Yoni goes to "philosopher's congress" after coconuco

Beyond Damunhwa or Culturalist Conception of Ethics of Difference

My paper seeks to intervene with the discourse of Damunhwa, translated as “multi-culture” or “multiculturalism,” that has emerged in Korea in recent years among various state and non-state sectors as a way of dealing with the growing migrant population in the country, i.e., “marriage immigrants” and migrant workers. Shaped in the language of liberal pluralism and ideas of tolerance and rights to difference, Damunhwa discourses primarily translate the issue of difference in terms of cultural difference, which is again defined as the differences in traditional or national custom, cuisine, and/or costume. My main arguments in this paper are two-folded. Following Alain Badiou’s critique that ideas such as recognition of the other does not shed any light on concrete situations of the ‘real’ (2000), I argue that Damunhwa discourses not only misrepresent the situation of inequality and marginalization with women migrants living in Korea but, in doing so, amount to an apolitical discourse of a ‘global village,’ which again works as an ideology and technology of domination. To put another way, multicultural discourses in Korea depoliticizes the issues of otherness and difference by defining the problem of inequality primarily within the framework of cultural difference and reinforces the political marginalization of migrants by focusing on the role of Koreans as subjects who should recognize and tolerate such differences (Brown 2006; Hage 2000). I argue that issues at stake in Korea and beyond are not cultural difference per se as much as global commerce of sex and marriage, racialization of labor, and biopolitical state regulation of population. To address these issues, one should interrogate what Gupta and Ferguson (1997) termed, “difference-producing set of relations,” or the political, social, and economic relations that render different positions and positionalities among peoples and groups in the first place, instead of starting from any absolute, purified notion of difference. That is, I propose that any interrogation of politics and ethics of difference and otherness should start from a recognition of the Same (Badiou 2000) or a common ground that is always in the process of becoming (Evans XXXX) and makes differences relative and related rather than from absolutist conception of rights and culture.