation and administrative fairness alone. Within this framework, politics is reduced to the management of specific group interests and individual demands, stripped of historical consciousness or a vision for the future. In Meritocracy in South Korea, Park Kwon-il questions “why South Koreans tolerate inequality but not unfairness” (Ahn, “Korean Meritocracy”). Recent examples illustrate this: students at an elite private university in Seoul sued janitors and security workers on strike for better pay and working conditions, arguing the protests infringed on their right to education. Similarly, female students at a prestigious women’s university boycotted the admission of a trans woman, citing safety and privacy concerns. Some critics may attribute these actions to individual selfishness. However, it is crucial to recognize that this erosion of a broader ethical horizon is deeply connected to the rise of neoliberal governance.
Towards a Serial Politics of Desire
In Korea’s technocratic regime, society is viewed as a collection of individuals and groups with specific wants and demands. However, reducing politics to a sum of these demands removes the transindividual dimension of desire from the political arena. This perspective misses a fundamental truth: there is always a gap between what a political subject demands and the desire that exceeds any specific demand. Neoliberal technocracy closes off this gap, while democracy thrives on it, generating a surplus of meaning and aspiration that technocracy, by its nature, suppresses.
This gap between demand and desire is best explained by the psychoanalytic concept of the split between the subject of statement and the subject of enunciation—the difference between what is said (the enunciated, or statement) and one’s unconscious relationship to that statement. In everyday life, we often say things that come out as vague, confusing, or even nonsensical as if words insist beyond our intended meaning. In moments like this, our own words suddenly become alien, prompting us to wonder: “Why did I say that?” or “What did I mean by that?” As Pietro Bianchi explains, this illustrates how our intentions as speakers do not always pre-exist the act of speaking (39). Even if we have a clear meaning beforehand, once spoken, our words can become ambiguous and open to doubt, not only for listeners but for ourselves as well.[1] This “hermeneutics of suspicion”—what did I mean by this?—is inherent to every speech act. Language, then, is not a transparent medium of self-expression but has the power to render speakers opaque to themselves, triggering a cycle of doubt and questioning. Language has the power to disrupt the very foundation of our identity each time we speak, due to its inherent inability to permanently fix our intended meaning or truth to our words.
As Lorenzo Chiesa points out, a signifier is thus not “significant” but “signifying” (50)—it does not transparently express what we want to say; instead, it could continually unravel what we thought we wanted to convey. In this sense, each act of speech retroactively creates what it does not say. Put differently, in every speech, something never stops “not writing itself” (Copjec 34). The unsaid, or the “unrealized,” is produced with each act of speaking retroactively. The term “retroactively” should be taken literally: the “unrealized” is not some prelinguistic desire that existed before speaking. Rather, it is generated by the speech act itself as a surplus that cannot be fully contained within the speech. Unconscious desire exists within this recursive movement—a delay in which our words return to haunt us, disrupting our intended meaning. This process is like reflux (as in acid reflux). [2] Instead of being digested and disappearing, what we say lingers, echoing back and undermining our ability to express exactly what we intend once and for all.
Each act of speech thus generates a new form of desire—a desire to add more, to question, or even to retract what has been said. No act of speech can claim final, absolute truth. In psychoanalysis, truth is therefore not a fixed, capital-T, “Truth” spoken once and for all, but a small, ephemeral truth, or “half-truth,” that must be continuously re-enunciated. This incompleteness of truth opens a future-oriented desire for repetition. Democracy, as a political system, is inherently faithful to this recursive movement of unconscious desire—a transindividual dimension that cannot be reduced to individual demands but instead emerges as a surplus beyond any specific demand. This persistence of desire is not directed at a fixed ideal that remains forever out of reach; rather, it is immanently created through each act of political enunciation.
The technocratic regime’s suppression of this political desire becomes painfully clear in the recent clash between Korea’s disability-rights activists and Lee Jun-seok, a young conservative politician and former chairman of the right-wing People Power Party (PPP). Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD), Korea’s largest disability-rights group, has staged subway protests in Seoul for years, demanding accessible public transportation. Lee condemns these activists as selfish disruptors infringing on fellow citizens’ rights, accusing them of “holding commuters hostage” (Lee). Many commuters have echoed Lee’s position, viewing the protests as an undue inconvenience and sometimes hurling insults at the activists, disregarding the long history of discrimination endured by people with disabilities. For Lee, these public demonstrations are excessive and unnecessary—a breach of procedural fairness that disrupts the orderly morning commutes of Seoul citizens.
Lee’s stance reflects a technocratic worldview at its purest. His criticism is not about the activists’ demand for accessibility; it’s about the disruptive nature of their protest, which he sees as irrational. According to Lee, activists should express their demands calmly, file official complaints, and wait for bureaucratic processes to address their concerns. For him, politics should operate within the bounds of rational administration, without passion or excess. Rather than engaging with the underlying desire that fuels the protest, Lee functions as a detached manager, treating citizens’ demands as items on a checklist. By reducing the activists’ protests to a procedural inconvenience, he fails to recognize that democracy is not sustained by demands alone but by a passionate, uncontainable desire for justice.
Desire for Communicability
By ignoring this surplus dimension of desire, Korea’s technocratic regime—embodied by figures like Lee—risks draining politics of its vitality. Lee’s response to the disability-rights activists illustrates this: he reduces their demands to their literal content, overlooking the desire that transcends those demands—the desire to be seen, heard, and recognized as full participants in public life. Their public demonstrations in Seoul subway stations—chaining themselves to train doors and crawling inside trains—should be understood as what Giorgio Agamben calls “gestures”: expressions of a desire for communicability. What the demonstrators communicate is not merely their specific grievances about long-neglected rights. At a more fundamental level, they strive to affirm themselves as equal political subjects, claiming their place in the public sphere.
Every act of speech conveys not only a specific message but also carries a self-referential desire, calling to our attention the very act of communicating that it communicates. This self-referential desire assumes a community of other subjects, a collective to whom this desire is addressed. As William Watkin explains, alluding to Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, a subjective statement like “this work of art is beautiful” is simultaneously transindividual when understood not in terms of its content but through its “pure intention to signify.” In Watkin’s words:
In communicating this statement the subject assumes that said others will instantly know what is meant by this statement, not in terms…of its content but of its pure intention to signify, as Agamben often calls it…What it communicates is communicability in terms of: I am a subject, you are a subject (12, emphasis mine).
Here, communicability transcends specific content and appeals to a shared recognition of each other’s subjectivity. Similarly, we must understand the Korean disability-rights activists’ protests not merely as expressions of their explicit demands but as an assertion of a “pure intention to signify.” They are essentially saying, “We communicate that we communicate,” addressing their fellow citizens with a fundamental message: “You are subjects, and so are we.” Or, to borrow Joan Copjec’s expression, they urge both the Korean public and its technocratic regime: “Read our desire literally.”
AUTHOR
Daae Jung is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, USA. She has written on authors including Slavoj Žižek, Joan Didion, Clarice Lispector, and Sun Yung Shin. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the American television series Better Call Saul, tentatively titled Better Call Saul: Democracy and Seriality in Contemporary Television.
NOTES
[1] See Pietro Bianchi’s Jacques Lacan and CinemaImaginary, Gaze, Formalisation,pp. 39-40.
[2] My analogy of reflux here draws inspiration from Paul Eisenstein’s recent talk, “Thinking Time: On Walter Benjamin,” delivered at the University of Vermont.
REFERENCES
Ahn, Seon-hee. “Korean Meritocracy Examines Why S. Koreans Tolerate Inequality, but Not Unfairness.” The Hankyoreh, 10 Oct. 2021, https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_entertainment/1014540.html.
Bianchi, Pietro. Jacques Lacan and Cinema: Imaginary, Gaze, Formalisation. Routledge, 2017.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press, 2007.
Choi, Lee Hyun. “Wheelchair Users Block the Seoul Subway as the Right Takes Power.” The Nation, 20 Apr. 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/korea-disability-protest/.
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso, 2015.
Eisenstein, Paul. “Thinking Time: On Walter Benjamin.” Lecture, University of Vermont, 29 Oct. 2024.
Shin, Kyung-Ah. “남성의 정체성 위기와 여성학 교육의 필요성.” Korean Women’s Development Institute, 18 Apr. 2019.
Watkin, William. Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.
Žižek, Slavoj. “What Our Fear of Refugees Says about Europe.” New Statesman, 29 Feb. 2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2016/02/slavoj-zizek-what-our-fear-refugees-says-about-europe.