Jaewoong Shin

I am generally interested in the fields related to theories and politics of emancipatory transition production, particularly, in-between (post) marxism and (lacanian) psychoanalysis.

Working title

The Purloined Letters for Transitional Analysis: Towards a Theory and Politics of Emancipatory Production

Thesis works

This research explores, via the Lacaninan framework, the problems of theory, method and strategy that make the production of emancipatory transition and transformation possible and the ideological circle’s subsumption of this impossible. In the appendix of Reading Capital, Althusser suggests the problem of the theory of transition from one mode of social production to another as the most urgent problem in research in Marxism. This could sound like an outdated problem because it was posed so long ago, as it were, before the collapse of so-called real socialism and the Berlin Wall crashed down with brick dust. And yet, I think which is rather why this problem would be crucially one of the inevitable and urgent problems in emancipatory politics; there is a need for the consideration of why this question was raised. This is because, without the theory and question of emancipatory transition production, the practical-critical activities would risk and be still embedded in the reproduction of the existing dominant social structure by the ideological circle’s subsumption. In this case, “it has made of the proletariat not the gravedigger, but the savior of capitalism” (Castoriadis). For this reason, how and why it is possible to produce emancipatory transition and transformation without being limited to the ideological mise-en-abîme structure’s subsumption could still be a horizon which constitutes contemporary tasks of emancipatory politics.

In this thesis, these problems are unfolded across four areas split as two fields: the theoretical formation (e.g. the question of ‘theoretical’ ‘mode of production’), the social formation, the subject formation and the political formation. And, two fields are, as it were, the emancipatory theory of history of social formation and that of history of theoretical formation entangled within the former problem. This process aims to unwittingly reconstitute Althusser’s renewal of Marxism via ‘symptomatic reading’, examining the theoretical practices of post/marxists and deconstructive inheritances. I hope this textual work could, perhaps, make the puppet’s hands move together and re-write certain letters: the purloined letters for transitional analysis and emancipatory production.

Shin, J. (Work in Progress) The Purloined Letters for Transitional Analysis: Towards a Theory and Politics of Emancipatory Production, PhD. University of Brighton

Shin, J. (2014) The Lacanian Form: The Topological Possibility of Political Transformation, MA. Kingston University London.

Shin, J. (2010) The Place of Question, Kyung Hee Column, Khuplaza.