T.S. 엘리엇 연구의 諸問題 : 緖 = Re-reading T.S. Eliot

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Every generation feels a need as well as a desire 'to name and substantiate itself by producing an interpretation of cultural antecedent', says Gregory S. Jay. So T.S. Eliot produces one of his own, but he denounces our 'blind and timid' dependence upon cultural antecedents and 'the objectivity of personal memory'. He simply negates the validity of the memory of the past, hence of the present, too, by saying that "the past remembered was never lived." Eliot urges us to re-excavate, re-interpret, and re-live the past as memory and the past remembered. This proposal calls for a radical re-examination of all the 'previously sanctioned systems of cognition, histriography, metaphysics, science, and poetics' in a fresh new light. His lifelong endeavors, philosophical and literary, may be said to be a de-sanctioning activity of every sort of sanctioned systems.
Eliot's first and foremost endeavor of desanctioning activity is launched against the traditional Western metaphysics of logocentrism, the recent origin of which may be traced back to the Cartesian concepts of 'I', 'mind', and 'consciousness'. According to Eliot's various philosophical writings, Cartesian concepts such as 'I', 'mind', and 'consciousness' are very fragile and precarious-and even volatile-because these are no more a stable and immutable, hence metaphysical, substance than a shadow is. Eliot presupposes, and argues, that these are nothing but those which are constructed by the communal necessities, ideological doctrines, and other prevailing cultural forces. And the major device employed in this constructiong processes, of course, is language which is itself nothing but a construction dominated by the above-mentioned elements. In Eliot's epistemology, therefore, society and/or culture constructs language, and language in turn constructs society and/or culture, and both of these build up and dominate the (concepts of) 'I', 'mind', and 'consciousness'. Thus Eliot says that without language there exists no object, adding that the reality of object depends upon-and only exists in-relations. The same is true of the 'I', 'mind', and 'consciousness'. These are all relational constructions. Anything dependent on other(s), that is, anything conditioned has no substance of its own(-nature) : it simply is not something metaphysical. Here, the possibility of metaphysics it radically denied. This kind of epistemology does not permit the possibility of any stable knowledge that is, and has been, desperately sought after by science and metaphysics. Eliot's epistemological workings are a little giant revolution against the Western tradition of metaphysics. According to Eliot's epistemological thinking, metaphysics is only 'a study of working fiction.'
However, why do so many literary critics-and even philosophers-are and have been anxious to find such possibility in Eliot? It may not be their faults : it is Eliot himself who invites/tempts them to do so-expecially in his literary discourses. When he compares, for instance, the poet's mind to a catalyzing medium, and when he quotes as an epigraph in one of his very important essays a line from Aristotle's De Anima that reads like 'something divine, unimpressionable, and unaffected', he surely seems to be encouraging such attempts. This kinds of references have led so many to hail/denounce Eliot as the champion of 'congnitive theism', the preserver of 'the traditional humanist values'. However, Eliot is neither so clear, nor so simplistic in his thinking/writing : he has a double-edged sword that sometimes undercuts the branch of a tree on which he is sitting. He is sort of a double talker, consciously and/or unconsciously. This essay will propose a (re-)reading strategy that is focused on this very double-talking and thus deceiving aspect of Eliot's and the related literary/philosophical problematics.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 이성중심주의 비판
• Ⅱ. 쌍날의 검
• Ⅲ. 「형이상학적 토끼사냥 놀이」
• Ⅳ. 심미적 놀이