파괴와 복원의 폭력: 척 팔러닉의 『파이트 클럽』에 나타난 반자본주의와 남성성 회복을 위한 폭력 프로젝트

Abstract

Analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, this thesis examines how Palahniuk depicts the loss of privileged masculinity in the consumer capitalist society and how he takes advantage of violence as a tool both to destruct the consumer capitalist social order and to restore the myth of strong masculinity supporting the older masculine symbolic order. Yet what the thesis ultimately focuses on is Palahniuk’s implicit strategy in dealing with violence. For him violence is physical and personal and at the same tim cultural and organizational. By awkwardly linking male with violence, he more awkwardly formulates that consumer capitalism feminizes males into consuming subjects and violence could help the destructed masculine symbolic order to be recovered. But such a clumsy logic in his text is also his strategy to emphasize the fact that violence has the two contrary powers, destruction and restoration, and this emphasis shows that what we should seek through violence is not to return to the pre-capitalist social order with the myth of strong masculinity but to understand the prevalent violence of consumer capitalist social order and to search for ways to resist that violent social order. Chapter Ⅱ investigates how the consumer capitalism deconstructs the masculine symbolic order and what its results are, exploring how he strategically establishes the link between masculinity and violence. The link between masculinity and violence leads to Palahniuk’s “interpretive violence” on consumer capitalism and masculinity. Paying attention to how relentless his interpretation on current consumerism and masculinity is, Chapter Ⅲ reveals that Palahniuk attempts to justify alternative violence against the consumer capitalist society. Chapter Ⅳ argues that the alternative violence that he depicts is designed to expose the destructive and restorative power of violence and the exposure of the paradoxical nature of violence demonstrates Palahniuk’s intention to claim the significance of violence to resist the malaise of consumer capitalism. The chapters of the thesis traces Palahnuik’s diagnosis on the contemporary social order and his prescription of maintain one’s own values in the violent capitalist circumstances.