We with-in/out Us

How to make sense of what happened in Itaewon on October 29th? In hindsight, the catastrophic event which claimed the lives of 159 youths on the Halloween eve appears to have been a dire forecast of bizarre administrative debacles that were to follow under South Korea’s current regime. Yet if it seems too simplistic, or morally disingenuous, to shift the entire blame to the incompetence and misrule of the powers that be, it is because the tragedy, like so many others preceding it in Korea’s turbulent modern history, once again raises to the fore the problematic nature of communal being of which we are, even in the age of hyperreal modernity, still essentially constituted. By retracing a number of key themes running through the historic debate that took place between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot in 1983 concerning the possibility (or the impossibility) of community―namely, myth, work, unworking, friendship, the death of the other, number, etc.―the present inquiry attempts to bring to bear the theoretical implications divulged in the debate upon the late Itaewon tragedy. If, as the two philosophers claim, one fundamental aspect of communal being consists in the responsibility to maintain the impossible memory the other, the other immemorially gone as well as imminently to come, then I argue that that unrepresentable other must encompass, as Derrida once argued, the non-human others.