Toward a Planetary Political Theology of the Inception: Diffracting Spacetime Through Western Relationalism, Zhang Zai, and Kim Ji-ha

Abstract

Reflecting Weimar-era crises, this study addresses contemporary democratic and technological divisions by proposing an alternative spatiotemporal foundation. It constructs a dialogue between Walter Benjamin’s messianic critique, Carl Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism, and Karen Barad’s quantum ontology. While Schmitt reframed Benjamin’s law-breaking ‘divine violence’ (1921) into the ‘sovereign exception’, Baraddeconstructs this division. Integrating quantum physics into political theology, her ‘spacetimemattering’ collapses the Newtonian empty container-space used to justify sovereign enclosures. This study contrasts Lineage A (Schmitt–Girard–Thiel), relying on static spatial partitions, with Lineage B (Butler–Barad–Keller), viewing spacetime as a relational flow. This relational ontology resonates with East Asian cosmologies, specifically Zhang Zai’s Taeheo (Great Void) and Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul (Pale Shade). This cross-cultural diffraction demonstrates that the subaltern alliance of Benjamin’s ‘hunchback’ and Kim’s ‘Koraebi (tail-enders)’ exemplifies those marginalized by sovereign divisions. By formulating a relational ontology for these figures, this study provides the essential ‘priming water’ for nonhuman salvation, weaving an integrative knot of violence critique, marginalized redemption, and planetary coexistence.

1. Introduction: The Straussian Moment and the Sovereign Illusion of Empty Spacetime

In his widely discussed essay “The Straussian Moment”, venture capitalist Peter Thiel analyzed the post-9/11 world by bringing together three major ideas: Carl Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism, Leo Strauss’s critique of Enlightenment liberalism, and René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence (Thiel 2007). Thiel argued that modern liberal-democratic systems struggle to manage the forces of human conflict. To prevent social disintegration, he proposed the necessity of a strong, technologically advanced sovereign authority to enforce order. Rather than treating sovereignty as an abstract legal category, this technological project materializes as a concrete drive to define, partition, and control virtual territories. By treating cyberspace as a vacant frontier—a digital empty container ready for sovereign organization—modern technology platforms have essentially reconstructed Carl Schmitt’s territorial Nomos on a planetary scale. This techno-sovereign project is built upon a traditional view that space is a passive, neutral container waiting to be divided and ruled by a central authority.

This technological division of space can be understood as part of a longer history in modern political theology. Indeed, the development of modern political theology reveals a close and complex dialogue between its founding figures. Schmitt’s Political Theology (Schmitt [1922] 2005) was developed in direct engagement with and as a response to Walter Benjamin’s early messianic writings, particularly his Critique of Violence (Benjamin [1921] 1978a) and the Theologico-Political Fragment (Benjamin [1921] 1978b). Agamben describes this relationship as an intellectual “chess game” over the boundary of the law (Agamben 2005). While Benjamin sought to decouple justice from the state’s legal violence by conceptualizing a non-sovereign, messianic disruption, Schmitt responded by reclaiming this external force and reframing it as the “sovereign exception”—the state’s authority to suspend legal norms to protect the social order. Rather than an abstract formal paradox, List underscores that Schmitt’s sovereignty functions as a concrete historical drive to define physical spaces and enforce territorial boundaries (Nomos) (List 2021). In this framework of division, political legitimacy is established through a transcendent decision—analogous to the theological doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing)—introducing order into a passive or unorganized territory.

This dynamic has sparked an ongoing debate, which today finds an important constructive resonance in contemporary relational philosophy, new materialism, and eco-theology. Rather than viewing sovereignty solely as a top-down, vertical force, these thinkers offer an alternative approach by focusing on immanent, relational, and more-than-human agencies. In doing so, they seek to move beyond traditional dualisms that separate human activity from a passive natural world, redirecting attention to the planet as a shared, active network of relations. This critique becomes particularly relevant as modern economic systems increasingly standardize the diverse, historically and cosmologically rich “places” of cohabitation into abstract, measurable “spaces” of equivalent exchange. In an era of global environmental concern, a rigid model of sovereign division and territorial enclosure faces significant limitations. When the Earth is treated merely as a passive backdrop for administrative decisions, we overlook the complex, relational dependencies that are essential for our collective future. To address this, contemporary thinkers like Karen Barad suggest that matter itself possesses an entangled, messianic structure, wherein past, present, and future are superimposed in the material present.

To address these sovereign limitations, this study proposes a cross-cultural, material-discursive dialogue. It seeks to explore the messianic, non-sovereign core of Walter Benjamin’s critique in light of contemporary relational physics and cosmology. This paper suggests that dominant models of sovereign division can be reconsidered by collapsing the traditional dualism of space and time that has historically supported cartographies of division. For Schmitt, this division operates on multiple homologous levels: he partitions physical space and linear time while establishing a rigid boundary between friend and enemy to define the political. By deconstructing these partitions through the paradigm of “spacetimemattering”—a core concept in Karen Barad’s agential realism that recognizes space, time, and matter as indivisible, dynamic entanglements perpetually co-constituted (Barad 2007)—this paper transitions from a politics of hostile divisions to a flat ontology of relational resonance.

By contrasting two diverging lineages based on their underlying spacetime theories, this paper tries to establish a philosophical terrain for liberation. On the one hand, Lineage A (Sovereign Exception)—running from Schmitt’s Nomos through Girard’s sacrificial theory to Peter Thiel’s platform capitalism—relies on a static, container-like spacetime that treats matter as a passive, empty vessel to be unilaterally partitioned. On the other hand, Lineage B (Planetary Inception)—flowing from Judith Butler’s ethics of transience, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Catherine Keller’s tehomic theology—collapses this container-space, offering a dynamic, non-local relational flow.

This Lineage B is beautifully echoed and completed by East Asian relational ontologies, specifically the Neo-Confucian cosmology of Zhang Zai (張載) and the eco-aesthetics of Kim Ji-ha (金芝河). By grounding the planetary inquiry in the raw cosmological vitality of Zhang Zai’s Taeheo (太虛, Great Void) and Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul (흰 그늘, Pale Shade) and Koraebi (꼬래비, tail-enders), this study moves beyond a simple comparative bridging of East and West as separate domains. Instead, it practices what Karen Barad terms a “diffractive reading”—reading quantum realism and East Asian ontologies of material agency through one another to observe the creative, non-dualistic interference patterns that emerge. By interpolating this East Asian-Quantum diffraction into the political-theological tradition, this analysis demonstrates that the messianic is an immanent, collaborative “Inception” bubbling up from the vibrant vacancy of the void. To unfold this planetary cosmology, this paper is structured around three major thematic movements:

Section 2 (Lineage A: Sovereign Exception) deconstructs the sovereign partition of territorial space, tracing the transition from Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical divisions to René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat and Peter Thiel’s algorithmic platforms.

Section 3 (Lineage B: Fluid Materiality) dismantles the chronological, linear temporality of progress by establishing a genealogy of the “Thick Present” that flows from Walter Benjamin’s now-time (Jetztzeit) and Judith Butler’s “eternity of downfall” to Karen Barad’s quantum vacuum and Catherine Keller’s tehomic deep.

Section 4 (The East Asian Diffraction: Zhang Zai’s Taeheo and Kim Ji-ha’s Pale Shade) synthesizes these spatial and temporal critiques into a flat ontology of universal resonance, exploring the subaltern alliance of Benjamin’s hunchback (the Kabbalistic Reshimu of Tzimtzum) and Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi enfolded within Zhang Zai’s Taeheo, and the materialization of historical trauma (Wonhon) through shamanic jeopsin as quantum spooky action at a distance.

2. Lineage A: The Sovereign Exception: Schmitt and Girard

Carl Schmitt’s political theology of territorial partitioning, or the Nomos, constitutes an ontology of separation, where sovereignty is grounded in the foundational, top-down act of land-appropriation (Landnahme) to draw clear lines over land, sea, and sky, separating friend from enemy, inside from outside (Schmitt [1950] 2003). Schmitt, in his seminal Political Theology, famously defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception,” asserting that the ultimate ground of legitimacy lies in the sovereign’s power to suspend all existing legalities in times of extreme emergency (Schmitt [1922] 2005). This decisionist vitalism is built upon the premise: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”—specifically, where the “omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver” (Schmitt [1922] 2005). The sovereign decision thus acts analogous to the theological miracle, performatively executing an absolute decision out of nothingness (creatio ex nihilo), forcing an artificial order over a presumed empty void (terra incognita, Schmitt [1950] 2003, p. 133; Keller 2018).

This sovereign partitioning of space is deeply linked to René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism (Girard 1972, 1978). For Girard, human desire is not autonomous but imitative; human subjects desire what others desire, which inevitably leads to catastrophic, uncontrollable mimetic rivalries that threaten to tear communities apart. To contain this apocalyptic threat of “man against man” violence, human cultures historically developed the scapegoat mechanism—a collective, unconscious process where the entire community projects its internal violence onto a single, innocent victim. The violent expulsion or killing of this scapegoat restores temporary peace and establishes the primordial “sacred” order, which in turn gives birth to human laws, taboos, and sovereign boundaries.

In Schmittian terms, the establishment of the Nomos is itself a sacrificial act. The drawing of the sovereign boundary requires a foundational, violent exclusion of the Other—the designated enemy or scapegoat—whose expulsion secures the inside of the law. Thus, Schmitt’s sovereign exception is predicated on a static, container-like spacetime. The sovereign treats space as an empty, passive container (creatio ex nihilo) that must be unilaterally carved up and possessed, while treating time as a linear progression of historical victors who march over the buried bodies of the excluded scapegoats.

Peter Thiel’s Techno-Sovereignty

In the twenty-first century, this decisionist, sacrificial structure is inherited and radicalized within the algocratic systems of digital technology and platform capitalism (Hui 2024). This is epitomized by Peter Thiel’s neo-reactionary, techno-authoritarian project, outlined in “The Straussian Moment”, which calls for an exceptionalist sovereign power to secure command and enforce order in view of geopolitical emergencies (Thiel 2007). Thiel directly co-opts Girard’s mimetic theory to argue that modern, secularized, liberal-democratic societies—which rely on Enlightenment ideals of rational debate—are fundamentally incapable of managing the primordial, apocalyptic forces of human mimetic violence in an age of distributed weapons of mass destruction.

For Thiel, the only way to avoid absolute self-destruction is to retreat from liberal democracy and establish a strong, techno-sovereign authority capable of enforcing absolute limits and boundaries. The physical Großraum (large space) envisioned by Schmitt to resist universalism is thus translated into cyberspace. This digital enclosure flattens qualitative, historically and cosmologically rich “places” of human and nonhuman cohabitation into abstract, quantitative coordinate “spaces” of computational exchange (Hui 2024). Cyberspace is treated as a frictionless, vacant frontier—a virtual terra incognita ready for sovereign capture and algorithmic extraction. The state of exception becomes the normalized, routine rule (Agamben 2005), reducing both human subjectivity and nonhuman matter to calculated objects for capital accumulation. This is the terminal culmination of Lineage A: an extractivist, patriarchal, and sacrificial political theology of sovereign omnipotence that treats the Earth as a disposable background for sovereign spectacles.

3. Lineage B: Fluid Materiality and Spacetimemattering

3.1. Butler’s Ethics of Transience and the Eternity of Downfall

In Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921) and Theses on the Philosophy of History (1941) (Benjamin [1921] 1978a, [1941] 1969), particularly in the Eighth Thesis, he famously declares, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (Benjamin [1941] 1969). In order to stop the uniform and progressive storms created by the flow of time and to gather the accumulated debris of history, political theology must break free from the vertical suspension of rules by the sovereign.

In her essay “One Time Traverses Another: Benjamin’s ‘Theological-Political Fragment’” (Butler 2016), Butler offers a thoughtful reading of Benjamin’s view of time that looks beyond a purely human-centered perspective, gently questioning the state’s claims to permanent authority. Butler’s analysis highlights a key distinction in Benjamin’s writing: the difference between “immortality” (Unsterblichkeit) and “eternity” (Ewigkeit) within worldly transience. While “immortality” often reflects a human desire to escape our natural limits and achieve endless survival, “eternity” (Ewigkeit) invites us to accept our shared finitude. This shift in perspective moves our attention from individual self-preservation toward the natural, rhythmic cycle of coming into being and passing away (Butler 2016, p. 277). For Butler, the messianic is not a historically embodied figure or a teleological endpoint of revelation; rather, it is the very “break in referentiality (p. 277)” that occurs when the historical fails to signify the divine. This messianic dimension manifests worldly restitution not as conservative restoration, but as the “eternity of downfall”. This allows Butler to offer a revolutionary re-reading of Benjamin’s enigmatic concept of the “soul of the living” (p. 283) from his 1921 essay Critique of Violence. Butler asks how “life” is distinguished from the “soul of the living,” and why violence—even sovereign or divine violence—cannot absolutely annihilate this soul. And the answer is as brilliant as radical: the “soul of the living” is not an immortal substance or an ethereal spark, but the indestructible, rhythmic recurrence of transience itself. Because this soul is the very rhythm of downfall and destruction, any sovereign effort to annihilate it is already under its sway. Consequently, Benjaminian “happiness” is redefined by Butler as the non-anthropocentric attunement to this rhythm of transience (p. 272). In this state of happiness, all earthly things seek their downfall, abandoning the narcissistic ego that obsesses over individual loss. By experiencing grief not as a private, overwhelming burden but as a shared, natural part of life, this steady practice of mourning helps us let go of the self-focused guilt (Schuld) and debt that often lock us into cycles of anger. This frees people from the destructive patterns of retaliation, state punishment, and war. In this light, global politics is no longer about maintaining rigid, unchanging structures. Instead, it becomes a continuous process of questioning, reshaping, and renewing our institutions—always guided by the understanding that no system is eternal, and that peaceful transformation is always possible.

3.2. Barad’s Quantum Vacuum and Keller’s Tehomic Deep

Catherine Keller’s process theology (Keller 2007) and her Political Theology of the Earth translates this non-teleological, relational time into process theology, turning Schmitt on his head. Rather than the sovereign exception decided by a transcendent, omnipotent Decider, Keller affirms an “ecosocial inception” (Keller 2018, pp. 93, 160, 179). Ecosocial inception represents an immanent, continued creation—a collaborative beginning-freedom that “flashes up” from below, replacing the dictatorial emergency with the creative, messy cohabitation of more-than-human alliances. Keller’s tehomic political theology systematically deconstructs the patriarchal doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which historically legitimated the sovereign fantasy of absolute mastery and imperial dominion over nature (Keller 2003, 2018, p. 42). Reclaiming the dark, undulating watery chaos of Genesis 1:2—the Tehom—Keller proposes creatio ex profundis (creation from the deep, Keller 2018, pp. 43, 87), recognizing that the deep is not a sterile void of negation but a vibrant “womb of becoming” teeming with relational potentiality (Keller 2003). Within this womb of becoming, creation is not a unilateral sovereign command but a consultative, co-creative process initiated by the plurisingular name Elohim, who undergoes a voluntary self-contraction (tzimtzum (Barad 2017, pp. 51–53; Keller 2018, p. 98) to make space for finite differences.

This process-theological deconstruction is powerfully extended by Crockett (2026), who synthesizes Keller’s process theology with new materialism and Korean Minjung theology. Conceptualizing “God as Change” and divine agency as an immanent, energetic transformation, Crockett broadens the scope of liberation beyond human socio-political struggles to encompass the entangled, nonhuman assembly of the planet. When read through this vitalist lens, the tehomic “womb of becoming” expands into an ecological domain where matter itself participates in the dynamic ongoingness of divine change.

To challenge the sovereign obsession with blinding, transparent light—which has historically been used to justify absolute control and the erasure of difference—Keller aligns her tehomic theology with the ancient apophatic mysticism of Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius (Keller 2018). Through this lineage, she develops the concept of “brilliant darkness”. For Keller, this brilliant darkness is not a frightening lack of light, but a fertile, generative womb of potentiality. It represents an apophatic space where the sacred mystery and dignity of the marginalized are safely preserved, resisting the sovereign power.

This tehomic deep as a becoming womb of potentiality acquires rigorous physical and ontological grounding when mapped onto Karen Barad’s quantum-mechanical formulation of spacetimemattering and the quantum vacuum (Barad 2007, p. 56). In her agential realism, the vacuum is not a sterile space of absolute absence or nothingness. Rather, it is a virtual cloud—a quantum womb teeming with virtual particles and hauntological relations of potentiality, where meaning and matter simultaneously emerge through non-local “mattering” (Barad 2007, 2012). Barad’s quantum realism shows that the vacuum consists of generative, “vacuum fluctuations (Barad 2012, pp. 14–15)” that shatter the meritocratic mirage of sovereign decisions out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo).

Under this agential realist framework, space and time are not empty containers but an indivisible, dynamic process of spacetimemattering—a flat ontology of universal resonance where the boundaries between subject and object, past and present, are perpetually contested and reconfigured from within (Barad 2007, 2012, p. 179). Historical trauma and the ethical claims of justice do not dissolve into a distant, vanished past along a unidirectional arrow of time. Rather, they remain actively folded and superimposed within the material spacetimemattering of the present as a state of quantum superposition. Thus, to live in and touch the “Thick-Now” is to recognize that the very bones of the living are materially enfolded with the suffering of the historical Other, demanding an unavoidable, trans-corporeal responsibility—or more precisely, response-ability (Barad 2010).

4. The East Asian Diffraction: Zhang Zai’s Taeheo and Kim Ji-ha’s Pale Shade1

4.1. The Bridge: Zhang Zai’s Taeheo and Barad’s Quantum Vacuum

The non-linear, relational spacetime theory established by Lineage B is beautifully diffracted through East Asian relational ontologies, providing a profound, cross-cultural bridge that replaces institutional state dogmas with raw cosmological vitality. The primary hinge of this diffraction is the Neo-Confucian cosmology of Zhang Zai (張載, 1020–1077), specifically his radical formulation of Taeheo (太虛, the Great Void) (Ziporyn 2015).

In classical Western Newtonian metaphysics, the void is defined as absolute space—a sterile, vacant container that is ontologically separate from the passive matter that occupies it. This container-space is what allowed Carl Schmitt’s Nomos and platform capitalism to treat territory for sovereign extraction. In contrast, Zhang Zai’s Taeheo represents a radical ontology of relational monism. For Zhang Zai, the Great Void is not a state of nothingness or blank negation; rather, it is the original, unformed state of Qi (氣)—the vital, undulating material energy of the cosmos. As Brook Ziporyn’s interpretation demonstrates, Taeheo and Qi are not two separate substances, but two states of the same primordial reality: “The Great Void is nothing other than Qi” (Ziporyn 2015). When Qi condenses, it becomes visible, forming the myriad things; when it disperses, it returns to the invisible, formless state of Taeheo.

This East Asian ontology of Taeheo resonates with incredible precision with Karen Barad’s agential realist reading of the quantum vacuum. Just as Zhang Zai’s Void is a vital plenum teeming with formless Qi that perpetually condenses and disperses, Barad’s quantum vacuum is a vibrant vacancy teeming with virtual particles that continuously flash into existence and fall back into the vacuum. Neither the quantum vacuum nor Taeheo represents a passive backdrop; both are active, self-differing physical–metaphysical wombs of becoming. To collapse the Cartesian dualism of space and matter is to recognize that the universe is a singular, dynamic, and non-local field of universal resonance.

Crucially, this ‘womb of becoming’ in Zhang Zai’s cosmology is not merely an abstract physical principle, but carries a profound ethical and theological mandate outlined in his seminal work, the Seomyeong (西銘, Western Inscription). Zhang Zai famously begins this text by declaring: “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother... all people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions [同胞, Dongpo].” By characterizing the cosmos as a giant cosmological womb of Qi nurtured by cosmic parents (乾稱父, 坤稱母), Zhang Zai establishes that all human and nonhuman entities share the same material–spiritual essence. They are sibling-beings, or Dongpo (同胞, planetary companions), enfolded within the same relational field of vital energy. This Neo-Confucian cosmology of universal siblinghood directly prefigures the eco-theological and egalitarian tenets of Korea’s native Donghak tradition as developed by Haewol Choi Si-hyeong. Haewol expanded this into the doctrine of Cheonjibumo (天地父母, Cosmic Parents) and Manmul-dongpo (萬物同胞, Siblinghood of All Things), asserting that all things are born of and live within the maternal, life-giving womb of Heaven and Earth. When diffracted with Catherine Keller’s tehomic creatio ex profundis (creation from the deep) as a “womb of becoming” and Barad’s quantum vacuum as a “quantum womb”, the Eastern and Western lineages converge on a shared relational terrain: the void/vacuum is not a dead, empty container to be carved up by sovereign exception, but an active, maternal matrix of planetary siblinghood and response-ability where all things are entangled as siblings.2

4.2. Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-Geuneul (흰 그늘, Pale Shade) and the Koraebi (꼬래비, Tail-Enders)

This relational spacetime of Taeheo and spacetimemattering acquires a powerful, subaltern political-aesthetic flesh through the eco-aesthetics of the Korean poet-philosopher Kim Ji-ha (金芝河, 1941–2022). The affective and aesthetic force driving this planetary liberation is “Huin-geuneul” (흰 그늘, the Pale Shade; J.-h. Kim 1999), a cornerstone of East Asian Qi-based aesthetics.

To fully grasp the philosophical depth of Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul, one must trace its intellectual genealogy back to the literary critic Lim Woo-gi (林雨基), who first philosophically formalized the concept of “Geuneul” (그늘, the Shade) in Korean critical history through his seminal volume of essays, On the Shade (그늘에 대하여, 1996) (Lim 1996). For Lim, the “Shade” is not a physical absence of light or a passive state of darkness; rather, it is a visceral, ontological accumulation of historical wounds, sorrow, and unrectified grief (Han, 한, 恨) that marks the “dignified folds of existence” against the abstract logocentrism and meritocratic binaries of Western modernity (Lim 1996). Crucially, Lim illustrates this aesthetic ontology of the Shade through the material example of Joseon White Porcelain (백자, Baekja). Refuting the conventional Western or colonial framing that reduces Baekja to mere rustic simplicity or pure, transparent whiteness, Lim argues that the true aesthetic heights of Joseon porcelain reside in its ‘subtle and cool grey-white shade’ (갓 맑은 듯 회백색인 서늘하고도 변화무쌍한 그늘) embedded within the glaze (Lim 1996, p. 30). For Lim, the white of Joseon porcelain is ‘a white that exceeds whiteness itself, or a white that negates its own whiteness within its self-consciousness’ (Lim 1996, p. 35). It is the potter’s historical grief, wounds, and life-experiences—their ‘Shade’—that physically manifest as ‘folds or wrinkles’ within the material surface, creating an infinite play of shadows. The ‘Shade’ is thus not a sterile absence of light, but the very place where these material folds and wrinkles reside, giving the object its profound existential echo.

Kim Ji-ha’s aesthetics of Huin-geuneul (J.-h. Kim 1999) represents a brilliant inheritance and aesthetic fermentation of Lim Woo-gi’s “Shade,” expanding it into a grand, planetary eco-cosmology. While Lim illuminated the stubborn materiality of the Shade residing in the background of things, Kim contrasted this Korean aesthetic of Shade with the transient, ephemerally brilliant aesthetic of the Japanese “Hana” (flower). Kim argued that when this thick, historical accumulation of Shade (Geuneul)—the visceral material traces of Qi left by centuries of suffering and oppression—meets “Shinmyeong” (神明, 신명, divine/cosmic ecstasy)—the explosive, creative life-force of the universe—it undergoes a profound spiritual alchemical process. It ferments into Huin-geuneul, a paradoxical “brilliant darkness” in Catherine Keller’s meaning that glows from within its own wounds (J.-h. Kim 1999). Just as Keller’s brilliant darkness rejects the binary of pure light and pure dark to safeguard the unquantifiable mystery of the deep, Kim’s Huin-geuneul refuses to wash away the shadows of historical suffering, allowing the scars of the marginalized to shine as a creative, life-giving force.

This pale shade is exactly the topological home where Walter Benjamin’s hidden hunchback dwarf—the secret theological engine of historical materialism—meets Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi (꼬래비, the absolute tail-enders residing in the Shade of the progress). Historically, these figures find a profound biblical resonance in the Hebrew concept of the Anawim—the ‘bent ones,’ ‘bowed down,’ or marginalized poor of Israel who are the core subjects of messianic justice. In modern political theology, the category of the Anawim was decisively recovered by Gutiérrez (1973) in his foundational theology of liberation as the material subjects of historical salvation, and further theorized by Eagletonas the tragic-messianic figures of the ‘dregs’ who disrupt progressive secular optimism (Eagleton 2009). By weaving this liberationist lineage, the Anawim serves as the essential theoretical bridge connecting Walter Benjamin’s hunchback (the physically bent one) with Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi of Joseon and modern times—the historically neglected, bottom-dwelling underdogs of society. Through this diffraction, the Girardian scapegoat is rescued and transfigured from a passive victim into an active participant in cosmic and social renewal.

Rather than serving as a passive, forgotten foundation of sovereign containment, the scapegoat’s crushed materiality is mobilized, resulting in the subaltern revolt of these outcasts—termed giwi-chinjeong (己位親政, 기위친정, self-governance of the marginalized). Deeply influenced by the intellectual legacy of the Korean philosopher Beombu Kim Jeong-seol—specifically his pioneering text Choi Je-u-ron (최제우론/崔濟愚論, Treatise on Choi Je-u) (J.-s. Kim 2009), which resurrected the egalitarian, life-centered ontology of Donghak as the historical revival of Korea’s ancient Sindo (神道) and Pungryudo traditions—Kim Ji-ha formulated this radical theory of subaltern agency. 己位親政 (giwi-chinjeong) asserts that the ‘absolute tail-enders’ (Koraebi) and marginalized outcasts do not appeal to a top-down, vertical sovereign exception or replicate the state’s violence. Instead, they stand up ‘in the very place where they are’ (gi-wi, 己位) to directly govern themselves (chinjeong, 親政) as active, self-determining subjects of political and cosmological power.

This horizontal rebellion operates on the cosmological plane of Yeong-dong-cheon-sim-wol (影動天心月, 영동천심월, the shadow moves the moon). Originally given as a profound, riddle-like phrase by the late-Joseon thinker Yeondam Yi Un-gyu to his disciple Kim Il-bu—who meditated upon it for nineteen years to establish the late-nineteenth-century Korean philosophy of Jeong-yeok (정역, 正易, Correct Changes)—this concept carries profound political-theological weight. Literally meaning ‘the shadow (影, Yeong) moves (動, Dong) the moon at the center of heaven (天心月, Cheonsimwol),’ it represents a cosmic paradigm shift: as the dominant, bright moon of the sovereign center is slowly moved and eclipsed by the rising shadows of the marginalized from the periphery, the old, oppressive world-order collapses to make way for a new, relational era of cohabitation. Thus, Yeong-dong-cheon-sim-wol is not a physical clash of forces, but a non-local, relational resonance where the lowest shadows on the periphery rise up to shake and reconfigure the very center of relations. By extinguishing the blinding, sacrificial spectacles of modern algocracy, this cosmological revolt restores the inherent, non-negotiable dignity of the discarded.

4.3. Shamanic Possession, Wonhon, and Quantum Non-Locality

In quantum field theory (QFT), the indeterminacy is written into the very fabric of the quantum vacuum. The virtual particles are ‘quantized indeterminacies-in-action’ that teeter on the infinitely thin edge between being and nonbeing, participating in hauntological non/presences (Barad 2012). They demonstrate that even nothingness is not free of ghosts. In classical metaphysics, objects are assumed to exist in fixed coordinates of space and time, with their properties predetermined and independent of any observation. Under this classical framework, ghosts are dismissed as irrational anomalies. In contrast, Barad’s quantum hauntology, rooted in Niels Bohr’s insights, replaces this stable ontology with an understanding that the universe is fundamentally indeterminate before any observation occurs. Crucially, Barad distinguishes Bohr’s ontological indeterminacy from Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; while Heisenberg’s uncertainty represents a mere epistemological limit of human knowledge (our inability to ‘know’ both position and momentum), Bohr’s indeterminacy is an ontological reality—properties do not have definite values prior to measurement, existing instead in a ghostly, virtual superposition of multiple coexisting possibilities (Barad 2007).

Within this hauntological framework, a ghost is not a supernatural entity, but the material embodiment of a disjointed, non-linear time where the past is never finished. Historical traumas, atomic ruptures, and systemic violence are not vanished events along a unidirectional timeline; rather, they remain actively folded and superimposed within the material sedimentations of the present, persisting as virtual superpositions of formless Qi within the cosmic plenum of Taeheo (Barad 2017).

This hauntological connection gains its ultimate philosophical rigour through Lim Woo-gi’s pioneer formulation of “Basin Literary Theory” (유역문예론, Yuyeok Munyeron), which recovers the deep, shamanic roots of Korean folk spirituality (Lim 2022). Lim argues that shamanism forms the primordial “magma” of the Korean psyche, upon which other philosophical systems are merely built as islands. Crucially, the spirit encountered in shamanic possession is not a transcendent, disembodied deity, but a profound synthesis of ancestral, spirits and the Confucian concept of Qi as the undulating, formless energy of the cosmic void. Under this shamanic–materialist framework, the act of jeopsin (spiritual possession) is not an irrational superstition, but a highly material onto-epistemological event. It represents an agential hyper-contact or non-local resonance where the shaman’s body acts as a responsive measurement apparatus, allowing the virtual superposition of the unmourned victims of historical massacres and systemic oppression to materialize and find voice in the present. While classical Newtonian physics constructed a mechanistic universe based on localized causality and isolated substances—systematically banishing non-local entanglements and spectral causality as irrational noise—quantum mechanics has proven that non-local entanglement is an undeniable, foundational reality of the cosmos, where spatially separated entities remain instantaneously connected across vast spatiotemporal chasms (Einstein et al. 1935; Barad 2007).

This quantum non-locality is beautifully translated through Zhang Zai’s concept of Taeheo (Great Void) (Ziporyn 2015).

Shamanic possession and the spectral return of Wonhon are highly material spacetimemattering events, where the latent data of historical suffering—preserved as virtual superpositions of formless Qi within the cosmic plenum of the Void—suddenly materialize and knot into the present when they encounter a specific aesthetic, theological, and historical apparatus (Barad 2010). Mourning (Re-membering) thus becomes a physical, relational reconstruction that bends the coordinates of spacetime to restore the dignity of the unmourned (Butler 2016; Barad 2017).

Within this framework, the Kabbalistic concept of Tzimtzum (self-contraction) emerges as the indispensable cosmic-political hinge that bridges Barad’s “thick present” to the subaltern theologies of the Hunchback and the Koraebi. In the Kabbalistic cosmology of Isaac Luria, creation does not occur through the imperial expansion of sovereign force out of nothing (ex nihilo), which is a colonial violence that fills all space with its own homogenetic light. Instead, the infinite (Ayn Sof) performs Tzimtzum—a radical, voluntary self-contraction and withdrawal, making room for finite, vulnerable differences to exist. Crucially, the contracted void is not a sterile vacancy; it contains the Reshimu (the ghostly residue/remnant of the divine light).

This reshimu serves as the exact theological–physical sanctuary where Walter Benjamin’s hidden hunchback dwarf and Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi (꼬래비, the absolute tail-enders residing in the Pale Shade) meet in solidarity. Their subaltern revolt (giwi-chinjeong) does not seek to capture or replicate sovereign power, but to activate the non-local, vibratory resonance of this divine residue left in the contracted void. By tuning themselves to this vibrant vacancy, the living participate in a “liturgy of the remnant,” realizing a planetary eco-cosmopolitics of horizontal, transformative coexistence with all things. Ultimately, messianic liberation is not a transcendent promise of a distant future, but a physical, immediate possibility residing in every morsel of finitude—waiting to be activated whenever the living practice Response-ability toward the historical and planetary Other within this “thick present.”

4.4. Reciprocal Transformations: Irreducible Differences and the Constructive Synthesis

To fulfill the analytical rigor of a genuinely diffractive methodology—reading insights diffractively through one another to attend to material effects, boundaries, and difference—it is crucial to demonstrate not merely conceptual resonances or analogies, but also where these frameworks remain irreducibly different and how each is mutually transformed through their encounter.

Crucially, this study does not postulate a naive, essentialist, or unbroken linear continuity running from eleventh-century Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism (Zhang Zai) to twentieth-century Korean anti-authoritarian eco-philosophy (Kim Ji-ha). Such an assertion would fall into an ahistorical fallacy that ignores the profound historical disruptions, colonial ruptures, and institutional transformations separating these eras. Instead, the articulation of this East Asian thread represents a constructive synthesis performed by the author, wherein distinct historical-cosmological insights are diffractively staged to expose their respective limitations and generate a novel planetary political theology.

First, regarding Barad’s Quantum Vacuum and Zhang Zai’s Taeheo (太虛): while both reject Newtonian absolute space in favor of a vital plenum, their ontological foundations differ irreducibly. Barad’s quantum hauntology is rooted in quantum field theory, where indeterminacy and virtual particles operate without a predefined teleological or moral direction. In contrast, Zhang Zai’s Taeheo is a Neo-Confucian moral cosmology where the condensation and dispersion of Qi (氣) are governed by intrinsic cosmic order (Li) and filial-ethical responsibility, as famously expressed in his Seomyeong (西銘, Western Inscription: “Heaven is my father, Earth is my mother... all things are my companions [同胞, Dongpo]”). Through diffractive encounter, Zhang Zai’s Seomyeong transforms Barad’s physics-based relationality by imbuing quantum spacetimemattering with an East Asian eco-ethical mandate of cosmic siblinghood (Dongpo). Reciprocally, Barad’s quantum indeterminacy de-essentializes Zhang Zai’s Neo-Confucianism, releasing Qi cosmology from being frozen into a rigid State-Confucian orthodoxy or hierarchical moral order.

However, from the standpoint of this study’s constructive synthesis, Zhang Zai’s Taeheo exhibits a critical limitation: as a high-metaphysical cosmology, it remains too abstract to account for the visceral, sedimented wounds of historical trauma and the concrete political agency of subaltern subjects. This is precisely where Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul (흰그늘, Pale Shade) and Lim Woo-gi’s Shade (Geuneul) intervene. Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul diffracts with Catherine Keller’s “Brilliant Darkness”. While Keller’s brilliant darkness emerges from Judeo-Christian apophatic negative theology deconstructing creatio ex nihilo in favor of the tehomic deep (Tehom), Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul is forged in the historical wounds of Korea (Han, 한/恨), shamanic jeopsin (접신/接神), and Donghak’s Shinmyeong (신명/神明, cosmic ecstasy). Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul transforms Keller’s process theology by supplying a concrete, historical-somatic “aesthetic fermentation” (sigimsae) of subaltern suffering to her apophatic deep, converting Zhang Zai’s abstract void into a somatic-historical plenum of sedimented trauma. Reciprocally, Keller’s apophatic horizon transforms Kim Ji-ha’s eco-aesthetics, preventing Huin-geuneul from falling into ethno-nationalist or folk-essentialist insularity by embedding it within an open, planetary-theological matrix.

Third, regarding Benjamin’s Hunchback and Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi (꼬래비, Tail-enders): Benjamin’s hunchback dwarf is a covert, elusive theological engine of historical materialism—a figure of messianic interruption residing in Western history. Kim Ji-ha’s Koraebi (꼬래비) is an active, collective subaltern subject of Donghak’s giwi-chinjeong (기위친정/己位親政, self-governance of the marginalized). Kim Ji-ha transforms Benjamin’s crippled, covert hunchback into an active, self-governing political agent (giwi-chinjeong), shifting messianic interruption into an immanent, collaborative Inception (Taedong). Reciprocally, Benjamin’s anti-teleological critique tempers Kim Ji-ha’s Donghak radicalism, ensuring that subaltern self-governance does not inadvertently reconstitute a new sovereign exception or revolutionary tyranny.

Through this multi-layered diffractive synthesis, the author constructs an unbreakable knot connecting the cosmological void (Taeheo), the historical wounds of the marginalized (Huin-geuneul/Koraebi), and the horizontal political practice of subaltern agency (Kiwi-chinjeong). The subaltern revolt of the Koraebi operates through the cosmological plane of Yeong-dong-cheon-sim-wol (影動天心月, the shadow moves the moon)—not as a violent seizure of central sovereign power, but as a non-local, relational resonance wherein the lowest shadows on the periphery rise up to shake and reconfigure the center of relations. By staging these East Asian and Western frameworks in reciprocal critique, this constructive synthesis yields a novel Planetary Political Theology of the Inception, wherein the redemption of the discarded subaltern serves as the indispensable catalyst (majungmul) for the nonhuman salvation of all things (Manmul-dongpo).

5. Conclusions: Toward a Planetary Political Theology of the Inception

The cross-cultural, material-discursive journey traced in this study culminates in the dissolution of the modern, Schmittianised political theology of territorial containment and linear progress. By collapsing the dualism of space and time through Karen Barad’s ontology of spacetimemattering, this study has demonstrated that space is not a sterile, vacant canvas waiting for sovereign conquest, nor is time a homogeneous, empty track (Chronos) upon which the victors march over the bodies of the oppressed. Instead, the universe is a living, relational field—a maternal womb of becoming.

This planetary Political Theology of the Inception stands as a radical, emancipatory alternative to the sovereign Exception. Under this new paradigm, the messianic is not an exceptional, top-down miracle decided by an omnipotent monarch out of nothing; rather, it is an immanent, collaborative Inception that flashes up from the vibrant, porous vacancy of the void. By contrasting Lineage A (Schmitt–Girard–Thiel), which enforces an oppressive container-space through the violent exclusion of the scapegoat, with Lineage B (Butler–Keller–Barad), which dissolves boundaries into non-local entanglement, this paper has opened a transformative ontological space.

This space is completed and grounded through the East Asian diffraction of Zhang Zai’s Taeheo and Kim Ji-ha’s Huin-geuneul (흰 그늘). By showing that the Great Void is not a dead, empty container but a vital material plenum of Qi, and that the Shade (Geuneul) is the visceral material trace of historical suffering waiting to be fermented by Shinmyeong into a brilliant, self-glowing darkness, this study has restored the sacred dignity of those who have been systematically erased.

Crucially, the subaltern alliance of the Hunchback (the Kabbalistic Reshimu of Tzimtzum) and the Koraebi (꼬래비, the absolute tail-enders) residing in the Pale Shade serves as the ultimate exemplification and proof of the victims of sovereign and mimetic violence. They are the physical and theological repositories of the historical wounds left behind by the cartographies of division. Yet, a political theology formulated specifically for these marginalized and discarded subjects does not stop at human restitution; rather, it acts as the indispensable “priming water” or catalyst for a broader, planetary theology of nonhuman all-things. Because the Hunchback and the Koraebi are ontologically enfolded within the cosmic plenum of Taeheo and the quantum vacuum, their liberation is inherently trans-corporeal. To touch and redeem the absolute tail-ender is to activate the vibrant, porous agency of the entire nonhuman assembly, since all things are sibling beings of the same cosmic Qi-womb.

Ultimately, the political theology of inception weaves an unbreakable knot connecting the critique of violence, the messianic redemption of the hunchback, and the salvation of nonhuman all-things. Messianic liberation is not a transcendent promise of a distant future, but a physical, immediate possibility residing in every morsel of finitude—waiting to be activated whenever the living practice Response-ability toward the historical and planetary Other within this thick, virtuous present.