A difference between dia-logue and mono-logue does not lie in the existence of speech and language, but in the existence of ‘the between’ by which we can refer to each other. The difference is none other than that between the Two and the One. This res ...
A difference between dia-logue and mono-logue does not lie in the existence of speech and language, but in the existence of ‘the between’ by which we can refer to each other. The difference is none other than that between the Two and the One. This research project has focused upon difference, whereas scholars usually tend to bring in topics like relation or personality with regards to dialogue and monologue. In so doing, the current research wants to say that dialogue, if really possible, exists in its way to differentiate in a space of the between, and that it is not a space in which one can wholly meet the other outside the subject. One cannot encounter or meet the other(s) in its wholeness. One of the main reasons for the failure of dialogue derives from the facts that the subject does not enough recognize its narcissistic space of desire and that it tries to make a dialogue with its belief that things simply exist outside. Due to this failure, religious dialogue cannot proceed beyond a form of monologue about the truth each religion tries to deliver. There has not been any real dia-logue between religions but only the simple aggregate of mono-logues, which failed to communicate. Any dialogue is not possible unless the subject breaks into the narcissistic structure of the talking subject. It is the reason why the present research focused upon the subject to talk about dialogue.
Our study on the talking subject is necessarily connected to the questions ‘how one can recognize the other?’ and ‘how the subject can make an operation for the events?’ Although there have been many theoretical models for the structure of the subject, the main task for the first year explored a model of the subject in A. Badiou and J. Derrida, along with S. Žižek because all of therm share the insights that the structure of the subject is the void and that theological insights about the subject are very useful for arguing for a philosophical debate for the subject.
The main task of the second-year research was to explore a possibility whether the philosophical discourse on the subject can communicate with discourses in cognitive science and biology or evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. For that purpose, the study tried to communicate with some paradigms in cognitive science, such as enactivism and extended cognition. What was crucial in the second-year study was the question of whether they can offer any contact point with the philosophical discourse on the subject. It wanted to show that the philosophical discourse surely has a contacting point with a theory of the subject from cognitive science and biology in that the scientific fields like biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence show the emergence of the subject out of its action in the life and that the emergence of the subject is quite close to the structure of the subject of the Void in philosophy. Although it has a tendency to reduce the topics of the soul and the mind to the matter of the brain, cognitive science tries to deal with the cognitive structure of the subject on the basis of the structure of the body. That is, the role of the body in cognizing the world outside does not only remain in its passive role as a foundation or a frame for cognition but further imply a possibility that the body itself is cognition. In this context, the study connect the implications of the subject of the body to the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead. the Whiteheadian structure of the subject seems to be closer to the subject in the scientific material than those of Badiou and Derrida.
The task for the third year was to develop an alternative model to overcome the current limitations of the existing models for religious dialogue, and what was at stake was how to apply the models of the subject in philosophy and cognitive science to the religious dialogue. when the philosophical models show the subject of the Void and the subtraction and when the models in cognitive science show cognitive operation, emergence and interaction between the body, the mind and the world, can we find any overlapping theory between the models? That is, between the repletion and the Void, or between addition and subtraction, does the subject exist as a will to decide at every moment? Thus, wandering on the between(s) without any determination, is the subject asked to exist for the world like Plato’s khora? If so, it is possible to regard the subject as the between. When the subject is poised as the between, one can talk about love that does not make the Two collapse into the One without dissolving the difference(s) and that can rather maintain the difference as if out of the between. As a study product for the third year, “religiosity in an age of atheism: on the obscene religiosity of Zizek” was presented at the conference of Korean Association for Religious Studies and is now preparing to submit to Religious Study.