Entering

Chapter 1.
The Thought of the Naked Tree - The Case of Park Soo-geun and Park Wan-seo
Chapter 2.
Survivalist Desire Machines - Kim Ki-young's Cinema
Chapter 3.
What is survivalist modernity?
Chapter 4.
Survivalist Rulership and the Dream of Modernity - Focusing on Park Chung-hee
Chapter 5.
The Spirit of Korean Capitalism - Focusing on Chung Ju-yung
Chapter 6.
Portrait of a Neoliberal Survivalist
Chapter 7.
Survivalism, Social Values, and the Problem of Death
Chapter 8.
People's Self-Transcendence: From People's Theology to the Ecological Level
Chapter 9.
Reconstructing 21st-Century Survivalism: Public, Kenosis, and the Anthropocene

References
source

Why didn't you say it was to survive?

What was the consciousness that drove Korea's 20th century? What were the values ​​and desires we most passionately pursued during that time? Sociologist Kim Hong-joong, who has keenly explored the collective psychology of Korean society, suggests "survivalism" as the most crucial driving force that enabled us to "finally" survive through war, dictatorship, democratization, and rapid economic growth.
According to survivalism, the world is a jungle.
It is a space of competition and elimination.
For survivalists, survival is the most important thing.
Therefore, values ​​that do not help survival are excluded or pushed down in priority.
The 20th century in Korea was characterized by survivalism, which considered survival to be the most important thing and took for granted avoiding or eliminating anything that hindered it.

There have been many theories explaining Korea's modern history.
These include 'compressed modernity', which rapidly adopted Western institutions and had a complex and mixed modernization process; 'reductive modernity', which gave excessive centrality to politics and the economy; 'militarized modernity', which emphasized war and the military during the Cold War; and 'Confucian modernity', which viewed Korean modernity within the larger framework of East Asian Confucian civilization, with Confucianism as its main cultural resource.
However, these theories fail to adequately capture the lives of citizens who have directly experienced and lived through dynamic and complex times.
The sad, vulgar, cruel, and tenacious moments we had to endure in order to survive were not touched upon.
Even though these moments clearly existed, why didn't we seize them? Survival was so crucial, yet because they remained unspoken, the door to Korea's modernity, "K-modernity," remained closed.
Through the key of survivalism presented in this book, we can now fully open the door and fully understand 20th-century Korean society and envision what comes next.

What does it mean to survive?

Kim Hong-joong explains that there were three major turning points in 20th-century survivalism in Korean society.
First, the ‘international public law survivalism’ that was formed in the midst of the shock caused by the Donghak Peasant Revolution of 1894, the Gabo Reform, and the Sino-Japanese War.
Second, ‘Cold War survivalism’ formed in the Cold War system after the Korean War in 1950.
Third, there is the ‘neoliberal survivalism’ that was formed in the process of being incorporated into the neoliberal international order following the 1997 foreign exchange crisis.
A particular focus of this book is Cold War survivalism.
Kim Hong-joong interprets Park Chung-hee's ruling ideology from the perspective of survivalist rulingness, and the spirit of Korean capitalism dreamed of by Chung Ju-young as survival-oriented developmentalism.
Kim Hong-joong also points out the survivalism embodied in art and literary texts.
We analyze the image of Park Soo-keun and Park Wan-seo's "Naked Tree," which depicts the vitality of the Korean people surviving on the border between life and death in the post-war ruins, and interpret the fundamental imagination of Kim Ki-young's films as an expression of the desire to "survive."

Meanwhile, in a society rife with survivalism, where the pursuit of political power and economic wealth is taken for granted, how are the values ​​that are "ultimately right, desirable, and reasonable in human life" pursued? Is it even possible to pursue them? Kim Hong-joong explains the perceived uselessness of these social values ​​in a society steeped in survivalism as the "hollowing out of the social." Through the minjung theology of Ahn Byung-mu and Seo Nam-dong, he introduces a new imagination of survival that pursues the social and seeks coexistence with others.


Now, beyond the modern era, into the 21st century, finally, into today and tomorrow

The signature ideology of modern Korea is neither ‘existence’ nor ‘existence,’ but ‘survival.’
Survival is the most fundamental problem, obsession, and ideology that defines the lives of modern Koreans.
It is a fundamental thought that embraces all of Korean society's achievements and contradictions, light and shadow, possibilities and despair, and it is a sad, vulgar, and cruel question.
In other words, our modern era was formed around the question, “What does it mean to survive?”
This book, which attempts to confront this question head-on, is a fierce self-reflection on modern Korea, a reflection on the identity of Korean sociology, and at the same time, a record of experimental exploration of the values ​​and desires of the new Korean society of the 21st century.
Understanding the time we have lived and will live in, centered around the keyword of survival, is one way to understand how the values ​​and desires pursued by 21st century Korean society originated.
It will be a starting point for us to reflect and gauge where we are headed now and where we will head in the future.