The Salimist: A Comparative Study of the Postmodern Feminine (and perhaps Feminist) Subject beyond Liberal Humanism.

In Korean, salim has two different meanings. While it commonly means household chores, it literally means life-giving or life-sustaining. Ji-Ha Kim is the first to use it in the latter sense and establish it as an ecological concept, recognizing that salim and women have been marginalized and arguing that they should be reevaluated and restored. Since then, salim has been developed into an ecofeminist theological concept by scholars such as Hyun-Kyung Chung and Jea Oh.

Confucian teachings, deeply rooted in Korean culture, rigidly divided space into inner and outer ones—nei 內 and wai外, assigning appropriate spaces for men and women, respectively. While wai is considered the only space for self-fulfillment, nei is often viewed as a space of self-loss. No wonder women have desperately demanded social mobility. For women under patriarchy, freedom has meant liberation from nei and salim, as well as gaining equal rights and opportunities with men in wai. However, as both men and women in our society fiercely compete for self-actualization in wai, they have unwittingly adopted the liberal humanist model of humanity as the sole paradigm of subjectivity.

Feminists like de Beauvoir embraced the self-defining (masculine and transcendent) subject as the only “authentic” one. The feminine and immanent subject becomes “an absolute evil.” Now, each subject—men and women—must identify itself as a project to define itself, that is, to enlarge its own freedom; that is the only raison d'être, and there is “no other justification” for existence. The winner-take-all recognition struggle is legitimized: when freedoms collide, there is no reason why either party should yield since to yield is “a fall” and “a moral fault.” This conception of humanity underpins not only liberal capitalism and the legal system that upholds it but also mainstream feminist discourse.

Before restoring salim’s intrinsic value and reinventing its ontological meanings to propose it as a postmodern feminine subjectivity–the salimist, we need to critically analyze the ontological and epistemological mechanisms through which modern liberal humanism constructs the human subject exclusively in terms of an infinite expansion of individual freedom.

After a stage of dwelling in intimacy with the surrounding world–a phase sometimes described as the Garden of Eden or infantile narcissism–self-awareness emerges. It reconstructs the world through differentiation, establishing itself as a subject that stands apart from and contemplates the world. The experience of separation from our primordial intimacy planted in our psyche both a nostalgia for the origins and a fear and desire that could only be temporarily alleviated by either repressing it deep within the unconscious or laying it bare before the illuminating gaze of the thinking mind. Hence, the dominant Western thought tradition, which Levinas called “phenomenology of light.”

Light, logos, independence, activity, spirituality, and transcendence have been exalted, whereas darkness, eros, relationality, receptivity, materiality, and immanence have been devalued and subjected to conquest. It is hardly surprising the former has been associated with the masculine and the latter with the feminine. The liberal humanist conception of the human epitomizes the Western, masculine, autonomous, Cartesian cogito. Independent of its relationality, it must bear both the glory and responsibility deemed to belong solely to itself.

Byung-Chul Han designates the liberal humanist subject as the achievement subject. Whereas the premodern subject was driven by “should,” it is propelled by “can,” rooted in the notion of unlimited freedom. Nations and individuals—especially the US and Americans—readily limit the freedoms of others in order to expand their own. Liberal humanism always condones this logic of power.

Through a comparative study of Laozi’s concept of “the female” and Deleuze’s concept of “becoming-woman,” we will propose a postmodern feminine subjectivity as an alternative. Throughout the Daodejing, Laozi uses the metaphors of water and female to describe the Dao. Their key characteristic is the tendency to flow downward, avoiding coercion and contention while receiving and benefiting all things. Laozi paradoxically asserts they embody the highest good and are closest to the Dao. He calls us to “play the role of the female.”

Laozi’s notion of the female can be formulated as a postmodern feminine subject, in stark opposition to the Cartesian masculine subject, which seeks to establish its rigid boundaries. Notably, Deleuze adds a feminine (and perhaps feminist) perspective to our understanding of subjectivity by conceptualizing the postmodern subject as “becoming-woman.”

For the postmodern subject, the boundaries between self and world, self and other, are blurred, making self fluid. It is not a stable entity that always remains the same but a liquid subject constantly transforming into new arrangements. Its boundaries are so porous that it allows the world and the other to in-fluence its identity by allowing their in-flux into its territory. Deleuzian “molecular” subject is not coagulated or centralized into a solid entity but diffused, pluralized, and renewed from moment to moment. If the subject of liberal humanism is one of “being-able,” then our alternative feminine subject embodies what Han calls “being-able-not-to-be-able,” which corresponds to the Daoist concept of wuwei (effortless action or non-action), that is, the feminine mode of being.

A comparative study of the Laozian child and the Nietzschean child will give us more insights into freedom. In Zarathustra’s teaching on the three metamorphoses (the camel, the lion, and the child), the lion is like the liberal humanist masculine subject who keeps trying hard to expand its freedom by suppressing others within the frame of the master-slave dialectic. However, true freedom, eventually attained by the child, comes from withdrawal from the very grammar of that framework. Interestingly, Laozi teaches we can be free by becoming a child who knows the masculine yet abides by the feminine.

A comparative study of Laozi’s ontology and Levinas’s unique reflections on home and woman—though persistently criticized by many feminists and consequently marginalized in feminist discourse—will enrich our discussion by ontologically revitalizing the traditionally devalued realms of home and salim.

Lastly, the works of conceptual artist Kimsooja and conductor Eun Sun Kim that vividly illustrate the postmodern feminine subjectivity will be introduced.