증언의 윤리에서 미메시스의 정동정치로—쿳시의 「악의 문제」에 관하여

This essay examines how Costello’s speech in “The Problem of Evil” (Lesson 6 of Elizabeth Costello) stands in relation to the ethics of witnessing as well as her own discourse on the unbounded sympathetic imagination in “The Lives of Animals” (Lesson 3 and 4). While her claim in “The Lives of Animals” has moral and ethical implications, it runs counter to the ethics of witnessing, which, revolving around the unrepresentable other, surely sets limits on our imagination, if not on our sympathy. On the face of it, Costello’s critique in “The Problem of Evil” of Paul West’s “obscene” description of the Nazi executioner and the executed seems to reinstate the ethics of witnessing. On a deeper level, her response complicates, rather than simply cancel, the question of the sympathetic imagination by turning it from the ethics of the representation of the other into what might be called the affective politics of mimesis. It is not “the other,” the victims of the evil, but the author and the reader, and their affects, that she really cares about in this phase. The question is further complicated by the narrative devices that undermine the authenticity of her words and feelings. No final word is given by the story, which remains an illustration of the suffering that the “embodied soul” of the author as a “secretary of the invisible” has to undergo.