The Humanities Studies Movement in South Korea: A Different Perspective on the "Crisis in the Humanities" and a Caution to Imagining Anti-Capitalist Community

If the virtue of reciprocity and mutual help and citizenry ethics of being responsible is not separable from the moral of "the owed must be paid back," how can community be a revolting agency of financial markets? This paper contemplates limits to community as a potential source of mystification about how to fight capitalism. In order to do so, this paper does not denounce the community as useless, rather demonstrates the legacy of community building as contingently on-going revolutionary attempts. In the context, this paper has a double edge of dealing with community: on the one hand, it historicizes the emergence and re-emergence of "community" in the anti-capitalist state legacy through a window of Humanities Studies Movement in the post-Asian Financial Crisis; on the other hand, it opens up a critical view of the very revolutionary goal as potential enemy, critically engaging in Lazarrato's insight from his recent book, The Making of the Indebted Man.