Postcolonial Melancholia and Nihilism against Nihilism: An Existential-Analytic of Post-Korean War Literature (1950s—1960s)

This paper develops an existential-analytic approach to postcolonial melancholia found in 1950s—1960s Korean literature, engaging with Walter Benjamin’s organized pessimism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Focusing on Obaltan (Beom-seon Lee), The Square (Choe Inhun), and A Respite (Oh Sangwon)—works shaped by the memory of Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953)—this study contends that postcolonial melancholia, with its theologico-political and ontological-ethical valence, is clarified when interpreted through a framework integrating organized pessimism and nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, I theorize postcolonial melancholia as an existential attunement—manifested as grief—toward a world wherein the hope for redemption is grieved over as a loss. This melancholia confronts nothingness, revealing the absence of moral grounding in postcolonial liberation. Reading 1950s—1960s Korean literature through Nietzsche’s nihilism and Benjamin’s pessimism illustrates this condition, necessitating that theologies of postcolonial existence center their discourse on the courage to be and to endure when romanticized notions of redemption appear nebulous and meaningless, and thus undesirable.