Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjo's Chosun

BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGNTY IN YOUNGJOS CHOSUN 1
A Filicidal Decree, a Royal Death, and a Code of Law: Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjos Chosun
Yongkyung Chung Underwood International College Yonsei University
This certifies that the senior thesis of Yongkyung Chung for the Political Science and International Relations Department has been approved.
[Signature] ___________________________ Thesis Advisor: Anthony C. Adler
Underwood International College Yonsei University June 2011
Acknowledgements
This thesis could not have been written without the following people: Professor Tae Lee of the English department, and my peers Mary Hayoung Kim and Violet Haeun Kim, who towards the end were instrumental in pushing me to organize the thesis coherently and presentably; Professor Choi, Yoon-ho of the Korean History department, who in his academic wisdom helped me narrow down my topic; Professor Kim, Sung-ho of the Political Science department, who with his formidable knowledge of political theory helped me figure out a fitting methodology; My parents, who humored me at length in my wild conjectures on sovereignty, and who led me to a fitting conclusion; My old friends at Yonseimunhakhwe, who sat supportively through my tortuous logic many an afternoon; My good friend Kim, Seung-yu, whose attentive reading and active critique of the first Korean-language draft first sent me searching for a better structure; And my advising professor, Professor Anthony C. Adler of the Comparative Literature and Culture department, who gave hours of engaged reading/editing to the thesis-to-be, provided me from the onset with the requisite insights and knowledge, and trusted in my potential. To the abovementioned I owe all that is good in this thesis. Any shortcomings must be assumed my own.
Abstract
In 1762 the heir apparent of Chosun, Crown Prince Sado, was put to death by the royal decree of his own father, King Youngjo the 21st King of Chosun. The extralegal and unprecedented nature of this filicide in which the son was locked up in a rice box until his death resulted in the shamanistic sanctification of the Crown Prince amongst the populace but arguably weakened subsequent monarchical power. Scholars of Chosun dynastic history have tried to explain the cause of this extraordinary event in terms of either personal motives on the part of Youngjo or more public political rivalries between the No-ron and So-ron. However, this paper finds that both causal explanations are equally problematic in light of both 1) pre-existing traditional rationale undergirding the very foundation of the ideologybased Chosun dynasty and 2) the implications of Youngjos crowning achievement, the legal coda of the Sokdaejeon. Through an investigation of the existing schemes of rationalization presented in the historical narratives, I identify a deep-set paradox and show that King Youngjos act of ordering his sons death fundamentally escapes rationalization. This leads to a need to incorporate an approach to history that reconsiders previous schemes of rationalization by making inexplicability itself the starting point of historical interpretation. In order to address this need I introduce the concepts of sovereignty, life and law as developed within a Western theoretical context by Giorgio Agamben. Through that interpretive framework I find that both King Youngjo and Crown Prince Sado are imbued with the selfsame characteristics that Agambens sovereign exhibits. I conclude that the paradox developed within the causality of history in this specific instance can be amplified and re-cast in terms of a new understanding that empowers the historical agency of both father and son.
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Table of Contents
a. Abstract.....4 b. Korean Abstract....5 1. Introduction...7 A. A Royal Murder, A Code of Law, and Historical Inexplicability .13 i. ii. Politics in 18th Century Chosun..............................................................................................13 The Death of the Crown Prince......17 The Significance of the Sokdaejeon, in Youngjos Tangpyung Politics.........22 Implications of the Sokdajeons Implementation ..25 The Familial Bond..........25 Necessary but Not Sufficient......27
B. Problematic: an Inexplicable Historical Event.....................21 i. ii. iii. iv. 2. 3.
The need to establish a different explanation of history.....30 Sovereignty, Life, and Law ....31 A. Sovereignty and Law...32 B. Sovereignty and Life....34 Sovereignty, Life, and Law as manifest in Youngjos Chosun..36 A. Youngjo the sovereign law-giver and the people as raw souls.....36 B. Sado, Great King of the Rice Box................39 C. A resolution, or just the beginning...................................................................................................40 Conclusion...41 Limitations and Proposals for Future Research..42 Works Cited.....45 Works Referenced.......49 Appendices......50 A. Appendix A: Translated Excerpts from Youngjo-Sillok..50 B. Appendix B: Translated Excerpts from Hanjunglok........................................................................54 C. Appendix C: Glossary of Terms.......55
4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
A Filicidal Decree, a Royal Death, and a Code of Law: Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjos Chosun
Father! Father! I have done wrong. I will now do everything as you tell me to. I will read books, and listen to everything you say, so please do not do this. (Hyekyungkung Hong, 2001, pg.80) The official court records1 tell of a summer evening in 1762 when, prostrated before his father the King, the crown prince pled thus for his life to no avail. His father, King Youngjo,2 the 21st King of Chosun, thumped the ground with the royal sword and ordered his son to step into a rice box. After much hysterical crying and horrified pleading on the part of every onlooker including the servants and bureaucrats of the court, the crown prince entered the box. The box was locked with two full padlocks, and then covered with bolts of cloth stuffing and a large plank of wood (Lee Sung-Mu, 2000, pg.75) The Kings own personal guard saw to it that no one freed or fed the royal progeny. Eight days later, the lifeless body of the once future King of Chosun was confirmed dead, brought out, and mourned. He had been 28 years old. The dead man was bequeathed the posthumous name of Sado3(he who is mourned and thought of) This incident has since been named the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon4, or the Terrible Incident of the 13th Day5. Then the common people, who had loved Jang-Heun Seja6 for his humanism as well as his considerate and progressive policies regarding agriculture and taxes, began to worship a Dwee-ju Daewang7 a Great King of the Rice Box, who was purported to be a most
1 See Appendix A. 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 13 6 , : another posthumously accorded name for the Crown Prince Sado. 7
powerful god in the spirit world. Even today, urgent shamanistic prayers go directly to the spirit of this young prince who died an untimely death. This was an unprecedented incident in which the reigning king had killed, without due process of law, his own son the heir apparent. The controversy this incident creates in Korean royal dynastic political history is considerable. Given the pre-existing mores of the day, it was an inexplicable tragedy that broke with both traditional and newly established orders that King Youngjo had fought so hard to procure. A key issue of concern in the 18th century was that of the divided political factions and their increasing strife. Although Youngjo himself was inclined to support the No-ron8, he as the monarch made it his duty to quell factional disputes. The establishment of Tangpyung Politics9 (literally, the administering of an antidote to better the political dialogue) was by far the most important accomplishment of Youngjo, second only to the publication of the Sokdaejeon10. Tangpyung politics aimed at leveling the political parties influence, preventing one party from asserting too much dominance, and ensuring that all were held accountable to the King. Sokdaejeon was a legal coda that promulgated an order of law that was distinctly new and yet claimed inherited legitimacy by basing itself in the tradition stretching upwards to the Zhou-rye11 and Kyungkukdaejeon12. In light of the aforementioned both traditional and newly introduced mores, the death of the crown prince was an almost impossible event because it is nearly impossible to rationalize; and because it occurred precisely at the crucial moment in which the nearly 500year monarchical system of the Chosun dynasty relied most on rationalization13 in the form
8 9
, : a political party opposing the Soron (, ) , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ,
of heavy dependence on reigning ideology to keep the nation together. To instigate such a violent event when neither pre-existing nor newly-instituted rationale could answer for its cause was an unthinkable, indeed unspeakable act14 on the part of Youngjo. Thus the incident in which Youngjo killed his own son the Crown Prince Sado occurred despite the fact that it ran contrary to most of the existing rationale and indeed even the reigning new societal developments of the day. Yet despite the puzzle it poses, this incident has so far been analyzed but circumstantially with regards to the political situation of the time. The analyses of this incident tend almost completely to observe the Im-Oh-HwaByeon as either an incidental stepping stone to the understanding of the later king Jungjos reign (during which this incident became highly politicized); or as an unfortunate but
adventitious tragedy stemming from the historical actors personal issues. Such approaches fail to grapple with the problems regarding the basic originating mechanisms underlying even the very causes of this incident: the Kings rejection of merely ritualized concepts of sovereignty and the links therewith to the legal system of the time. Furthermore, the efforts that have thus far been made to explain the causes of this incident do no more than perpetuate the dichotomous framework of personality incompatibility theory vs. political party strife theory as based upon the highly politicized contemporaneous accounts of Hanjungrok and Youngjo Sillok. The Personality incompatibility theory (Kim Sungyoon, 2002, pg.35) has suggested that Youngjos impatient and dynamic temperament was a horrible mismatch with Sados slow contemplative personality, that Sado loved the martial arts too much, and that Sado was crazy. The implication is that Sado was an unfilial crown prince who deserved to die.
14
(that which one could not bear to write) and (That which one could not bear to hear) are phrases heavily relied upon in the official chronicle. This attests to the unthinkably controversial nature of the incident, which defied rationalization even at the time.
The Political Faction Strife Theory asserts that the official records as well as Hyekyungkung Hongs personal memoir involve disproportionate defamations of the Crown Prince. This claims that the personality conflict was a justification for what was a political killing: the Crown Prince sided with the So-ron, who were by then a minor faction, and the King was more sympathetic to the opposing No-ron. Frontsmen of this camp are Jung-Jo, 22nd King of Chosun, son of Crown Prince Sado; the Si-pa that emerged during Jung-Jos reign, and some Nam-in individuals. I argue that neither account is sufficiently explanatory. The first camp establishes a personal motive for Youngjo, a murderer in a sense: but Youngjo had just as firm a personal motive to not have his son killed. The immense trauma of his brothers death and the accusations and political strife that followed would have made him fear being seen as a killer of his own kin. Besides, records attest that Youngjo did love his son, and was in fact eager to hand over the throne, because Youngjo was an old man by this time and tried many times before to establish his son as the King. The second theory establishes a political motive for not just Youngjo, but also for the No-ron. Yet it makes no sense for a political party, no matter how self-assured, to want or need to have royalty killed, when the merest hint of anger expressed towards the royal bloodline did constitute blasphemy outside of an ideological schema unless exceptionally buttressed with justification. Going one step further and considering the Sokdaejeon and the Tangpyung politics of Youngjos rule spells a definite paradox: in ordering the death of his son, Youngjo was going against not only every traditional legitimating rationale, but even all the newly instituted ideological self-legitimizing works that the King himself had worked all his life to establish. This is where I find that historical narrative meets its limit. In order to further establish a causal relationship and verify the definitive truth of the history-as-event, reliance
on records themselves can only be a fallible strategy. Both of these interpretations are speculative and there is no way to verify either of their claims, which are at best contingent. Therefore, a new approach to the interpretation of history is necessitated by the Crown Princes Death. In this paper I demonstrate that interpretations and explanations surrounding this highly exceptional and tragic incident in Chosun dynasty Korean monarchical history have so far been thus continuously relegated to the political or psychological dimensions. Most contemporaneous arguments hinged on legitimacy and therefore considered one or the other party justified/wronged. But the fact is that overreliance on such logic actually leads one to overlook the disquieting paradox inherent in this incident. The paradox is that Youngjo had every reason not to kill his son, but did. It wasn't a momentary lapse in judgment either: the prince died after eight days locked up in that box those eight whole days of stubbornness on the part of that mercurial King imply conscious willfulness and some degree of calculation. But every reason Youngjo could have had to kill his son can be easily countered with an even better reason to keep his son alive. Those political and psychological arguments that tried to explain this away were merely circumstantial - contingent - tacked on after the fact. And the fact consists in a paradox. So I look for a different paradigm that can explain this incident without erasing or neglecting the paradox, and in order to find the right paradigm I scrutinize Youngjo's legal code, because that is both the essence of Youngjo's aspirations for his country and the arena in which the aforementioned paradox is located - because in killing Sado, Youngjo goes against his own law, risks overturning his accomplishments completely, and endangers his bloodline's legitimacy (his bloodline's legitimacy is also tied up with the tradition behind the legal code.) Because traditional explanations based on causality (the political and psychological explanations) failed to address, and in fact gave rise to, the paradox, I look for
a method of treating history that lends itself to more flexibility: the application of a political theory encompassing paradox. In short, I scrutinize two versions of historical narrative hinging on causality, and then I identify a need: a need to incorporate an approach to history that reconsiders previous schemes of rationalization by making inexplicability itself the starting point of historical interpretation. In order to address this need I introduce the concepts of sovereignty, life and law as developed within a Western theoretical context by Giorgio Agamben. In the process of application I discover that what seemed at first to be simply a perplexing paradox to be explained away can now be reconfigured as a key feature in the identities of the King, the Prince, and combined: the nature of sovereignty itself (both conceptually and within Chosun spatiotemporally.) Through the law-making of a king who tried to rule on the theoretical foundations of aligning the royal spectrum hwang-geuk15 with the peoples spectrum mingeuk16, I try to broaden the possibilities and implications of understanding Youngjo and his creation of an exceptional state through the exercise of his sovereign power. I conclude that in light of Western concepts of sovereignty and law and life, specifically those enunciated in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this incident yields a new understanding - of Youngjo, Crown Prince Sado, and the nature of sovereignty in Chosun - that manages to both embrace the paradox and open up more possibilities of explanation.
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A. A Royal Murder, a Code of Law, and Historical Inexplicability In this section I give an overview of the historical context, focusing on tradition, the founding ideology and guiding principles of the political situations leading up to the incident. Then I trace the traditional rationale and the newly founded mores in turn in order to identify the paradox on which this thesis will turn. A crown prince in 18th century Chosun was obligated from birth to submit to the unending study of scholarly classics and to participate in royal ceremonies. The firstborn son was automatically, by default of primogeniture, selected as the Crown Prince. The official selection and subsequent declaration of the Crown Prince, the Chaekbong17 was a highly officiated and solemn process. The crown Prince Sado, born Wonryang,18 was born into, and brought up with, everyones full expectations on him to be the future King. The complex political situation into which he entered upon birth required intensive study of the classics and the founding principles of the kingdom19, because the nature of this monarchy dictated the rigid establishment of scholastic justification.
i. Politics in 18th Century Chosun Being a monarch in the Chosun dynasty came with the great burden of being both a Gun-Sa20 (exemplary moral scholarly leader, or philosopher-king) and a Sung-Wang21 (holy lord and ruler22). Current historical tendencies tend to differentiate between Sung-hak23(holy
17 18
, , : this was one of his formal names in life. For disambiguation in this paper, the living Crown Prince will hereafter be referred to as Wonryang; the dead Crown Prince will be Sado; another title of the same that emerges in the text of the royal records is Dong-gung (, ). 19 It has been a matter of much debate as to whether Chosun should be referred to a dynasty or a kingdom. is the direct transliteration of Kingdom; however, increasingly, this term is discouraged and instead Chosun is referred to simply as - the Chosun period, or the Yi Dynastic Period. This period stretched on virtually unchanged for five hundred years, arguably ossifying towards its end. 20 , : 21 , 22 D. Bodde, who translated Fung []s History of Chinese Philosophy, translated this as Sage-King.
scholarship) and Sung-wang24 (holy King) theories, ascribing the former to Youngjos rule to accentuate his relative dependency on the scholars acknowledgment of him as legitimate King. Yu Mi-rim has noted that rationalization in the form of heavy dependence on reigning ideology was by this time the key rein corralling the nation together: In Chosun, the many political actors all shared an equal class that of Sadaebu25, or bureaucratic scholars and therefore support from the people was not a basic legitimizing force for their power. Therefore, purity of conformity to Chu Hsi values and precise conceptual understanding of the classics was often construed as the sole grounds for legitimization of the monarch. (Yu Mirim, 2002, p. 184)26 Traditionally, the guiding political ideology in the latter half of the Chosun dynasty was an offshoot of Chu Hsi Confucianism, Chosuns Chu Hsi (in Chinese) or Ju Ja (in Korean) Confucianism,27 wherein the traditions of Ka-rye28 (universal and absolute rules of propriety ruling over the average scholars, rules of primogeniture) and Oh-Rye29 (rules specifically focusing on the royal family, the ruling scholar/spokesperson of heaven) worked in tandem and in adherence, in subtly varying degrees, with the book of Zhou-rye (Lee Bum-Jik, 2007, pp.55-108). Ever since the Chosun dynastys inception, a new order largely centered on the Kyungkuk-daejeon (which played the role of a constitution) placed itself within the Confucian tradition of Zhou-rye. The respectful continuation of a legitimate bloodline within this paradigm was a vital duty to royal forefathers.
Here this is a contraction of the concept of Inner Sage and Outer King [, .] 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 Translation my own. The original text reads as follows: . , . [] , , . . 27 , 28 , 29 ,
This particular tradition of Chu Hsi Jujahak had settled increasingly into place as the dominant political discourse ever since the 14th century Chosun scholar Twegye Yi Hwang30s work on Li31 (universal order) and Ki32 (life force) took 12th century Ming and Song dynastys neo-confucianism and reconfigured it into a new, distinctly Chosun-based political theory that centered on Kingship, loyalty, and Sungrihak33(the natural order of the heart/ the study of natural order). From this lineage the Young-nam hakpa34 issued, eventually becoming the Nam-in35: a political party centering on the idea that Li was always good and Ki could be neither good nor bad, among other things.36 These reform-minded Nam-in clashed with the traditional interpreters Seo-in37. The Seo-in had descended from Yul-gok Yi Yi38 whose line formed the Kiho-Hakpa39, and by the 16th century had branched into the NoRon40 and So-Ron41. The So-ron tended to share fundamental scholarly outlooks with the Nam-in, such as the idea that nature and human beings were disparate, and only human philosophy or action could be normative. That resulted in a highly pro-active policy-making stance on the part of the So-ron. The No-ron derided this unorthodox development.
30 31
, , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 One of the four main tenets of Sungri-hak neo-confucianism as identified by Cho, Sung-Eul was that the human world and the natural world could be interpreted entirely as interactions of Li and Ki. The Yulgok school focused on the idea that these two could not be divided [, ] that is, that the two shared certain limitations and it was merely their portions that varied. On the other hand the Twegye school focused on the idea that these two could not be separated [, ] that is, that they were autonomous and yet dependent the one on the other. 37 , . Kim, Joon-Suk, in the English abstract of his book (2003) identifies this opposition as a split between two ideologically irreconcilable groups, that is, Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and the new reformist school, later to become known as the Sirhak school or the practical learning school. The latter [] stressed the importance of reforms for national rehabilitation, [while the former supported the status quo, and moderate tax reforms.] Mention of the new reformist school here pertains to the Nam-in and the So-ron, who regarded the monarch as the real nucleus for reform. 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ,
Thus the political arena was increasingly divided in the two centuries leading up to the crown princes death. This was possible because Neo-confucian tradition allowed (or, according to interpretations, necessitated) Gong-Ron42 (public debate), and fittingly therefore allowed for a political party Bung-dang43 of knowledgeable, hallowed scholar-politicians. Theoretically the parties role was to aid and abet or sometimes check and balance the King by productively churning out constructive discussions. But the reality was far from ideal. The relationship between the No-ron and the So-ron divided the court by the time Youngjo came to the throne after his sickly elder brother Kyungjongs untimely death. The result of this division was an imbroglio of scholarly disagreement and personal resentment.44 It was into such a political situation that Youngjo entered as King, although he was not the eldest son and in fact succeeded his elder brother under suspicious circumstances45. As his reign progressed he managed to shake off or brutally suppress much of the suspicion regarding his hand in his brothers death, and garnered acknowledgment as a dedicated scholar. Youngjo held more kyung-yeon46 scholastic seminars and debates regarding the founding holy documents and wrote more interpretive works of the classics, than any other Chosun King.47
42 43
, , 44 Song Si-Yeol [, ], a great teacher and uncompromising conservative of the No-ron, was asked by his student Yoon Jeung [, ] to write an elegy on the tombstone of Yoon Jeungs father, who had recently passed away. Apparently Song Si-Yeol disapproved of the scholarly legacy of Yoon Jeungs father, deeming his to be an unorthodox cult [ ]: Song denigrated the elder Yoons work on the very face of the new tomb. Enraged, Yoon Jeung left his inconsiderate master and formed the So-Ron. 45 When Kyung-Jong, Youngjos brother, was ill, Youngjo persistently sent Kyung-Jong bulb root tea to drink, even though the royal doctors forbade him. Most decisively, Youngjo interfered in the royal Surasang [, main course meal], sending Kyung-jong persimmons and pickled crabs to eat, because pickled crabs were Kyung-jongs favorite food. That day Kyung-jong ate remarkably and heartily, but the next day he fast grew ill and then passed away. Although Youngjo was completely devastated and shed many tears, the circumstances were enough to arouse suspicion in those that had been loyal to Kyung-Jong and in those that had hoped for a son to be born in line with the rule of primogeniture. Many Nam-in and So-ron considered the death as having been deliberately orchestrated by Youngjo. It is still believed in many rural areas of Korea that eating persimmons after eating pickled crabs can kill you within days. 46 47 For a complete table of Youngjos scholarly endeavors on the legal coda, see Kim Baekcheol, 2007. For a
ii. The Death of the Crown Prince Analysis of Primary Sources: Youngjo Sillok and Hanjunglok Although countless personal memoirs, mun-jip,48 of many scholar-bureaucrats must surely record this incident, such firsthand accounts are hard to account for and rare to come by, usually collecting dust disheveled or awaiting translation in secondhand book stores or academic vaults. In addition, the parts of the Sungjeongwon-Ilgi49 (Records of the Royal Secretariat) that recorded the incident in much more meticulous detail were ordered destroyed by Jungjo50, 22nd King of Chosun and son of the crown prince a curious incident considering how historically-conscious the people of the time tended to be51. The two key primary sources recording the incident are the Youngjo Sillok52 and the Hanjunglok53. These are two very different sources of information: the former is an official record, one part of the vast and remarkable day-to-day annals that span the duration of the entire Chosun period. The Sagwans54 (historians) writing the annals were allowed complete free rein to write piercing analyses of what they saw happening around them and to interpret the history as they thought right. These records were kept completely hidden until the Kings death. The Hanjunglok, on the other hand, was a private memoir, highly politicized and curiously inconsistent throughout its re-issued versions, written by the Lady Hyekyungkung when she was in her eighties, nearly six decades after the death in question.55
comprehensive list of kyungyeon by Sookjong and Youngjo, see Jahyun Kim Haboush, 2001, p.239. Also see Yu Mirim, 2002, p.92 48 , 49 50 , 51 Kim, Yong-Suk has suggested, after a lengthy Freudian analysis of existing records, that this destruction of historical records took place because the crown prince committed the taboo crime of incest. This is, however, a very speculative claim, and it is hard to back up with concrete evidence. 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 For the relevant passages from each source that directly discuss the death, see Appendices A and B.
Interpretations of History It is possible to identify several key perspectives interpreting Crown Prince Sados death. Many historians have suggested methods of interpretation and just as many have offered methods of classification for those very interpretations. I will briefly look over these before going on to state the problems inherent in their postulations. Firstly, Lee Bum-Jik asserts that the political atmosphere of the time can be whittled down into a general structure wherein the O-rye (the five laws governing the individual Kings home) and the Ka-rye, the law of homes (the universal order of things, governing the Sarim scholars at large, emphasizing primogeniture) were at constant odds with each other. It is in such a context that he labels the Im-oh Hwa byeon as a case in which the power of the King was overridden by the power of the courtiers and bureaucrats. To this end he emphasizes the situation of the Crown Prince who was not politically aligned with the powers behind his maternal line, We-cheok56 and his wife Hyekyungkungs line (of No-ron persuasion) and concludes that Youngjos killing of Sado was simply an unfortunate political move in these circumstances. Secondly, Park Gwang Yong has mentioned Hong Yi Sups private opinion regarding Youngjos mentioning that revolt is in between breaths,57 leads to the confirmation of a position that would view Crown Prince Sado as attempting to instigate a coup detat. However this is a problematic claim because it lacks corroborating evidence; even if there were rumors about a coup detat any actual threat or active planning on the part of the crown prince would have been highly unlikely. Park Gwang-yong mentions in passing and without much substantiation the personal opinion of the late Hong Yi-Sup, speculating that the reason Sado went to Pyongando was that he was planning a coup-detat against his
56
, were the maternal line of familial power, the force behind Queens and powerful concubines in the Chosun dynasty. 57 See Appendix A.
domineering father. But even if Youngjos words that there is rebellion in between breaths may allude to some kind of rumor within the palace regarding Sados potential rebellion, the circumstances of Sados ill health and evidence of his efforts to please the King strongly suggest that even if there were such rumors they would have been highly unsubstantiated. It is unlikely that Youngjo, who despite his quick temper did exhibit extreme prudence in key moments by actually going against demoting the crown prince to a commoner, could have been swept up so drastically and easily into such clearly falsified rumors. Classifications of these interpretations have been proposed on several levels. Park Hyun-Mo and Kim Sung-Yoon delineate the division twofold: into 1) approach based on psychopathy and 2) approach based on political structure. (Park Hyun-Mo, 1991, pg.42) An example of this first approach is Kim Yong-Suks psychoanalytical analyses of the incident, which though somewhat speculative convincingly emphasize the following: Youngjos domineering and volatile personality, his favoritism regarding his children (his daughter in particular, from whose loss he never recovered,) the nervous personality of Wonryang, and Wonryangs obsessive-compulsive fear of changing into appropriate ceremonial garb. Park has also identified adherents to the second approach as Lee Eun-Soon (1988), Sung Nak-Hoon (1955), and Lee Duk-Il (1998) (42). Kim Sung-Yoon also specifies the division of these pre-existing perspectives into Political Strife theory which views the Im-oh-Hwa-Byeon as an inident in which the crown prince was swept up in the whirlpool of political battle between No-ron and So-ron, and Personality Conflict theory which chiefly identifies the personality clash between the royal father and son possibly even attributing the young princes illness directly to stress born of this ill-fated mismatch. He goes on to criticize the idea that the cause of this incident was purely personal and completely apolitical, but at the same time he worries that Sados ShinSo-ron (neo-soron) position and the incident are oftentimes too linearly connected.
While these are very useful interpretations in terms of schematically organizing historical narrative, it is actually difficult to step out of the quagmire of what he himself points out as the fact that most of the research surrounding the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon are largely entirely devoted to the investigation of circumstantial and superficial causes. Another recurring problem is that the relationship between Youngjo and Sado is conflated and embellished to seem like it was irreconcilable from the outset (which Kim Sungyoon asserts was far from the case) and makes it difficult to see how the incident is related to the pursuit of Tangpyung politics. Through meticulous analysis of many primary sources Kim identifies the elements of Youngjos manipulation of pretext, chronicling the irrecoverable downward spiral encompassing many unfortunate events, rumors, and psychological trauma. Lastly, a closer look at the political actors of the time yields insight into how the next generation struggled to make sense of this incident. Hyekyungkung Hong has spoken of the differences in opinion between the Si-pa and the Byuk-pa in her Hanjunglok.58 The Si-pa deny that the crown prince had a mental illness at all, argue that Youngjo was misled by his courtiers, and consider the No-ron party to be responsible for Sados death. This positions implications could topple the entire work of hard-won semblances of inter-party harmony established within the Tangpyung political scheme. On the other hand the Byuk-pa side with Youngjo, considering the crown prince a crazy person who failed in his filial duties. The implications of this are much more detrimental to Jungjo, the grandson of Youngjo who became heir to the throne, because Jungjos father is seen as having forfeited his legitimate right and through this the legitimacy of his son, the royal grandson-to-be-king: When I think upon it, if one resents the late King Youngjo and says it is the bureaucrats fault instead of the illness of the crown prince, one not only
58
It would be of note here that the original was written in 1795 or the 19 th year of her son Jungjo, but the edited version which holds much more bile and was written towards the end of her life in 1801 called Euphyeollok [ ]was written after the Byuk-pa launched many political attacks. However, she herself claimed neutrality.
loses sight of the actual incident as it happened but it is a shameful thing to all three kings [Youngjo, Jungjo, Soonjo]. (Hyekyungkung Hong, 2001, pg.75) Hyekyungkung Hongs position, asserting public loyalty over private sorrow by taking the advice of her father Hong Bong-han which prescribed loyalty to rule that which requires loyalty, and sorrow to leave itself to sorrow, allows the understanding of the Hanjungrok as a political gesture of sorts. Both of these key branches of interpretation, however, harbor a debilitating weakness in that they can both be countered with the same logic with which they are constructed. Regarding the potential personal motives that Youngjo may have had, the sources give just as much reason to believe that Youngjo would have had every reason to defend his personal integrity, and dissuade ugly rumors of his supposed murder of his elder brother to fortify the royal lineage. Also, the political motives postulated can be countered with the fact that there were so many ideas that could be used for justification, but none among them would have sanctioned even considering the idea of getting rid of a legitimate crown prince through extralegal means, even if those means were to be carried out by the Kings orders.
B. Problematic: an Inexplicable Historical Event The question from the onset was: why exactly would Youngjo have killed his son? The abovementioned interpretations were attempts to address this question. And yet, each of these interpretations can easily be countered by another so that the chain of causality crumbles or is not sufficiently grounded. I suggest therefore that a different underlying mechanism, a different kind of answer to why and how Youngjo came to kill his son the way he did must be sought. Such an answer must be sought in the fundamental center of all
Youngjos politics: the Tangpyung politics. The written proclamation of Tangpyungs underlying logic was crystallized in the legal codes. These legal codes are also the place where the dilemma first was identified. Therefore it is indispensable to re-cast this incident in light of the significance of the legal coda. In this part of the thesis I address the problematic discrepancies latent in the event itself of crown prince Sados death, whilst taking into consideration specifically the many implications brought forth by Kim Baekchuls analysis of the penal code Hyungjeun59 of Youngjos legal coda Sokdaejeon. It then becomes possible to view Kim Baekchuls analysis based on the three main levels of malicious intent, murder of a family member, and the relationship between the king and his law. Even when the purported reasons are taken into consideration, it becomes clear that this Great Disposal was an incident that could be justified with no conceivable rationale of the time.
i. The Significance of the Code of Law, Sokdaejeon, in Youngjos Tangpyung Politics and the Legal system of the Chosun Kingdom Youngjos Tangpyung politics set out on the basis of respect and worship of ancestral kings and the ancient holy kings, as well as a focus on scholarly interpretation of the Zhou-rye which was spearheaded by the king. Kim Baek-Cheol refers to this as a new way of re-asserting the might of the Tangpyung political system, as well as a completely novel way of bringing legitimacy to the King. (Kim Baek-Cheol, 2010, pg.38) The Sokdaejeon which actually did bring about many results such as bureaucratic stringency and the betterment of prison conditions, the abolishment of cruel and unusual punishment, the protection of the socially disadvantaged etc., also played a vital role in setting out the
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foundational logic behind the Tangpyung politics. This is why it is imperative to address the question of the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon in which all those changes wrought in the penal code were violated. Firstly Kim Baek-cheol identifies three main levels of the Zhou-ryes importance in the tangpyung political system which are the sense of inheritance of a Confucian politics, the work of proclaiming legitimacy, and the teaching of the crown prince. (Kim Baek-Cheol, 2010, pg.62) For Youngjo the Zhou-rye was a sort of heirloom passed down from his father Sookjong and his elder brother Kyungjong. Youngjo eagerly took it upon his own person to teach his son the crown prince with this book as well, even from beginning before the nations tasks were relegated to the crown prince: Youngjo says, now we have inherited the Kyungukdaejeon to make things right, and the reason I am teaching this Zhou-rye is because I want my son Wonryang [the crown prince] to know that even after I grow old he can know the meaning and intent behind my teaching of these words.60 Thus Youngjo considered the Zhou-rye of utmost importance, and went on to say that this Zhou-rye was akin to Sejongs Kyungukdaejeon and the two were one and the same. This can be seen in light of the sense of continuity from the founding of the kingdom itself. But in order to apply the Kyungukdaejeon to the changed reality of the times, it was necessary to re-invigorate the Yao Sun dynastic politics and re-organize the national order of official words and things mum mul je do61 through publications. (Kim Baekcheol, 2010, pg.35) Youngjo managed to rise to this task by publishing the Sokdaejeon.
60 61
See Youngjo Sillok qtd., Kim Baekcheol, 2010. ,
The Sokdaejeon was published in this context as a Daejeon62 (literally a great book or code of law, which promulgated the mores of a new era it opened.) The Sokdaejeon as a Daejeon played the role of a centralizing force in the process of Youngjos rule, linking all the fundamental mechanisms Youngjo sought to rule by into specific and concrete bureaucratic policies. Hahm Chai-Hark understands the Sokdaejeon as a document establishing a new order inheriting the constitutional document Kyungukdaejeon (Hahm Chai-Hark, 2004) Proclaiming a Daejeon order demanded the comprehensive overview of all the legal codes and mores up to that time and then the appropriate application of contemporaneous changes to restore and preserve the essential aims and make them more feasible, then proclaim them anew. Indeed compared to Sookjongs publication project or the myriad other legislative procedures undertaken up until the 16th year of Youngjos reign, the publication of the Sokdaejeon in Youngjos 20th year was an unprecedented creative proclamation that brought the flow of inheritance to its peak (Kim Baekcheol, 2007). Such was the import of this Sokdaejeon, and its directions are based on three main goals, namely the abolition of cruel and unusual punishments, the improvement of prison conditions, and the protection of socially enfeebled persons in light of intentionality. Youngjo clearly started out from the argument that in a prison cell whose purpose is to keep someone locked up, no one should die. And yet we will go on to see that Youngjo killed without due process of law his own son who was ill and had no control over his actions, for no one discernable triggering reason. Through this he undermined those accomplishments he had so painstakingly set forth.
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ii. Implications of the Sokdajeons Implementation Firstly, in the Sal-ok clause of the Sokdaejeons penal code Hyung-jeon, the verifiable presence or possibility of malicious intent was clearly a very important standard for ruling a crime punishable. Therefore when an insane person killed other people while out of his mind, this was considered manslaughter rather than murder, and protocol provided a diminished sentence. Secondly, not even the King himself could be completely free from these laws. Although he had the power of legislation, and retained express right to approve of the death sentence for convicted criminals, he could not exist above the law and was to be submitted to the regulating constraints of the countrys laws. Moreover, the tradition of respecting and upholding the holy wisdom of the royal ancestors ensured that the future kings could not make adjustments to the national law of Chosun, embodied in the Daejeon, except in cases where additional laws were created by special circumstances whose conditions were specified63. This clearly means that the Daejeon system lay at the heart of the Chosun Kingdom and kings had to rule their nation from within the legal system already provided by their predecessors.
iii. The Familial Bond In analyses of the abovementioned penal code we can see that familial ties and interfamilial moral codes are brought to the fore, so that sentences are significantly reduced for illegal revenge killings involving retribution for family members, and even the shinmungo64 that was re-introduced during Youngjos rule was only allowed use in the case ones own life, the life of ones immediate family member, or the life of a master figure was
63 64
See Kim, Baekcheol, 38. Drum introduced for direct appeals to the King regarding injustices perpetrated against the people.
under extremely wrongful and pressing danger. Furthermore, among the types of crimes that were specifically considered heightened crimes requiring especially serious punishment, were included instances of manslaughter involving parents, spouses, siblings, or next of kin. The torture and murder of relatives could even be grounds for convening the Sam Sung Chu Guk65 (an interrogation of the highest degree) based on the Sokdaejeon. (Kim Baekcheol, 2010, pg.54) The dominant atmosphere of the court at the time was fixated upon the aforementioned five laws governing familial relations and their propriety and ceremony, to the extent that different factions and warring political parties split forth more often than not from a quibble over the interpretation of a line in a book on dress codes and funeral rites. The Yesong debates66, through which the Seo-in and Nam-in cemented the split, occurred when King Hyojong67 died and opinions were divided over whether his stepmother the Great Queen Regent Cho should mourn three full years and don the appropriate garments, or simply mourn one year. This was no small issue: if she were to mourn three full years, the rites explained in the book of Yea-ron that she would have considered him a legitimate firstborn son, whereas a one-year mourning period would confirm the deceased Kings status as a second-born that had dared to die before his parents did. The controversy arose from the fact that Hyojongs father king Injo had, upon the death of his firstborn, appointed his second son as crown prince even though his firstborn had had his own son in line. The Seo-in argued against the full mourning, stating that Hyojong was not a legitimate firstborn in light of the principles of primogeniture, whereas the Nam-in fought to procure full rites for the late King. When Song Si-yeol, leader of the Seo-in, wrote a venomous and denigrating elegy on the gravestone of the father of his former disciple Yoon Hyo (a Nam-in,) this cemented the split.
65 66 67
, , , . 17th King of Chosun, 16491659
Debates opened up once more when Hyojongs wife Queen Insun passed away, regarding dressing protocol for the same reasons as the first debates. Through this the Nam-in won and gained power in the court. Such was the import that a royal death and its aftermath could shoulder in the court.
iv. Necessary but Not Sufficient Thus, this was an event that cannot be fully explained or understood by any legal or moral or familial logic. Furthermore the gap between the holy law-setting King Youngjo and the illegal murderer of his own son is so difficult to reconcile that historical verdict-passing on this King and all his accomplishments may be compromised. How could this sort of event have taken place? And what does it signify that it did? The Crown Prince, allegedly sick with a debilitating mental illness that robbed him of his holy natural wits, was killed, without any legal procedures whatsoever, by the hand of his own father King Youngjo. Not only was this death completely illegal on all three levels examined, but it was also the most horrific death imaginable, much more dreadful than any cruel and unusual punishments that were in place and which Youngjo had set out to abolish. This was because Crown Prince Sado was extremely susceptible to fear and the possibility of seeing spirits. When he was a very young child he happened upon a laymans book called Ok Chu Kyung68, which was something of an instruction manual for the conjuring up of Taoist spirits, and ever since then he is reported to have never been quite the same, and especially vulnerable to thunder. (Hyekyungkung Hong, 2001, pg.45) Knowledge of Sados condition and his particular fears would have played into the cruelest perverted calculations when he was locked up to die alone in a very dark, claustrophobia-inducing rice box in the middle of a
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steaming Korean summer. Hyekyugkung Hong alludes to this particular paranoia of the crown prince: Around shinshi on the 20th torrential rains fell and thunder and lightning struck. I thought, my prince was afraid of thunder - how is he now? I could not bear to envisage his image so my heart thought of dying by refusing food, or I touched cloth and often gripped the knife. [] They say that he lasted very long and was simply there all night on the 20th. I think perhaps he must have perished during the rains. (Hyekyungkung Hong, 2001, pg.86) Such was the image conjured up so vividly by those who knew of the Crown Princes constitution and his obsessive-compulsive fears: extreme terror in the face of this punishment. It is conceivable that the peace and wellness of the royal family69 that the crown princes own birthmother Suhn-hee proposed as a pretext for requesting the death of her son could be posited as an acceptable justification, in light of the significance that the five laws and the respect and worship of ancestors wisdom held. However this does not provide the necessary and sufficient conditions which are required for the crown princes killing to be absolutely necessitated. This is because in order to necessitate the death of the crown prince, there must have existed some reason to believe beyond any doubt that the preservation of the royal line as a manifestation of the tradition of respect and worship for ancestors was more important than the life of the crown prince, and furthermore that the importance of the life of the crown prince dwindled beside the dangers the crown princes illness posed to the structural whole. If this was not the case and the very existence of the crown prince was not the problem whereas his illness and incompetence were, all the King had to do was make him well again, or depose him to make him a commoner. The fact that the Crown Prince, while in
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his official status of Crown Prince, was made to die in such a cruel and unnecessary fashion is beyond comprehension. In short, the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon was a highly convoluted, paradoxical event strange enough to break the very mores of Youngjos Tangpyung politics, the continuity of inheritance, and even Chosuns founding core of holy ancestral wisdom-upholding as had been established ever since the Kyungukdaejeon. Youngjo had every reason not to kill his son, but he did. The fact that this event occurred despite all these reasons to hinder its occurrence demands a shift in the questions to be asked: now necessity must be established; there must have been a reason Sado had to die. In this light the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon is not an unfortunate accident or a random political feud that devolved into a tragedy, but instead it is re-cast as a monumental event that cannot have occurred without much deeper underlying originating mechanisms. The problem with this identified dilemma is that all of its interpretations and alleged causes are hardly even necessary, and far from sufficient, in explaining this very unusual and in many respects inconceivable death of a monarch-to-be in the Chosun dynasty. This leads to a need to establish a different way of interpreting history.
2. THE NEED TO ESTABLISH A DIFFERENT WAY OF INTERPRETING HISTORY So far the historical interpretations have focused on what is already known of the event and then extrapolated from this. However, I have asserted that these are but surface apparitions of an underlying characteristic something yet to be identified. If this characteristic, this mechanism were to be successfully and properly identified, then the paradox of Youngjos actions of which it is difficult to make sense of in the plodding application of the detective-work of historical causality could manage to become a central feature, rather than a contingent puzzle, of the nature of this disturbing event. When I speak of this need to establish a different way of history, it is important to note that I limit the scope of this particular need specifically to the problem issuing directly from the event outlined in this paper. I do not intend to extend the application of this view to Korean historiography at large either within or outside Korea. The late Jahyun Kim Haboush identified (Kim Haboush, 2002, pg.119) with reference to Michel de Certeau, that the writing of history is an interaction that takes place between the individual historian and the regime of historical knowledge; and largely divided the study of Korean history into two regimes: one within and one outside of Korea. Regarding the one within Korea she stated that the psychic space occupied by history in this particular country is enormous, in fact leading and informing civic discourse. (Kim Haboush, 2002, pg.121) As such, it would be toeing the line of political and historical responsibility accountability of the present generation to the past if at this juncture an overly flexible, possibly unbalanced approach to history were to be proposed for the whole of Korean historiography.70
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Much caution must be exercised in applications of theory to Korean history, particularly pertaining to either
Therefore I limit for now this particular perspective to this particular question at hand. In order to re-evaluate the paradox outlined in recounted history, I introduce Giorgio Agambens paradigm of biopower in biopolitics, in which the figure of homo sacer and the sovereign interrelate through bare life. Although this was originally developed within a Western tradition, I find that it is not amiss in application to this particular incident indeed it is important to introduce the concept here. It is necessary to resort to another interpretation of history: an interpretation in which not explanation but description through theorys application can serve to explain that which initially shrank from comprehensions grasp. In addressing the paradoxical nature of this incident I have focused on the nature of sovereignty in Chosun and its relationship to the legal coda of Youngjo, in light of Sados death. A look into theories of sovereignty and sovereigntys relationship to life and law is accordingly very much in order.
3. SOVEREIGNTY, LIFE, AND LAW An overview of the western paradigm as enunciated by Agamben reveals that life and law have always been inseparable from the paradox of sovereignty identified therein. The fact that the paradox is not explained away but actually fortified and re-evaluated is what necessitates this theorys incorporation at this particular juncture. In this section therefore, I identify the nature of this sovereignty in order to judge further as to what it can attest to regarding the Terrible Incident of the 13th Day.
ancient history or times nearing/ during the modernization period. Some elements of the effects of unbalanced approaches to Korean history can be observed in the recent New Right fringe movements to re-interpret the colonial era as a period that was conducive to the development of Korean modernity. While a fair and accurate measure of history is assuredly of importance, and undoubtedly some of the overbearingly militant nationalistic strands of Korean historiography nationalistic to a xenophobic degree can be stifling stumbling blocks to the establishment of open historical dialogue, nevertheless a bias in the other direction is often just as, if not more, damaging. All too often in the case of these New Right historians a political agenda to justify the political economys status quo is disproportionately evident.
A. Sovereignty and Law In modern western political thought, sovereignty has been intimately related to law, particularly in terms of the decision and pronouncement of that which is declared exceptional or outside of the ordinary law. This has been the case ever since Hobbes, who after Machiavelli has been identified as being one of the earliest modern liberal thinkers (Strauss 1996, pg.52), stipulated that naturall lawes are like jus naturale (the right of nature that constitutes liberty in the form of self-ownership as the wielding of sovereignty) and eventually went on to determine those naturall lawes to be inseparable from civill lawes (Hobbes 1968, pp.66-134). When Walter Benjamin identified the thesis of natural law, which regards violence as a natural datum, [as] diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history, he was acknowledging that selfsame accumulated tradition that would serve as springboard for his critique (Benjamin 1978, pg.237). And when Jacques Derrida, in his essay published in the Cardozo Law Review, identified in Benjamins critique three main forms of violence law-making, law-preserving, and law-destroying (Derrida 1990, pg.981) Derrida was also attempting to re-think the arena of justice (which can only be served or decreed or negated with a foundational sovereign claim) and the role of law within it, in order to reformulate this age-old tension between sovereignty and law. When Carl Schmitt71 started the first chapter of his book Political Theology, entitled definition of sovereignty, with the words sovereign is he who decides on the exception, (Schmitt 2004, pg.5) Schmitts context considered an exception to include any kind of severe economic or political disturbance that requires the application of extraordinary
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Carl Schmitts ideas were instrumental in the conceptualization of totalitarianism not only in the context of Nationalsozialismus. In South Korea, the Park Jung Hee dictatorial rule also based itself on a controversial legalistic interpretation of this mans work.
measures because necessitas non habet legem. (Schwab, 1970, pp.7 - 42) His idea that a crisis confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception [and is] distinguishable from a juristic chaos (Schmitt 2004, xlii) would go on to establish the necessity of juristic considerations of the exception in light of the sovereign. This is the framework from which Agamben writes. For Agamben, the idea of sovereignty in terms of the exception is a puzzling and paradoxical one and it is important that it remain that way. He notes that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside in relation to the exceptional: the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way designates itself as exterior to itself by means of the suspension of the juridical orders validity by letting the juridical order, that is, withdraw from the exception and abandon it. (Agamben 1995, pg.19) Thus the self-designation through external incorporation of the internal system on the part of the sovereign forms a principle according to which sovereignty belongs to law. This principle, far from eliminating the paradox of sovereignty, even brings it to the most extreme point of its development. (Agamben, 1995, pg.30) In this way, sovereign power divides itself into constituting power and constituted power and maintains itself in relation to both, just as it identifies itself as being within the state of nature to be kept in a constant relation of ban with the state of law; in short, the nature of sovereign power is such that it constitutes itself through its very own exception a sovereign ban. (Agamben., 1995, pg.41) That sovereign ban which applies to the exception in no longer applying, (Agamben, 1995, pg.46) leaves the sovereign, the decider of the exception to a law that is fundamentally
natural, to exclude himself from the law that he himself decides upon the exceptions to.72
B. Sovereignty and Life The concept or rather, paradigm of biopolitics, which after World War II was brought to the fore of western intellectual discourse by theorists such as Arendt or Foucault in the light of concentration camps and other modern inexplicabilities, actually addresses just as recurrent themes within western political thought. Those themes are sovereignty and life. Opposing Machiavellis assertion that men enter into political society for glory and fame, Hobbes takes his departure from death and the fear of death; thanatopolitics is introduced in this way from the onset of the wests modern political thought (Strauss 1996, pg.28). Agamben notes this as well, in his Homo Sacer, by remarking on the great metaphor of the Leviathan that the absolute capacity of the subjects bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West. (Agamben 1998, pg.125). Before addressing this new politicization, Agamben goes further upstream to the Greek polis itself, the very birthplace of western philosophy, to review the figure of homo sacer. Homo sacer is a limit concept of the Roman social order that, as such, cannot be explained in a satisfying manner as long as we remain inside either the ius divinum or the ius humanum. (Agamben, 1995, pg.71) The structure of this sacredness is composed of the conjunction of two traits: the unpunishabillity of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice [...] the neque fas est eum immolari (it is not licit to sacrifice him) takes the form of an
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau also noted in chapter 7 of his Social Contract that legislation must be performed by an extraordinary man in the state. He gave the example of the ancient Greeks to illustrate his point: When Lycurgus gave laws to his homeland, he began by abdicating the throne. It was the custom of most Greek cities to entrust the establishment of their laws to foreigners [] He who frames the laws does not or should not have any legislative right. And the populace itself cannot, even if it wanted to, deprive itself of this incommunicable right, because, according to the fundamental compact, only the general will obligates private individuals.
exception, this time from the ius divinum and from every form of ritual killing. (81) In the sovereign exception, the law applied to the exceptional case in no longer applying and in withdrawing from it and the nature of homo sacer is analogous to this in that homo sacer belongs to the sacred in the form of unsacrificeability, and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed. This double exclusion and the subsequent exposure to violence marks the status of the homo sacer. (82) Strikingly, this life that may be killed but not sacrificed is the life that has been captured in [the sovereign sphere.] This leads to the possibility of analysis of an ancient practice in French monarchy: burial rites in which the Kings death is mourned twice first in a secret ceremony for the physical body, then in a more public ritual for the wax effigy of the King. (Agamben, 1998, pp.92-93) This Agamben characterizes as a manifestation of the divide, conjoined in the figure of the living King, between the sovereign body and the sacred body (91). He finds such ceremonies to implicate a demarcation point for the divide between the kings political body and the mortal body once the life has left and the king has died: The kings political body [which cannot be seen or touched, exalts the mortal body to which it is joined] cannot simply represent the continuity of sovereign power. The kings body must also and above all represent the very excess of the emperors sacred life, which is [] passed on to the designated successor. (Agamben, 1998, pg.101) Finally, Agamben goes on to join the ideas of the exception, the homo sacer, and the sovereign: It does not matter, from our perspective, that the killing of homo sacer can be considered as less than homicide, and the killing of the sovereign as more than
homicide; what is essential is that in neither case does the killing of a man constitute an offense of homicide. [] sacred life may be killed by anyone without committing homicide, but never submitted to sanctioned forms of execution. (Agamben, 1998, pg.103) Ultimately exclusion from the ordinary course of societal or legal affairs binds homo sacer and the sovereign in a structure that also can be seen to incorporate the werewolf, the loup garou, as a banished figure. And that which has been banned has been delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. (110) That, Agamben argues, is the paradox on which is centered key paradigm running through western structures of politicization the very bare life (or sacred life) that, in the relation of ban, constitutes the immediate referent of sovereignty. (112).
4. SOVEREIGNTY, LIFE, AND LAW AS MANIFEST IN YOUNGJOS CHOSUN A. Youngjo the sovereign law-giver and the people as raw souls Youngjo led and fostered the Tangpyung political situation throughout his rule by constantly re-defining the nature of his Kingship. He also killed his son, which act flew in the face of every rationale behind the then-400-year kingdom itself including his own Sokdaejeons significance. But then Youngjo uses in the preface of the Sokdaejeon many expressions that belie a radical shift in the way he thinks of the people it is unprecedented and alien to conventional Confucian thought. Furthermore he goes on to secure the changes he has wrought in his view of the people, as well as his scholarly convictions, by putting them to policy in the Sokdaejeon. His seemingly paradoxical behavior is surprisingly
reminiscent of situations dealt with in Western discussions of sovereignty, and particularly in the relatively recent discourse on biopolitics wherein the banishment from society inherent in bare life and the self-banishment of the sovereign as well as the legislative process are intimately linked. Here it is possible to draw on the concept of sovereignty as Carl Schmitt defined it in order to re-evaluate the nature of Youngjos sovereignty. For Schmitt, sovereign is he who can lawfully suspend the law. For Agamben, the ban, the banishment presupposes a certain fundamental mirror image between the banisher, or the laws suspender, and the banished. In short, the right to banish law from its own realm is sovereignty that has pushed its legalistic traits to the full. Thus it can be established that while the realm of law and the realm of the sovereign cannot be shared, the two are in a reciprocally defining and dependent relationship with each other. At this juncture we must now focus on the relationship between Crown Prince Sado and his father Youngjo in order to see how Kingship and Sovereignty were manifest in the two men. Kim Sung-Yoon points out that after the Eul-hae Ok-sa incident of Youngjo year 31, the crown princes position started becoming compromised because of conflict between the Dong-in (East faction) and Nam-in (South faction), both of the No-ron party. This argument leads to the idea that it is indeed possible to view the Im-oh-Hwa-Byeon on the same spectrum as the Shin-im Sa-hwa73 : as a political accident. However, first of all, the reason that we can consider aspects directly related to the identity of the sovereign individual of the king as weighing in far more significantly and pertaining to the much deeper originating mechanism is because we have seen the kings teaching of the Zhou rye and what that signifies. As we have seen earlier, Youngjo was already thinking of Crown Prince Sado as his heir and was sharing his own kingly power almost evenly with his son from the very
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, : A major factional rift.
roots. Kim Sung-Yoon also notes that neither Youngjo nor the crown prince created any discord whatsoever insofar as the Tangpyung politics were concerned, and in fact worked quite excellently together the dynamic, charismatic father and the thoughtful, considerate son complementing each other in policy creation and administration alike. The central power of the royal court was composed of Wonryang and Youngjo: in terms of ownership of power it was not divided in any way. Therefore it could be stated, without too many misgivings, that Youngjo and Wonryang together could be seen as having formed the center of sovereignty as a team of sorts. Secondly, it is also possible to say that this characterization of Youngjo can be recast in terms of the equal owners and womb-sharer brothers of the King: the raw souls or saeng-ryeung74 mentioned in the preface of the Sokdaejeon the everyday, common people, the min75. Traditionally the Ae-min ideology76 (the idea that a King must love his people) in Confucian thought was bound tightly to the rigorous worldview that saw hierarchy as inherent part of the natural human order could liken the difference between Yangban classes and lower classes to the difference between rocks and grains of sand. (Cho Sung-Eul, 2004, pg.230). But in the case of Youngjo this was not merely a calculating or demeaning position vis--vis the King and his people. It did not stop at pity but saw the King as equaling the people (strikingly, the bureaucrats are left out of the picture, and the link is forged directly from King to people as raw souls and flesh-and-blood brothers.) Here the idea of Hwang Keuk Jeuk Min Keuk77 (literally, the extreme of the King equalling the extreme of the people) is based directly on the fact that the sky for the lord king is the people, but the sky
74 75 76 77
, , , ,
for the people is food to eat for survival: that the continuation of life naturally is even the Kings ultimatum. Fascinatingly this is again reminiscent of Agambens biopolitics. For Agamben bare life itself, we saw, was only applicable to the banished and the king, the homo sacer; the flow of western history was then understood as a process in which such life is regulated and categorized and publicized and at least from the eyes of society, wiped out methodically. In this light Youngjo, the king who banished his very son from the realm of life itself, when his son was a crucial part of royal power itself, might even be re-evaluated as a manifestation of this particular brand of self-aware sovereign power. The political system and the legal system that reveal all raw souled common people to be the living brethren of the King, a large family, was then created by the sovereign Youngjos self-proclamation born in tragedy of himself as raw life itself.
B. Sado, Great King of the Rice Box But the concurrence does not stop at Youngjo in fact it splits off and finds completion in the figure of the Crown Prince Sado. Sado died alone, shut off from society, locked up but it was of his own volition, albeit a forced volition, that he walked into this box of eternal banishment. His spirit lives on more powerful than any other King was in life in a remarkable amplified sanctification of the sacratio that was invested in him, even after and somehow perhaps precisely because his sovereignty and his bare life were stripped from him. Here it is elemental to note that sovereignty and sacredness in relation to bare life and exception were conjoined completely in the figures of both Youngjo and Sado respectively. Sado was ultimately killed in a situation so extralegal and so outside, indeed, of
anything nearing an inclusive structure of justification that it formed a paradox. Through this paradox, we have seen, has been revealed the true nature of what exactly was invested in both father and son. Both Youngjo and Sado, then, were facilitators, through their actions, of that separation: each by his own hand fulfilled the extreme realization of that which has been identified as underlying the nature of the sovereign person.
C. A resolution, or just the beginning Youngjo, in his preface to the Sokdaejeon and in his proclamations, created a new space of political conceptualization a pocket of development in which his sovereign self and his people found a certain elemental unity in the fact of bare life. For Sado also, relegated to his complete banishment, confined to nothing but his life which was there for the wasting away, two worlds entirely his own sprung forth in the situation of his death: the first world being spiritual, omnipotent, and the other world, isolation relegation to nothing but his own nature eventually, death. And yet it would easily be agreed that these were very self-contained and perfect but unsustainable dead-ends for both to enter into. Sado, obviously, died, and although once one enters death that state is surely sustained, from the perspective of life death is effectively an ultimate ending. Youngjo lost his son, whom he mourned and regretted the loss of, to that ending. And eventually the weakening of monarchical power that this incident ushered in created a political situation in which Jungjo, the son of Sado and grandson of Youngjo, could not effectively apply his reform policy plans: although adopted nominally under the first son of Youngjo (Hyojang Seja, who died at a very young age), Jungjo identified himself during his reign as the son of Jangheun Seja, the Crown Prince whose name was to be restored in
full pomp and grandeur during the Hwasung Haeng-haeng78. This created problems of legitimacy that went on to arguably weaken the effect of the next, last kings of Chosun this set the backdrop for the opening of the ports in 1876, with the Kanghwa Treaty.
5. CONCLUSION The late Jahyun Kim Haboush summed up this tragedy in words more eloquent and measured than I could have hoped to employ: Sados regency ended in a sealed rice chest thirteen years after it began. [] This was the only public execution of an heir apparent by a reigning father in Yi history. Sados tragedy encapsulates the contradictions of Youngjo and his reign: Youngjo, one of the greatest kings, resorted to filicide, of which no other Yi king was guilty; he was obsessed with rule by virtue, yet violated the basic tenets of Confucian humanism; he insisted on being a father to his people, yet killed his own son; he struggled to silence suspicions of fraternal regicide, yet turned irrevocably to filicide; and, though valiantly dedicated to a policy to end bloody purges, he snuffed out the life of his own son Sado, groomed from birth to fulfill a dynastic mission, but who died to safeguard that selfsame mission. (Kim Haboush 2001, pg.167) At the onset I identified and established the puzzle of this selfsame paradox in history. I then attempted to recast the puzzle so that the problem hinged on the paradox itself, by introducing concepts from relatively removed traditions of thought. The results that were to be had from this overture were a certain form of insight, a juridico-political possibility of re-visualizing the character of sovereignty in the Chosun of Youngjo and Sado.
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Thus it seems that the mystery of the paradox between Youngjos most prized and most tragic acts during his reign has come to one kind of end. Up until now the research surrounding Crown Prince Sado was almost without exception centered on the circumstantially contingent and politically causal explanations. There surely are results that can only be got from such a direction of inquiry, but in order to open a new and much more potentially comprehensive insight into the nature of the time, the publication of Sokdaejeon which Youngjo himself considered his own most honorable accomplishment, the nature of Youngjos politics and the character of sovereignty in Chosun a century and a half before the ports were opened, a widening of the interpretive horizon is indispensable. In light of Crown Prince Sados death and the significance of the Sokdaejeons publication, perhaps the biopolitical interpretation can play that widening role.
6. LIMITATIONS AND PROPOSALS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH This paper is not without its limitations, the dilemmas of which I propose future research may find itself better equipped to resolve. In the process of being written this paper encountered numerous setbacks, chief among which was the surprisingly hard initial shock of diving from one self-contained epistemological culture to another and then to yet another. Given the time constraint of one semester, constant adjustment and re-adjustment to the multitudinous nuances and methodologies took too much time and I was instead forced to find for myself a plodding, slightly confused pace of research and writing that I fear may not yet seem to settle sufficiently into the context of either of the existing knowledge communities. While writing in this fashion I found myself drawn to some recurrent patterns in each of those separated traditions. As a proposal for future research I would suggest, for
example, a more complete comparison of the ancient French burial rites and the Korean rituals for the dead; also an investigation into whether the concepts of Li and Ki could be construed as being analogous to law and life in the Western traditions of political thought. Also, in the course of my research I would have found useful a more complete overview of the key dichotomies that characterize our understanding of the Chosun dynasty that are brought into play specifically in this incident the yield of my search was unsatisfactory. My section entitled A resolution, or just the beginning is lamentably brief, because it would take another book to thoroughly and responsibly trace the possible repercussions in the century leading up to that so-called rupture of modernity in this light. A more overarching look at how this led into the Jungjo period would be an issue of much interest. In addition I will identify two potentially fatal overtures on the part of this thesis, and attempt best I can to explain them. As this is a thesis limited in scope and allotted time that cannot and does not lend itself to being a full biography, I limited my object of analysis to the text of two controversial primary records specifically chronicling the single, focused event of the Crown Princes death. I then somewhat forcedly employed theory as a divining rod to scrutinize and explain the discrepancies between that event and many prevailing norms of the time - putting especial weight on an interpretation of Youngjos code of law. As a result I have not been able to give as thorough and well documented an account of the entire historical situation as Kim SungYoon or Jahyun Kim Haboush have. Although I have attempted to refer back to the incident and locate the pertinent passages as best I could, I have not been able to look through all the day-to-day record tomes of official royal history that have been identified by the abovementioned academics as being relevant. Although I acknowledge the limitations of this, I would also like to point to the
problem of context-dependency79 in history and in doing so identify a second potential role for the porous fiber of this thesis to play. That role would be the insertion of yet another space of possibility between history-as-event and history-as-account: a space of open, pliable, even potentially fantastical dialogue, not just within its self-referential self, but with other disciplines and modes of narration. If carried out with the requisite rigor and honesty, the history obtained through this possibility could weed out the atrocious practices of evidence fabrication, malicious revisionism, or even propagandizing politics. It would be anything short of a direct lie - indeed it couldnt even be deemed an established truth, and would humbly recognize in itself merely a potential explanation, because it would have records and the referent discipline to substantiate its claims and there are many records (albeit of different levels of reliability but those levels of reliability, too, can be determined by the referent discipline!) and just as many referent disciplines available to historians. I also realize that this thesis centers on the application of a theory originally developed in a Western political context to arguably fallible records of a historical event. This was a dangerous and potentially irresponsible strategy, but nevertheless the insights gleaned were not so dismissible.
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See Michael Stanford, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p.91 for a succinct formulation of this problem. The idea is that the establishment of causality presupposes a certain subjective approach, on the part of the historian, to the selecting of a context deemed to have the most explanatory power.
WORKS CITED
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.) Stanford, California: Stanford University Press (Original work published 1995). Benjamin, W. (1978). Critique of Violence (P. Demetz, Trans.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (Original work published 1955, Suhrkamp Verlag) Derrida, J. (1990). Force de loi: Le "fondement mystique de l'autorite", 11 Cardozo Law Review 919-1045 (Republished: Paris 1994) Foucault, M. (1995). Dicipline and punish (A. Sheridan, Trans.) (2nd ed.). Studies in Critical Theory. New York: Vintage Books (Original work published 1978). Haboush, Ja Hyun Kim. (2001) The Confucian Kingship in Korea: Youngjo and the politics of Sagacity. New York, Columbia University Press Haboush, Jahyun Kim. (2002) ? , [On Historiography of Korea: Methodologies and Strategies], Haboush, Jahyun Kim. (1999) Culture and the state in late chosun korea, Harvard-Hallym Series on Korean Studies, Harvard University Asia Center Hobbes, Thomas. (1968) Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. ed. C.B. Macpherson. Pelican Classics (Original work published 1651) Schmitt, Carl. (2004) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. (George D. Schwab, Trans.) University of Chicago Press (Original publication: 1922, 2nd edn. 1934)
Schmitt, Carl. (1996) The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. (George D. Schwab & Erna Hilfstein, Trans.) Greenwood Press (Original publication: 1938.) Strauss, Leo. (1996) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis. University of Chicago Press Kang, Shin-Yeop. (2001) [Study of Late Chosun dynasty Soron], Kim, Baek-Cheol. (2005) '' [The Ideology of Tangpyung Politics in Late Chosun Youngjo Period and Zhou
Rye]52, Kim, Baek-Cheol. (2010) [Late Chosun Youngjo periods Tangpyung politics] Kim, Baek-Cheol. (2007) - [Reassessment of the place of late Chosun Youngjo periods Sokdaejeon focusing on the publication of the penal code]194, Kim, Baek-Cheol. (2007) ' [Late Chosun Youngjo Period changes in conceptions of the common people and a Republic]138, Kim, Baek-Cheol. (2008) [Late Chosun Youngjo period organization of legal codes and publication of
Sokdaejeon], 68,
Kim, Sung-Yoon. (2002) - [Political circumstances towards the middle of Youngjos period and the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon focusing on a reassessment of the causes of the Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon] 43,
Kwon, Yeon-Woong. (1989) [Kyung-yeon in Chosun Youngjo period]17, Park, Kwang-Yong. (2000) [The land of Youngjo and Jungjo] Park, Hyun-Mo. (1991) [Jungjo, Politician] , , 69-99 Lee, Deuk-Il. (1998) : [The Confession of Sado-Seja: What happened during those eight days] Lee, Beum-Jik (2007) , [Idea and Passion: the History of the Chosun Dynasty] Lee, Sung-Mu. (2000) 2 : ~ [A history of Chosun Dynasty Political Faction Disputes, book 2 Tangpyung and Sedo Politics: Sukjong ~ Kojong] Yu, Mi-Rim. (2002) [Political Thought in Late Chosun Dynasty] Cho, Sung-Eul (2004) [Conditions of the Dispersion of Sungruhak in Late Chosun Period] , ,
5 2004.12 pp. 51-85 Hahm, Chai-Hark. (2004) [Is the Kyungkukdaejeon the Constitution of Chosun]7-2, Hyekyungkung Hong. (2001) [Hanjung Manlok] Lee, Sun-Hyung trans.,
WORKS REFERENCED
Agamben, G. (1993). Infancy and History (L. Heron, Trans.) London: Verso (Original work published 1978). Kim, Jun-Suk. (2003) [Study of History of Late Chosun Political Thought], 32 Moon, Hyung-Jin. (2004) significance of the of and
[Jurisprudential
publication
]34,
Oh, Yeoung-Kyo ed. (2005) [Systemic Political change in late Chosun and the Sokdaejeon] Yeon, Jung-Yeol. (1988) [A case study on the Sokdaejeon and the Daejeontongpyun]12-1, 12 , Yeon, Jung-Yeol. (1994) [History of Korean Jurisprudence] [] : 1994 Jung, Ho-Houn (2005) [Logic and Character of Publication of Youngjo Period Sokdaejeon] 50, 2010. 6 Cho, Ji-Man (2007) , [Publication of Sokdaejeon, Penal law of Chosun period] [Daemyungryul and Kukjeon],
APPENDIX A: YOUNGJO SILLOK
The records of Youngjo Sillok Book 99, or Youngjo Year 38, fifth month, 13th day (Eulhae) (a) summarize the events leading up from the birth of the crown prince, his illness and psychotic fits, Youngjos disapproval, Na Kyung Uhns report about the crown princes incompetence, and the rumors that started from within; (b)/(d) record the events of the day on which the crown prince was deposed; (c)/(e) record the doing away with of the crown princes cohorts; and (f) relate the events leading directly up to the imprisonment and death of the crown prince:80
The Crown Prince was put to death at the Wol-dae of the Simin-dang. The King went forth to Changduk Palace and deposed the crown prince to become a commoner, then locked him up severely within.
(a) At first Prince Hyo-jang died, and the King for a long time had no heirs, but then the crown prince was born. His letters were excellent, so the King loved him very much, but after the age of 10 he slowly lost diligence in his studies, and ever since he started delegating for the King he was struck ill and lost his original good temperament. At first because it was not so horrible the lieges and people all wished for him to recover. By Jungchook year and Mooin year the symptoms of the disease worsened so that when he threw fits he killed the women and servants of the court, and then every now and then would think
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As I found great discrepancies among even the very few English translations of the text of the Memoirs of Hyekyungkung although the most reliable by far is by the late Jahyun Kim Haboush, who passed away in 2010 I have attempted, for the sake of consistency within this thesis, after my crude fashion, to give my own translation of the relevant chronicles. I have followed the Revised Romanization of Korean system; where mistakes occur, the Hangul word must be assumed correct.
back on his doings and regret them. When the King continuously and earnestly reproached him with severe commands, the crown prince grew doubtful and worsened in his illness. When the King moved to Kyunghee palace the two palaces were blocked between each other, and when the crown prince did away with the customary visits that should have taken place three times a day, instead playing without discipline or propriety with servants and ladies, this was not in line with the Kings intentions but because there was no other heir the King always worried for his nations future. Once after Na Kyung Un raised a protestation the King determined to depose him but could not bring it up, and then suddenly rumors arose from within that surprised the heart of the King.
(b) When the King had finished his performance of the rites, and the crown prince finished bowing down four times to the North in the middle of the court, the King suddenly clapped his hands and decreed, Have all the lieges also heard the words of the spirit? Queen Jungsung truly said to me, there is revolt in between breaths. Then the King ordered his own personal guard to firmly block all doors on four or five levels, then made the artillery guards line up and protect him while they opened their swords in the direction of the walls of the palace. He blocked the door of the main palace, blew his horn to gather soldiers about him, and prevented the passage of people [] The King ordered the crown prince to prostrate himself on the ground and remove his crown, put his head to the ground with his bare feet, and then with a persisting demand that one could not bear to hear he urged the crown prince to take his own life, and blood came forth from the crown princes hanging head.
(c) Shinmango Jaeuijung Hong Bong Han [father-in-law of Crown Prince], Panbusa Chung Hwi Ryang, Doseungji Lee Yi Jang, Seoungji Han Gwang Jo all came in but could not bring themselves to speak before the King. The King ordered the four Daeshin and Han Gwang Jo to be removed from their offices and they all retired. When the grandson of the King came in and, taking off his crown and royal frock to prostrate himself also behind the crown prince, the King took the child up into his arms and bore him away to Sigangwon, ordering the Kim Sung Eung family to guard him so that he could not enter anymore.
(d) When the King took up his sword and delivered several consecutive decrees that one could not bear to hear that urged the self-destruction of the East-Palace Prince, the Crown Prince did attempt to kill himself but many lieges from the Choonbang restrained him. The King went on to give the decree that he would depose and make a commoner of him.
(e) At this time Shinman and Hong Bong Han and Chung Hwi Ryang came back inside but could not bring themselves to dare speak, and many lieges also could not dare to speak amongst themselves. When the King ordered the personal guard to expel many lieges of the Choonbang, Hanlim Lim Duck Jeh alone firmly prostrated himself and refused to rise, whereupon the King firmly declared, The Crown Prince is no more, so how is there a Sagwan [position of writing first draft of official court history]? and forced people to drag him outside. At this the crown prince gripped a corner of Lim Duck Jehs cloak and
crying loudly followed him outside and said, If you too leave me, then who am I to depend upon? Then the crown prince left the Junmoon and asked many members of the Choonbang what he should do. Sasuh Lim Sung spoke, There is nothing for it but to go inside again and wait for the Disposal at which the crown prince crying went back inside and prostrating himself begged and begged to be given a chance to completely renew himself for the better.
(f) The Kings proclamations became increasingly severe and he referred to what Youngbin had spoken of to him. Now Youngbin was the very birthmother of the crown prince, and was the selfsame person who had secretly spoken up to the King against the crown prince. When Doseungji Lee Yi Jang said, Is Your Highness seeking to shake the foundations of the nation through some words by one woman deep within the palace? the King was infuriated and ordered a quick straightening of the penal code, but presently ceased this order. Finally he ordered that the Crown Prince be locked up deeply within, when the Kings grandson frantically entered. The King ordered that the Bingung [wife of the crown prince], the Kings eldest grandson, and other royal progeny be sent to Jaeuijung Hong Bong Hans residence, and at this time the night was already half over. At this the King issued a horrible decree that was to be exhibited both within and without the court, but the Sagwan refused to dare to write down this decree.
APPENDIX B: HANJUNGLOK
When the younger sovereign [, literally the smaller eldest reverence, referring to the crown prince] had exited, the angered voice of the greater sovereign [, literally the elder and most great reverence, referring to King Youngjo] was heard. As the Hwiryungjeun and the Ducksunghap was not far away I sent a person to go beneath the walls. The crown prince is already lying on the ground having taken off his royal garments. At this I knew it was the great Disposal and my heart seemed to crumble and break. Being there was meaningless so I came to the place where the royal grandson was, and we clung to each other and did not know what to do. Around Shinsi [3 pm or 5 pm] a serving vassal came in and said, The rice-containing box is to be brought out from the Batsojubang. [] I passed Soongmoondang to go to the Geunbokmoon leading to the Hwiryungjeon. I could not see anything and I could only hear the sound of the King thumping his sword and the sound of the Crown Prince speaking. Father! Father! I have done wrong. I will now do everything as you tell me to. I will read books, and listen to everything you say, so please do not do this. [] With your courageous strength and healthy air, oh why did you not simply refuse to enter that box, even if Father did say Go into the box! At first you tried so hard to jump out and then finally you could fight no longer and you reached this situation why have the heavens ordained this? (Hyekyungkung Hong, 2001, pg.80)
APPENDIX C: GLOSSARY OF TERMS
, : Youngjo , : Sado/ Crown Prince Sado , : Im-Oh-Hwa-Byeon 13 : Terrible Incident of the 13th Day , : Jang-Heun Seja : Great King of the Rice Box , : No-Ron , : Tangpyung Politics , : Sokdaejeon , : Zhou-rye , : Kyungkukdaejeon , : Myung-bun (rationalization) , : Hwang-keuk , : Min-keuk , : Chaek-bong , : Wonryang , : Gun-Sa , : Sung-wang , : Sung-hak , : Sadaebu
, : Chosun Jujahak , : Ka-rye , : Oh-rye , : Twegye Yi Hwang , : Li , : Ki , : Sungrihak , : Young-nam hakpa , : Nam-in , , Yulgok Yi Yi , : Kiho hakpa , : So-ron , : Gong-ron , : Bung-dang , : Song Si-Yeol : Sa-mun Nan-jeok (unorthodox cult) : Kyung-yeon , : Mun-jip : The Royal Diaries of the Secretariat , : Jungjo , : Youngjo Sillok , : Hanjunglok
, : historian , : We-cheok (the maternal line of familial power, the force behind Queens and powerful concubines in the Chosun dynasty) , : penal code , : Mun-mul-je-do , : Daejeon , : Sam Sung Chu Guk , : Yesong Debates , : Hyojong , : Ok Chu Kyung : Peace and wellness of the royal family , : Shin-Im-Sa-Hwa (a major factional rift.) , : Saeung-ryung (raw souls) , : Common people , : Ae-min ideology , : Hwang-geuk-jeuk-min-geuk , : Hwa-sung Haeng-Haeng

Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjo&#39;s Chosun

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BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGNTY IN YOUNGJOS CHOSUN 1

Yongkyung Chung Underwood International College Yonsei University

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[Signature] ___________________________ Thesis Advisor: Anthony C. Adler

Underwood International College Yonsei University June 2011

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B. Problematic: an Inexplicable Historical Event.....................21 i. ii. iii. iv. 2. 3.

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, : a political party opposing the Soron (, ) , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ,

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See Youngjo Sillok qtd., Kim Baekcheol, 2010. ,

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, , , . 17th King of Chosun, 16491659

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, : A major factional rift.

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APPENDIX A: YOUNGJO SILLOK

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Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjo's Chosun

Bare Life and Sovereignty in Youngjo's Chosun