Mobility Biopolitics and the Aquarium as a Paradigm of Political Space

Abstract

This paper examines Namcheon Kim’s novel The Aquarium of Love and, using Japanese colonialism as an example, identifies the aquarium as a paradigm of political space in terms of the right to mobility. It pays special attention to mobility biopolitics which a colonial biopower imposes upon the colonized lives by managing their mobilities, redefining the threshold in life. In the novel, Kim describes colonial Korea as a mobile society composed of citizens with the right to mobility and non-citizens without it, and as a colonial-political space in which a colonial biopower excludes (probably) threatening mobilities from society for the maintenance of the colonial regime. In the colonial-political mobile space, non-citizens, including the poor and the threats, are identified as lives devoid of value. At the same time, by utilizing an aquarium as a paradigm of political space, Kim characterizes citizens in the colonial society as fish in an aquarium, who (un)consciously practice “sheer political thoughtlessness,” restricting their movements within “animal reaction and fulfillment of functions.” Thus, as the colonized, citizens and non-citizens are homogenized equally as the bare life deprived of political rights, that is, the sacred life. Thus, the aquarium discloses the colonial space’s insubstantiality originating from the categorical exclusion of political subjects, which then encourages the politics of “more than” to seek the decolonized-humanized formation of society.