ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Convenience Store Human is a novel that explores the reality of ‘convenience store-human’, an inseparable existence from convenience stores, the signature space of modern society. It is the story of Keiko Furukura, who was alienated and disgusted from the community because it was impossible to empathize and communicate with others. The novel represents in a surprising way the new identity that her life, which fluctuates after a man’s intervention, has struggled to achieve. The new identity reproduced through the physical, material, and ontological entanglement of convenience stores and Furukura is also read as preempting a post-human identity in the near future. Therefore, Convenience Store Human is also a narrative of self-approval and struggle for recognition that Furukura constructs a convenience store-human identity. This paper first analyzed the disgust patterns that Furukura faced in two aspects: class/gender and inability to empathize. Next, the problem of ‘uncanny feeling’ closely related to disgust affect and new identity was investigated using the theory of ‘uncanny valley’ of robotics engineer Masahiro Mori. Finally, the possibility of thinking about the problem of minority disgust through the new identity of ‘robot-human’ was sought based on Karen Barad’s argument for new materialism. The disgust pattern surrounding the novel is not unilinear. For Furukura, the paradox that convenience store labor, which is the basis of identity, is a subject of discriminatory myths and self-disgust against non-regular workers reveals that the magnetic field of disgust is very layered. The ‘uncanny valley’ theory, which states that subtle differences that are similar to each other rather than just differences, that is, an ambiguous identity, can cause more uncanny feeling and act as a disgusting affect, is also very suggestive for thinking about disgust for Furukura. By reflecting on the meaning of the unexpected influence of the human observer in the quantum mechanics experiment, Karen Barad argued that all beings, including humans and objects, do not exist independently and that objects and subjects are intricately intertwined. It inspires us to identify new identities, ‘convenience store-human’. Barad’s position that even if she aims for post-anthropocentrism, she cannot be completely free from the existence condition of “human” is ethical in that she acknowledges the ontological limitations of human subjects. For Furukura, who cannot be identified with social norms and common sense due to his inability to empathize by birth, convenience stores are inseparable, but she knows that this is not self-evident or eternal. This would be the ethics-existence-epistemology of the new identity ‘convenience store-human’, in which existence and knowledge, ethics and knowledge become one. Furukura’s ethics, which can only find meaning when connected to a convenience store, are those that divide and penetrate human and non-human existence.

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