The purpose of this study is to examine how the poetic subject has aesthetic response and how ethics work in Kim Jong-sam’s poetry. Kim Jong-sam’s poetry started against the situation of the world’s devastation and the absence of human beings, and it called for an aesthetic response as well as an ethical response. To this end, this study sought to determine the cause of this confrontational attitude toward the poetic subject of Kim Jong-sam and examine the process of how each response was changed.
This study showed that the experience of world-loss and absence of human beings in Kim Jong-sam’s early poems influenced not only the poet’s aesthetic consciousness but also the ethics consciousness. This study basically takes the research method of discourse analysis in Kim Jong-sam’s poetry. Through this, we examined the distance between the subject of the speech and poetic situation. In this study, we classified three type of speakers. First, “intrusive speakers” who operate in a consistent or fairly close proximity to poetic situations, second, “impersonal speakers” that are situated in the exterior of poetry, third, “non-intrusive speakers” who are far from poetic situations. The intrusive speaker directly participates in a situation or event of a poem, exposing his or her thoughts or feelings; the non-intrusive speaker tries not to expose his or her thoughts or feelings as much as possible by keeping distance from poetic situations; and the impersonal speaker acts to treat the situation or event of a poem as opaque as possible and maximize the materiality or the intransparency of language. In this study, we examined the characteristics of the poetic subject by considering the way and degree(the process of subjectization) in which the subject is registered in language activities and explored the process of significations. In short, there is “ércriture” between langue and style.
This study looked an aspect of transformation of poetic subject in Kim Jong-sam’s poetry in accordance with the aesthetic approach and structural changes. Depending on the degree of poetic subject intervention in the poetic situation and the degree of transparency in the voice of the verbal subject, Kim Jong-sam’s poems can be divided into three periods. Since its ascent in 1954, the early period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the mid-term period from 1960s to mid-1970s, and from mid-1970s to the late period of death. Among them, poems that could be included in the mid-term period were approached by dividing them into poems that had a strong aesthetic perception and those whose ethics of testimony dominated.

The second chapter dealt with Kim Jong-sam’s early poems, which is, from the beginning of 1954 to the end of 1959. Kim Jong-sam had a strong sense of self-consciousness in the square of ruins and chaos. In particular, he is strongly aware that had been in a state of lost or displaced home and his language could not communicate with the world. In Kim Jong-sam’s early poems, the experience of world-loss has been formatted into a mixture of pure and tragic abstraction, which is also believed to have resulted from the more dominant language of tragic abstraction. The representative works include “G Minor” and “The Stone.”
Kim Jong-sam took a very critical stance that the old generation’s aesthetic consciousness. Kim Jong-sam rejected the traditional aesthetics that focused on the superficial aestheticization of nature. He had a sense of resistance to the hierarchy of representations that gave an privileged authority on a particular object or theme. Such non-representative attitudes or moves toward the outside of representation were based on the beginning of Kim Jong-sam’s early days, which seems to have prompted him to focus on suggestive language. Kim Jong-sam’s poetic orientation and departure is to reveal the “world of meaning” without damaging the purity and independence of poetic language. Kim Jong-sam’s early poems also reveal the impossibility of the pure world.
In Kim Jong-sam’s poem, “the crisis of meaning” occurs in three dimensions. First, facing the horrors of war, the subject was forced to confirm the impossibility of self-reliance as a subject of perception and experience. . Second, in a world where absolute and transcendent subjects are not possible, they are now perceived as incomplete and as a time of deprivation, or as a corrupt world. Third, the language that connects the subject and the world becomes detached to the object. The existence of poetic subjects is possible by perceiving a deficiency and loss of self-loss, and it is realized by the separation of nature. The moment immediately before that the identity collapses begin to operate as “origin.” Its origin is pure time or non-flowing time, and poetic languages is fragmented. The poetic subject of Kim Jong-sam stood at the border between the nature and artificial world.
Kim Jong-sam’s early poems seem to be an aesthetic response to the loss of the world. It provided a new awareness of reality by sensitively detecting a world full of ruins and suffering on the one hand, but moving toward a pure and original world on the other hand, which led to a humanistic existentialism. In other words, the poems that explored the possibility of defending and saving humanity such as “Tales of Blooming days” and “Girls Who sell books.” In his poems published in the late 1950s, Kim Jong-sam presented a optimistic vision that such beings still have hope in the world and do not lose their true value. The emergence of “the other” that evokes a sense of guilt and responsibility to the self.

The third chapter dealt with Kim Jong-sam’s poetry from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, when the impersonal speaker was at the center in poetry is believed to have been significantly influenced by Malarme’s poetics, which turned out to be a poetic orientation toward neutral writing. It was consequently a path to exploration and of pure poetry. As Kim Jong-sam’s poetry enters the 1960s, aesthetics deepen through the neutral writing trying to restore his pure language. He derived his own unique poetic work by pushing forward suggestive languages that maximized an intransparency of language and self- reference.
In this study, subjects intended to go outside the representations and maximize the “density of language” are called “aesthetic subjects.” The way is to reach a pure utterance beyond pure representation. The floating voice and suggestive language remain in the void where similarities have been lost. These poems will form an axis of Kim Jong-sam in the 1960s and mid-1970s.
Kim Jong-sam entered the world of pure language by describing the situation of absence of human beings through an impersonal speaker. In these poems, the subject of discourse describing the landscape are concealed by impersonal voice that is unknown. The impersonal speaker focuses on describing it sensitively without intervening in events or landscapes in front of him while maintaining “trans-personal neutrality.” The impersonal speaker eliminates the difference and distance between the subject of utterance and the subject of the enunciation. Kim Jong-sam reaches the completion of aestheticism in his “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Lashanska.” The key to the aesthetic of Kim Jong-sam’s mid-term poems is to maximize meaning by stopping just before the language took on meaning. Kim Jong-sam’s mid-term poems take an uncompleted structure in which the semanticization is not complete by opening conclusions.

The fourth chapter dealt with Kim Jong-sam’s poems published in the early 1960s and mid-1970s, in which ethical subjects stand out on the opposite side of aesthetic subjects that aim for pure poetry. The subject open to the other becomes interested in the situation of the other in poverty and pain. The change in attitude of such the subject is bound to be closely associated with an objective impartial narration, and these subjects appear to be non-intrusive speakers in the poem.
Non-intrusive speakers faintly participate in the situation or event of poems. In other words, they act as a medium to prepare for two contradictory situations or reveal their ethical positions with detailed linguistic indicators, without exposing their thoughts, feelings or judgments as much as possible. Continuity and discontinuity between what is said and a speech act are important here. The subject that emerges from the disjunction of possibilities and impossibilities of words is the subject of testimony.
Among Kim Jong-sam’s poems, a series of poems “Auschwitz” and “Sketch” adopts these speakers. But the point is that they do not take a completely neutral attitude toward events or landscapes. While he remembers and reflects on the violent and inhuman massacres and horrors of the past at this point in time, he shows an attitude of not backing away from that ethical judgment, melting the eyes of the parties and outsiders at the same time. It takes on the nature of testimony that bears the responsibility of the survivors. At the apex of these poems are “Civillian” and a series of poems “Auschwitz”
Ethical subjects are those who testify to de-subjectivization and speak as “unspeakable.” The testimony has a double structure: the difference and integration between the impossibility and possibility of speaking, non-human and human beings, and a being of life and being of speaking. Through irony, Kim Jong-sam demonstrated a formal experiment in which he tried to shockingly reveal the space where inhumanity was maximized and the miserable human figure placed there. Double or multiple focus appears during the mid-term poems. By slowly or suddenly entering the interior from the outside of the poetic situation, they crack our dull perceptions and renew our sense of ethics. This is an ethical adventure of not putting yourself in a distance that is unrelated to the other.

The fifth chapter looked mainly at poems from the mid-1970s until Kim Jong-sam’s death. In his later poems, Kim Jong-sam reveals deeper concerns about a gap between aesthetic and ethical, and is acutely aware of the convergence between “emotional” (art) and “ethics” (life). This attitude can be called “the aesthetics of existence.” This requires active intervention and foregrounding by subjects of enunciations other than non-intrusive speakers. It is an intrusive speaker to show “subjectivization” through “telling truth or truthfully(Parrhsia).” The poems of this period show that the actual speaker, “I,” is exposed to the front of the text and the emotions are projected without filtering. What was used to reveal this was the writing of confession.
Since around 1974, Kim Jong-sam strongly reveals his self-reflection on his life by putting forth “I,” the subject of speech in the poem. It directly expresses the physical and mental pain that must be endured as the devastated interior and death is suspended, and the skepticism about how far the life and art of a great artist are from his own life and poetry. Poetry in which “consideration for oneself” or “return to oneself” appears keenly aware of the nodal point between truth and subject, or between truth and life. Kim Jong-sam obtains this through “Parrhsia.” In other words, it is to maximize of powers of direct speech by unifying the subject of speech and the subject of act.
It is also deeply related to the form of confession that the subject of self-care in the latter period becomes the subject of speech through telling truth(fully). Confession requires the separation of oneself from non-self and the ultimate nullification of one’s boundaries while exploring oneself. It is the writing of confession that eliminates the boundaries of the subject of utterance and the subject of enunciation. The fact that Kim Jong-sam’s late poems take the form of lyrical composition seems to have resulted from this.
Unlike later poems that take lyrical compositions, Kim Jong-sam’s works of art end the poem with the existence of an unsolved process. Kim Jong-sam’s works of artists include a “common space” that connects everyday events (episodes) with the entire art world (including works and lives). The proper nouns written in poems do not just present the protagonist of a poetic situation, but rather deepen the shape and expand its meaning by acting as a sign, a single poetic device. A fragment of an artist’s life spreads through his life and artistic world. This breaks the boundaries of life and art, and emphasizes the strong continuity and overlap between the two.