Selección y obtención de los componentes de la carga aleante

History [also] teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. (Foucault 1984 [1971], 79)

Foucault (1984 [1971]), in his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, emphasises that Nietzschean genealogy is not a means of searching for ‘origins’ and ‘inviolable identity’ but is used to seek the exact opposite – deconstruction of timeless ‘truths’ and ‘dissipation’ of identity (p. 79, 95). In this sense, the genealogical method employed by Foucault through his reading of Nietzsche – as shown in his historical studies such as the History of Sexuality (1978), is indeed an inversion of traditional historical investigation which often looks at the past for its own sake, or interprets the present as a linear progression from the past. From this perspective, genealogy can be used as a useful methodological tool, when questioning taken-for-granted notions and indisputably received truths of the present day. For example, in his genealogical analysis of sexuality, Foucault (1978) reverses the prevailing belief that sexuality was repressed in nineteenth-century Victorian society (in Foucault’s words, the ‘repressive hypothesis’) by excavating the Victorian bourgeois’ obsession with

70 sexuality which, Foucault explains, functions as the basis of their differentiation from the aristocracy. In this vein, genealogy can be employed by ‘social scientists who attempt to investigate the “history of the present” first by mounting an organised assault on the intellectual object that we take history to be and by unsettling and disrupting the political and intellectual grounds upon which we rest our inquiries’ (Anaïs 2013, 126).

As argued in the previous chapter when exploring the conceptualisation of racism and nationalism in Korean intellectual discourses, my research begins with the problematisation of a naturalised account of the (racially pure) nation and the persistent decoupling of nationalism and racism which are manifest in the silence about ‘race’. In this sense, my historical examination of nationalism is informed by critical genealogy with the aim of contesting the present discursive formation about ‘our past’ – the history of Korean nation – from which the present modes of being are conceived as a historically inevitable and essential arrangement. However, in tracing ideological formations and transformations of nationalism, I do not seek to provide a truer account of the origin of nation. For instance, it is not my intention to corroborate the multiethnic foundation of the Korean nation as such, and thereby prove the notion of ethnic homogeneity false. In other words, my interest lies in tracking how Koreans have been made to believe who they are, rather than in explaining who they really are. In this sense, as for my research, genealogy works as ‘more a tactics of sabotage and disruption than a straightforward head-to-head measuring up of “supposed truth” with a “truer” counter-example’ (Hook 2005, 7). By placing stress on the role of critique in Nietzsche’s genealogy, Deleuze writes:

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Genealogy means both the value of origin and the origin of values. Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones. Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which their value itself derives. Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but also difference or distance in the origin. Genealogy means nobility and baseness, nobility and vulgarity, nobility and decadence in the origin. The noble and the vulgar, the high and the low – this is the truly genealogical and critical element. (Deleuze 2006 [1962], 2)

Not only as a historical hermeneutical analysis but more importantly as critique, genealogy allows us to look at ‘both the value of origin and the origin of values’ according to Deleuze. This means that genealogy directs us to question how a certain practice or ethos attains its meaning and values. And this search is not to sanctify the truth of origin or a single account of history, but to reveal contradictions and plurality, historically involved with the very practice or ethos.

From this point of view, my approach to the history of racial nationalism draws its inspiration from Weinbaum’s (2004) take on genealogy, as both a ‘raced and reproductive object’ of analysis and a ‘critical theoretical tool’ (p. 18). In her

Wayward Reproductions (2004), where she situates genealogy in her conceptualisation of ‘the race/reproduction bind’ – the notion that ‘race can be

reproduced’ (p. 4-5) – Weinbaum traces the inextricable relationship between race

and sex embedded in the notion of reproduction and its role in constituting nationalism. She does so particularly by reinterpreting modern transatlantic intellectual thought as a site where such interconnection is revealing. And in this project, she employs genealogy both in the sense of an indication of bloodline – ‘notions of racial “purity”, familial, and national belonging’ – and a ‘method of critical historical inquiry’ (ibid., 8) to contest the very notions by unpacking not only

72 the perpetuity of the idea of the ‘racially pure nation’ (p. 17) but also its impossibility. Following this approach, my use of genealogy attends to both identifying historical (trans/)formations and mobilisation of the notion of nation, and demystifying the present understanding of National History.

In Chapter three, I begin this genealogical undertaking from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. The reason for this is that, contrary to the prevailing trans- historical conceptualisation of nation, it is the time when the concept of nation and the ideology of nationalism became central to the identification of who Koreans are or who they ought to be. In this sense, my selection of particular times, events, discourses and practices reflects an attempt to historicise what is often thought to be trans-historical. This historicisation also involves an active practice of selection in order to reveal interactions of various ideologies such as nationalism and racism that are often conceived to be irrelevant to each other in the Korean context. I, by no means, claim that this historical examination of nationalism proffers a comprehensive, chronological account of the development of nationalism. In fact, that is exactly what I intend to avoid, as it should be clear by now what it means to look at history through a genealogical lens. Rather, against a teleological approach to reading the present as an inexorable endpoint of history, I highlight the historically

contingent nature of nationalism particularly by focusing on its transfigurations. Furthermore, my choice of particular events in Chapter three can be considered as part of a process of reading my own empirical study – interviews. Broadly, the ways in which the nation is discussed by my respondents, in a biologically and culturally reproducible sense, prompted me to hone my genealogical approach as a tool to

73 explore not only the historical institutionalisation of racial nationalism but also its shaky ground – i.e. the impossibility of pure homogeneity. More specifically, some events, episodes or historical analogies that my interview respondents (implicitly and explicitly) brought up, when they discussed issues of contemporary multiculturalisation of Korean society, were chosen as objects of investigation precisely in order to deconstruct the essentialist notion of self often attached to such descriptions of the past. To sum up, by exploring historical modalities of nationalism in an episodical manner – put differently, attending to history fraught with ‘accidents’, ‘minute deviations’, ‘errors’, ‘false appraisals’ and ‘faulty calculations’ (Foucault 1984 [1971], 81) – what I aim to do is to problematise and denaturalise the present. In this sense, throughout the thesis, genealogy is used to ‘reveal the wholly constructed character of the present even as it reveals discontinuities and fissures in that construction’ (Brown 2001, 113).