Remaining After Ruin: The Politics of Lament in Forced (Im)Mobilities

Abstract

How do survivors mourn when violence controls movement, speech, and public grief? This article reads lament as a political–theological practice that keeps the dead publicly addressable under forced (im)mobilities—conditions in which some are deported, disappeared, or killed while others are compelled to remain amid ruins, surveillance, and stigma. Through a comparative reading of Lamentations and Han Kang’s Human Acts, this study develops “fourth-person lament” to name a ruin-saturated address (“you”) that is relayed through multiple voices and across the boundary of death, refusing to resolve responsibility into a single speaker or a finished story. The analysis shows how lament is mediated through bodies that remain—hunger, wounds, exhaustion, unburied dead—and through spaces turned into archives of violence, so that catastrophe cannot be sealed into closure or denial. By tracing struggles over memory and affect—over who may move, who must stay, and whose deaths can appear as grievable—this article argues that lament operates as resistant passage within enforced (im)mobility: a communal and public insistence that memory, mourning, and responsibility remain open to contestation.

1. Introduction: The Narratives of Those Who Remained in Forced (Im)Mobilities

Two ruined cities anchor this study. The first is Jerusalem after 587/586 BCE, when Babylonian violence culminated in the city’s devastation and deportations (Lipschits 2005, pp. 81, 368; Grohmann 2016, pp. 14, 17; cf. Shalom et al. 2023). Lamentations gives this catastrophe a polyphonic and theological grammar of grief (O’Connor 2002, p. 7). The book of Lamentations gives voice to a community that remains among the rubble—survivors who inhabit a devastated urban landscape while watching others go into exile (Grohmann 2016, p. 17; Dobbs-Allsopp 2002, p. 4; Middlemas 2021, p. 60). Their bodies and memories become archives of violence that they did not choose, and yet must carry. At the same time, recent work on exile and diaspora has emphasized that the image of an entirely “desolate land” is a literary and theological fiction; archaeological and demographic studies suggest that a significant portion of the Judean population stayed in the land, and Lamentations 1 can be read as a poetic record of this “remaining” community’s trauma and disorientation (Dobbs-Allsopp 2002, p. 1).

The second city is Gwangju in May 1980. During the Gwangju Democratization Movement (18–27 May 1980), citizens protested martial law and authoritarian rule, and the city was ultimately encircled and crushed by military forces; in the aftermath, official narratives labeled the uprising a “riot” and suppressed public mourning for the dead, even as many were killed or disappeared. Human Acts (소년이 온다) returns to these dead and to survivors who cannot speak straightforwardly, narrating unfinished stories across six chapters and an epilogue. This comparative reading is a situated reading emerging from the South Korean context of state violence and contested public memory.

Placing Lamentations alongside Human Acts makes visible a shared politics of “remaining after ruin.” Both texts emerge from urban spaces where some bodies are forced to move—through deportation, disappearance, or mass killing—while others are forced to stay, immobilized within structures of occupation, surveillance, and stigma. Exile and massacre are not only events of displacement; they also generate what this article calls forced (im)mobilities: forms of constrained staying in which survivors negotiate limited movement, ongoing vulnerability, and contested memory. Lament, in this frame, does not arise from a neutral distance but from the specific position of those left behind in the wake of imperial conquest and military repression. In Lamentations, the ruined Jerusalem is personified as a bereaved woman who addresses God and passing strangers from within a shattered city, calling them to look, to see, and to refuse indifference. In Human Acts, survivors speak from spaces turned into archives of violence—gymnasiums filled with corpses, cordoned streets, and later years in which the city’s violence migrates into their bodies as insomnia, fear, and unresolved grief (Han 2016, pp. 11, 22). Forced (im)mobility thus registers not only as a spatial condition but also as a temporal and affective one: the event persists, and leaving it behind is not simply available.

Read through the lens of forced (im)mobilities, Lamentations and Human Acts illuminate how imperial and authoritarian violence generates not only coerced movement but also coerced staying—forms of constrained life within regimes that manage bodies, movement, and grief. Lament in these texts is therefore not merely a private or liturgical response to loss but a political practice that contests state and theological efforts to regulate mourning and to render certain lives ungrievable. Attending to the gendered and classed dimensions of “remaining after ruin,” this study foregrounds those who are left to carry the aftermath—widows, mothers, low-status urban dwellers, students, and workers—and asks how their laments disclose the politics of visibility, mobility, and public mourning. In this context, haunting functions not as the article’s governing theory but as a descriptive name for one recurring trauma-effect of “remaining”: unresolved violence that returns in bodies, affects, and contested public discourse (Cho 2008).

2. Interpellated by Ruins: Fourth-Person Lament as Politics of Addressee

This study reads “remaining after ruin” as a problem of address: who is hailed by catastrophe, who is made responsible, and how lament turns the addressee itself into a political site. Following Hélène Cixous, beginnings in writing and living are bound up with death—not only bereavement but the collapse of secure identity and inherited orders (Cixous 1993, p. 98). Jacques Derrida’s account of spectral return likewise foregrounds how violence does not simply “end” but reappears as an insistence that unsettles presence and mastery (Derrida 1994, p. 11). Ruins, then, are not passive settings but active agents of interpellation: they keep calling, reopening the conditions of speech and responsibility for those who remain.

Lamentations and Han Kang’s Human Acts are exemplary in this respect. In Lamentations, personification functions as a way of refusing to let the devastated be reduced to mute objects and of letting the voiceless enter the text as speaking subjects (Heim 1999, pp. 129, 139–40). What matters here is not only that suffering is represented, but that suffering is staged as an address that recruits others—readers included—into the disaster’s contested moral field (Heim 1999, pp. 130, 146–48). This interpellative structure clarifies why lament, in a ruined city, functions not as private affect but as a public claim that unsettles indifference and reassigns responsibility.

2.1. From Second Person to Fourth Person

Second-person narration is structurally unstable: “you” can slide among addressee, protagonist, narrator, and implied reader, making it especially apt for fractured selves and split positions (Richardson 2006, p. 19; 1991, p. 327; Fludernik 1994, pp. 458, 461). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of expression reinforces that address is not a simple transfer between sealed subjects but an event in which self/other boundaries are reconfigured within a shared field (Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 85; S.-J. Lee 2024, pp. 115–18). Bakhtin’s account of addressivity and heteroglossia pushes this further: utterances are always oriented toward others and saturated by social voices, so that even a seemingly singular speaker is already a crossing point of multiple speech-types (Bakhtin 1986, p. 90; 1981, p. 272). And in histories of violence and displacement, second-person address can become a formal means of dramatizing how the “I” is inhabited and pressured by voices it cannot fully own—voices of accusation, grief, and demand (Gordon 2008, pp. 7, xvi; Cho 2008, p. 29).

“Fourth-person lament,”1 as used here, names what happens when second-person address is saturated by the dead, the disappeared, and the not-yet-settled claims of justice—so that “you” no longer belongs to a determinate interlocutor but becomes a ruin-saturated field of responsibility. This is not a new grammatical category; it is an analytic shorthand for a “you” that is simultaneously singular and more-than-one, personal and impersonal, living and spectral. The concept draws on Deleuze’s account of impersonal yet singular life at the threshold of the ego (Deleuze 1994, pp. 258, 277; 2001a, pp. 28–29) and Derrida’s claim that haunting must be built into the very structure of concepts, including being and time (Derrida 1994, p. 202; Davis 2007, p. 9; Jameson 2009, p. 142). Gordon’s sociological framing clarifies the political stakes: haunting marks how what is officially “not there” can remain materially operative as a demand for recognition and a “something-to-be-done” (Gordon 2008, pp. 7–8, xvi). Fourth-person lament, then, is the mode of address produced when ruins keep returning as an ethical-political summons—especially for those forced to remain in the aftermath.

2.2. Fourth-Person Lament in Human Acts: Haunted Political Address

Human Acts scripts a “you” that cannot remain a simple second-person addressee, because the addressee is already dead and the address is repeatedly re-voiced through survivors, witnesses, and readers. In this sense, the novel’s “you” functions as a fourth- person: a ruin-saturated site of address where multiple lives and voices converge, enabled by second-person narration, free indirect and free direct presentation, and italicized passages that intensify immediacy without stabilizing the speaker. Rather than relying on a classic omniscient narrator, the novel’s technique repeatedly blurs narrator/character boundaries and makes “you” a shareable, disorienting position (Abbott 2008, pp. 77–78; Yi 2022, pp. 219–27). In Su-Jin Lee’s terms, the “I/you” configuration can function as an anonymous subject position that draws the reader into an intercorporeal sensory field (S.-J. Lee 2024, pp. 125, 128, 130–31). Yi’s reading sharpens the hauntological effect: the novel’s “you” is repeatedly addressed across the boundary of death, while plural and shifting pronouns generate a collective site of enunciation (Yi 2022, pp. 221–32). Rather than stabilizing a single narrating consciousness, these techniques stage address as a relay: the “you/we” is produced through shifts in voice and focalization, so that speaking positions remain porous and shareable. What emerges is a political addressee: a “you/we” that counters the state’s objectification of victims by reconstituting them as addressable—even where speech is blocked, censored, or unbearable.

The opening already displays this layered address2:

Looks like rain (free direct); you mutter to yourself (second-person).

What’ll we do if it really chucks it down?(free indirect)

(Italic in original, Han 2016, p. 7)

Later, Lim Seon-ju’s section intensifies fourth-person address as a field of coerced testimony, where the demand to “remember” collides with bodily knowledge that resists straightforward narration:

(a) Yoon has asked you to remember. To ‘face up to those memories’, to ‘bear witness to them’.

But how can such a thing be possible?

(b) Is it possible to bear witness to the fact of a thirty-centimetre wooden ruler being repeatedly thrust into my vagina, all the way up to the back wall of my uterus? To a rifle butt bludgeoning my cervix? To the fact that, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I had gone into shock, they had to take me to the hospital for a blood transfusion? Is it possible to face up to my continuing to bleed for the next two years, to a blood clot forming in my Fallopian tubes and leaving me permanently unable to bear children?

(Italic in original, Han 2016, p. 174)

Here, the “you” is not merely a narratological trick; it becomes the political site where forced silence, coerced recollection, and bodily remainder collide—precisely the conditions under which lament becomes a practice of refusing erasure. Human Acts can be read as generating a “fourth-person” collective subject insofar as its overlapping pronouns and relayed voicings form a polyphonic site of enunciation in which the dead, the effaced, and the community of mourners speak together (Yi 2022, p. 231). Eun-sook, now working at a publishing house, edits a play script about 5.18; the manuscript is visibly marked by state censorship, with lines struck through, and yet the writer insists on staging the play exactly in its censored form, as an exposed archive of erasure:

Once the figures of the men have melted back into the wings, their steps sliding forward with a dream-like lassitude, the woman begins to speak. Or so it seems. In actual fact, she cannot be said to say anything at all. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. Yet Eun-sook knows exactly what she is saying. She recognises the lines from the manuscript, where Mr. Seo had written them in with a pen. The manuscript she’d typed up herself, and proofread three times.

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

(Italic in original, Han 2016, p. 105)

In this scene, the performance from which sound has been erased functions as a sign of state violence, while at the same time presenting the paradox of a stage that is acoustically “full,” saturated with sound through the participation of those who experienced 5.18 or share its memory (Yi 2022, pp. 231–32). The lines within the novel are in fact spoken only imaginatively, through the editor Eun-sook who has memorized the script. In this sense, the dialogue can be said to be uttered through a newly generated personhood constituted collectively by author, actors, audience, those directly involved in 5.18, and readers as a community of mourners. At the climax, the boy finally appears, walking down the corridor toward the stage, and Eun-sook speaks his name:

“Dong-ho…”

(Han 2016, p. 107)

This visible emergence of the boy is less the reappearance of a single character than the manifestation of a fourth-person subject that arises when multiple speakers and hearers speak, write, and resonate together (Yi 2022, p. 234).

Across these scenes, the novel’s fourth-person lament can be described as “political address under enforced immobility”: it refuses the state’s attempt to close the dead as finished past, and it reopens passage by sustaining addressability where official discourse would dissolve persons into objects (Yi 2022, pp. 217, 231–34; S.-J. Lee 2024, pp. 125–31).3

2.3. Fourth-Person Lament in Lamentations: Ruin-Saturated Political Address

A comparable ruin-saturated address can be traced in Lamentations. Daughter Zion’s second-person appeal to passersby (Lam 1:12) expands beyond any single addressee, gathering God, enemies, nations, bystanders, and later readers into a contested space of responsibility. Lamentations repeatedly addresses multiple audiences from within the ruined city (e.g., Lam 1:2, 20; 2:20; 4:21–22; 5:1), and its personifications extend to structures and spaces, so that the city itself becomes a speaking and addressed site rather than a mere backdrop (Heim 1999, pp. 139–40). The feminized city-woman’s voice sounds as a collective lament that gathers both deportees and those who stayed behind.4

Because speaker positions and addressees circulate across narrator, city, community, enemies, and God, the text refuses to let either responsibility or voice settle into a single stable location. This is where a fourth-person field emerges: not a new pronoun that replaces “I/you/we,” but a shared enunciative space in which “I/you/we” remain mobile, overlap, and become structurally inhabitable by later mourners without collapsing the catastrophe into closure. In this sense, the communal “we” is multi-sited, formed where templeless, spatially rooted memories of those who remained intersect with later exilic theologies and liturgical reuse (Middlemas 2021, pp. 61–64). And Daughter Zion’s “you” can remain overdetermined—not because address is vague, but because the book declines to stabilize responsibility into a single moral position (Heim 1999, pp. 146–53; Berlin 2002, pp. 6, 51; Dobbs-Allsopp 2002, p. 59; Grohmann 2016, pp. 17–21; O’Connor 2002, pp. 20–21, 103).

Recent scholarship helps clarify how Lamentations’ unresolved polyphony yields a composite field of address—a fourth-person configuration in which speaking and being-addressed cannot be reduced to a single, stable position. Miller (2001, pp. 402–3, 406) highlights how Lam 1 stages distinct, unmerged voices (narrator and Daughter Zion) that pull the reader into their tension rather than leaving the reader outside. Boase (2006, p. 206) likewise emphasizes that no single theological voice secures final control of the book’s discursive space. Mandolfo (2007, p. 68) sharpens this point by reading Lam 1–2 as a genuine quarrel in which Daughter Zion’s voice actively contests and reworks other discourses. Korzec (2021, p. 637) shows that even Lam 3’s “I” functions as a questioned, model-like voice within a broader panorama rather than as a settled center. O’Connor (2002, p. 138) frames the book’s climactic “we” as a historically grounded yet liturgically shareable voice—one communities can later inhabit without forcing catastrophe into closure.

Taken together, these readings suggest less a harmonized “dialogue” than a composite, unsettled personhood produced by the text’s relay of voices and addresses. Thus, Daughter Zion is not simply a “survivor” in the sense of someone who remains alive; as a figure for this unsettled survival, Daughter Zion can be read as living a sur-vie—a life-in-between—where the dead remain present as ongoing addressees (Derrida 1994, p. xx). Here “survival” names not an ontological claim about ghosts, but an effect of addressability: the dead persist as addressees within the politics of lament. In this sense, Lamentations scripts a fourth-person lament whose address remains inhabitable across time, space, and liturgical reuse—so that “those who remain after ruin” can be named not only as witnesses of catastrophe but as remaining bodies whose constrained staying becomes a site of political-theological contestation under forced (im)mobilities.

Here Paul de Man’s critique of prosopopeia marks the ambivalence of speaking-with-the-dead: when the living “lend” their voice to the dead, they may be “struck dumb, frozen in their own death,” as agency is displaced onto a fictional “voice-from-beyond-the-grave” (de Man 1984, pp. 77–78). Read through fourth-person lament, this is not a reason to abandon spectral address but a constraint on how it can function politically and theologically. Ruin-saturated “you” cannot remain a purely textual haunting or a disembodied ventriloquism; it must be answerable to the bodies that remain—the unburied, the unmourned, the injured, the traumatized—and to the communal practices that carry them. A theology “on the ruins,” then, begins where interpretation is bound to care: in the politics of lament enacted by remaining bodies under conditions of forced (im)mobilities—through practices of tending, naming, and public mourning in the aftermath of imperial and state violence.

3. Remaining After Ruin: Grotesque Bodies and the Ethics of Re-Address

Fourth-person lament leaves responsibility and address unresolved—and precisely for that reason it cannot remain at the level of voice alone. Ghostly address is mediated through bodies that remain: corpses left unburied, scars, exhaustion, and the spatial afterlives of ruin. In Human Acts, the italicized passages can be read as bodily utterance—speech anchored in the sensory, temporal-spatial specificity of Gwangju rather than floating as disembodied memory (Jun 2022, p. 133). A comparable cue operates in Lamentations: its insistently somatic lexicon and ruin-bound imperatives (“look,” “see,” “remember,” unceasing tears) bind address to hunger, blood, and exhausted flesh, so that lament registers as bodily testimony from within the city’s wreckage (e.g., Lam 1:11–12; 2:11–12; 2:18–19; O’Connor 2002, p. 83). What persists is not only narrative voice, but the body as the site where violence is registered, recalled, and re-addressed.

3.1. Grotesque Body(ies) of Christ

To name remaining bodies as sites of lament is also to name the kind of truth that can be generated there. As Bakhtin argues, “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin 1984a, p. 110). This is not a claim about consensus so much as a claim about truth as an event of relational hearing—truth that arises where wounded bodies listen-with and endure the costs of address. In this register, the grotesque body is not monstrosity but the symbolic undoing of closed boundaries and settled hierarchies. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as “not a closed, completed unit,” a body that is “unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits” (Bakhtin 1984b, p. 26). What remains after violence—unburied corpses, open wounds, insomnia, fear, bodily residue—cannot be reduced to “private suffering”; it is the public exposure of how history and power pass through flesh.

After 5.18, some Korean churches and artists developed a radical christological iconography that overlays the bodies of massacre victims with Christ’s wounded body (S. C. Lee 2015, p. 6). In Kim Bong-jun’s Foolish Jesus, especially, this overlay is staged not only iconographically but also materially: as a relief-printed image, the work is designed for multiple impressions and for circulation—cheaply and repeatedly—across memorial liturgies and public protest settings. The medium itself thus participates in forming a shared practice of reading the crucified Christ alongside victimized bodies under state violence (Yoo 2011, p. 180). Within the image, moreover, the body is not idealized; it appears awkward and exposed, refusing classical wholeness. The print thereby invites viewers to read the crucified Christ as overlapping with “foolish” victimized bodies—bodies violated by state violence yet bearing truth against official discourse (Yoo 2011, p. 180; S. C. Lee 2015, pp. 2–3).

Read in this light, the “grotesque body(ies) of Christ” cannot function as a cheap metaphor that aestheticizes suffering. Its claim is that truth and justice are re-generated “on the ground,” among bodies that cannot be quickly buried—literally or politically. Bakhtin’s account of “positive degradation” clarifies the stakes: “Degradation,” Bakhtin writes, means “coming down to earth,” and this downward movement is “not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one” (Bakhtin 1984b, p. 21). Degradation “digs a bodily grave for a new birth,” hurling what is exalted down into the material “lower stratum” where regeneration becomes imaginable (Bakhtin 1984b, p. 21).

Lamentations is saturated with corporeality that fits this grotesque register. The poems linger on hunger and bodily depletion (Lam 1:11; 4:4, 8), on infants collapsing and life “poured out” at the breast (Lam 2:11–12), and on the horrific reversal in which “compassionate women” boil their children (Lam 2:20; 4:10; cf. Thomas 2013, p. 222). The ruined built-world is likewise rendered as bodily collapse—walls that “mourn” and gates that “sink” (Lam 2:8–9)—so that bodies and ruins interpenetrate as one devastated field (N. C. Lee 2002, p. 146; Joyce and Lipton 2013, p. 75). In this way, the “body of the people” is not an abstract symbol but the medium in which catastrophe is registered, protested, and kept addressable. Daughter Zion condenses this more-than-individual body: a persona in which land, people, and the capital’s destruction overlap as one wounded figure (O’Connor 2002, pp. 20, 23).

Human Acts refuses to leave such corporeality safely at the level of image. In Lim Seon-ju’s narrative (see §2.2[b]), sexual torture and lasting bodily injury expose the underside of official rhetoric about “order” or “national necessity.” The body becomes an archive of state violence, where power inscribes itself into flesh. Read together, Lamentations and Human Acts show that the politics of lament is inseparable from the politics of bodies: fourth-person lament reverberates in opened, unfinished bodies that bleed, scar, and endure (O’Connor 2002, p. 4; Lam 2:11–12; 2:18; 4:4, 8–11).

3.2. Unlamented Bodies: Grotesque Witness on the Ruins

If fourth-person lament keeps address and responsibility unsettled, it also presses interpretation downward—into the bodily field where violence is registered and where mourning is either permitted or refused. Lamentations has repeatedly been read as constructing precisely this “body-language” of public witness: instead of sealing catastrophe into explanatory closure, the poems make pain speak, holding social, personal, and physical distress together within a shared bodily register—“the body becomes a way of experiencing and expressing all kinds of distress—social, personal, and physical” (Cottrill 2008, pp. 109–10). In that sense, bodily imagery in Lamentations is not ornamental; it is one of the text’s primary means for refusing denial and for keeping devastation publicly contestable (O’Connor 2002, p. 4; Joyce and Lipton 2013, p. 60).

A comparable commitment to bodily utterance emerges in Human Acts, not only at the level of what the novel depicts but in how it insists on sensation as a medium of memory. In an interview, Han Kang frames the project as an attempt to render the felt texture of pain and to stay with the voices of those who were piled up, burned, or clandestinely buried (Y.-s. Kim 2014, p. 322). Kim’s interview record also clarifies the novel’s relational ethic of embodiment: across Dong-ho, Jeong-dae, Eun-sook, Jin-su, and Seon-ju, suffering does not remain private interiority but moves as an intercorporeal “leaning”—a bodily inclination toward another’s pain that becomes, in Kim’s phrasing, a last defense of human dignity (Y.-s. Kim 2014, pp. 321–22). Read alongside Lamentations’ polyphonic arrangement—voices that do not harmonize yet remain co-present around a single catastrophe—this “leaning” can be understood as a fourth-person logic at the level of bodies: different lives bear overlapping wounds without collapsing difference into sameness (O’Connor 2002, p. 83; Thomas 2013, pp. 92, 173).

This is also where “unlamented bodies” becomes more than a thematic label. Lamentations’ scenes of hunger, exhausted infants, public humiliation, and unprotected corpses (Lam 2:11–13; 4:1–10; 5) form a ruined social world in which some lives are rendered discardable and grief is politically contested. Scholarship on Lamentations has long noted how ruined space is narrated as bodily collapse—an urban “death” lament in which architecture and flesh interpenetrate, so that the devastated built world functions like the wreckage of a communal body (Westermann 1994, p. 11; N. C. Lee 2002, pp. 89–90; Joyce and Lipton 2013, p. 60). Human Acts echoes this logic through the gymnasium, the lists, the identification of the dead, and the strained labor of handling bodies—public sites turned into evidence-warehouses of state violence—so that place itself becomes part of the body’s afterlife. In that sense, ruin is not merely a setting; it is a condition that immobilizes and reorganizes life. Thomas’s account of forced emplacement, together with Linafelt’s description of a “displaced” existence even without geographic departure, helps name this as (im)mobilized displacement: remaining in place under conditions that make ordinary dwelling impossible (Thomas 2013, p. 179; Linafelt 2000, p. 40).

Lamentations 5 is crucial here because it gathers bodily ruin into a communal petition that is simultaneously memory-work and public speech. The chapter has often been read as the moment when the community’s praying voice becomes explicit—an attempt to lift private loss into public address and, thereby, into a politics of remembrance (Linafelt 2000, pp. 38–41; O’Connor 2002, pp. 86–87, 104). Williamson’s framing is helpful: the communal lament can function as “public transcript” under domination while also carrying an edge of “hidden” resistance that refuses tidy reconciliation (Williamson 2008, pp. 68–69). O’Connor’s related emphasis on God’s silence sharpens the point: precisely because the text does not resolve suffering by divine speech, it grants priority to the voices of pain and refuses to “solve” their polyphony (O’Connor 2002, pp. 85–86, 94). The result is a witness-form that does not “whitewash” catastrophe but keeps it publicly addressable (O’Connor 2002, p. 4). Holocaust survivor and witness-writer Elie Wiesel describes writing “to stop the dead from dying,” speaking “to those who were gone” so that the dead might “live on … in my memory” (Wiesel 1995, pp. 239–40). Within fourth-person lament, such address persists under catastrophe by refusing to relinquish the dead as interlocutors.

Human Acts intensifies this bodily witness by letting the dead speak through sensation that cannot be morally or narratively domesticated.

I think of the festering wound in my side.

Of the bullet that tore in there.

The strange chill, the seeming blunt force, of that initial impact,

That instantly became a lump of fire churning my insides,

Of the hole it made in my other side, where it flew out and

tugged my hot blood behind it.

Of the barrel it was blasted out of.

Of the smooth trigger.

Of the eye that had me in its sights.

Of the eyes of the one who gave the order to fire.

(Han 2016, p. 61; Italic is original)

Even when Jeong-dae turns toward accountability, the address falters into an agonizing aporia—“Go to those who killed you, then/But where are they?” (Han 2016, p. 62; italics original). The problem is not simply ignorance; it is the political structure by which responsibility disappears. Hirsch’s account of sanctioned massacre clarifies the mechanism: violence becomes possible when perpetrators redefine themselves as instruments of authority and thereby disown responsibility for harmed bodies (Hirsch 1995, p. 128). Fourth-person lament can be read as a counter-practice at exactly this point: a hauntological “you” that refuses the conversion of bodies into disposable matter by reclaiming them as addressees within a contested moral universe—bodies to whom speech must still be directed, even when the agents of harm are routinized into anonymity.

This is why haunting cannot remain a purely textual category here. Derrida’s language of spectrality names a mode of survival that is neither simple presence nor simple absence; the demand is to learn life “with ghosts,” in the strange interval “between life and death” (Derrida 1994, pp. xvii–xviii). Abraham and Torok’s account of the “phantom” similarly offers a grammar for unfinished business that persists across generations as a foreign remainder—less a stable image of the past than an active afterlife within embodied subjects (Abraham and Torok 1994, p. 167). Yet these spectral economies are mediated through material constraints: bodies that remain are not at rest but are held in place by surveillance, occupation, stigma, and by trauma’s compulsive returns. Derrida’s description of mourning as an aporia—where completion fails and the other’s trace remains “impossible” to interiorize—helps articulate why this bodily witness is structurally unfinished (Derrida 1989, pp. 35, 38). In this sense, haunting names not only voice but arrested movement: the forced staying of bodies that cannot leave the scene and yet cannot stop moving within it through memory, affect, and ritual.

Placed against the ruins, then, “grotesque witness” can be named with precision: it is the public, embodied insistence that unlamented bodies remain addressable—through scars, exhaustion, handling of the dead, lists, tears, and communal speech—when empire and state attempt to eject certain lives from the domain of mournability.

4. Arrested Movements: (Im)Mobility and the War of Memory and Affect

Han Kang reflects on the writing of Human Acts in bodily terms: “all I could do was lend them the sensations, emotions, and life pulsing through my own body” (Han 2024). Read alongside the preceding sections, this remark names a key problem: fourth-person lament keeps address and responsibility unresolved, but that unresolvedness is not abstract. It is mediated through arrested movement—through bodies that are constrained, returned, and held in place by fear, surveillance, stigma, and the repetitive force of traumatic recall. Lament, in this register, can be approached as a resistant form of movement within enforced immobility: a way of refusing the closure of passage when “advance” is structurally forbidden.

This sense of blocked passage has a conceptual analogue in Derrida’s description of interpretive conflict as an “endless war” with “multiple fronts and frontiers,” where “the very possibility of the passage seems to forbid any advance,” and yet responsibility must still be assumed precisely there (Derrida 1989, pp. 177–78). If the “war” is not only textual but also political, then its medium is not only memory but also affect. Ahmed’s account of fear clarifies how movement is governed affectively: fear does not merely represent danger but materially contracts bodies and “restricts the body’s mobility,” working to “contain some bodies by restricting the mobility of others” (Ahmed 2014, p. 69; see also Ahmed 2014, pp. 4, 10). In this sense, immobilization is not simply a physical condition; it is an affective apparatus that organizes who may move, who must stay, and how bodies are oriented toward others.

To name this “war of memory and affect” more precisely, Deleuze’s Spinozist account of affectus is useful: affectus is “the passage from one state to another,” registered as a variation—an increase or diminution—in “the power of acting” (Deleuze 2001b, pp. 49–50). Movement and immobility can therefore be read not only as locomotion but as the changing capacities produced by encounters: whether an encounter composes bodies (joy) or decomposes them (sadness) (Deleuze 2001b, p. 50; 1992, p. 261). Even immobility, then, is not affectively static; it can be a repeated condition in which bodies are immobilized through hostile encounters that diminish collective capacity. In this register, denial, distortion, and the manipulation of public memory are not secondary problems but mechanisms that restrain what bodies and communities can do (Hirsch 1995, p. 10; Deleuze 1992, p. 257).

Lamentations offers a thick biblical analogue for this politics of arrested passage. The book repeatedly stages distress as bodily testimony: “over and over again, it represents the body as at once the sign of physical suffering and the signifier of psychological causes and effects” (Joyce and Lipton 2013, p. 60). Its testimonies remain in “unresolved tension,” such that “no voice wins out, unifies, or dominates,” resisting assimilation into a single authoritative account (O’Connor 2002, pp. 84, 86). This arrested movement is also inscribed in the lexicon of displacement: in Lam 1:3, the exiled “finds no resting place,” a mobility deprived of rest and tethered to affliction and servitude (Thomas 2013, p. 101). At the level of voicing, the interchange of individual and communal voices blurs the borders of speech, making it unclear whether the voices respond to one another or overlap in an unstable relay (Thomas 2013, p. 173). And at the ending, Lam 5:22 can be read as an arrested conditional—an “if” without a “then”—a protasis “left trailing off,” which “leaves open the future of the ones lamenting” (Linafelt 2000, p. 60). What is “arrested” here is not only narrative closure but the political drive to seal devastation into finished meaning. By refusing closure, the book keeps memory and feeling in dispute, compelling repeated return—through communal speech and ritual—to the ruin where the dead remain grievable and addressable.

Human Acts emerges from a comparable contest over public remembrance. Memory, as Margalit insists, is an ethical–social question—“So what should humanity remember?”—and shared memory is carried by “institutions of shared memory” that determine what is preserved and what is permitted to disappear (Margalit 2002, pp. 78, 58). In that register, “the witness has nothing but [the] memory,” and to impugn memory is to lend credibility to denial itself (Wiesel 1995, p. 336). Bakhtin sharpens the point at the level of cultural transmission: traditions are preserved not primarily in private memory but in the “objective forms that culture itself assumes” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 249, footnote 17). Against this background, Human Acts can be read as intervening in a contested mnemonic field around Gwangju. Survival, here, is pressed into the struggle against forgetting—“Did I survive in order to combat forgetting?” (Wiesel 1995, p. 80). The novel dramatizes the desecration and protection of the dead in a direct plea: “Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again” (Han 2016, p. 220). In this context, the book’s recurrent problem is not only “what happened” but the politics of who is permitted to grieve, to speak, and to make the dead publicly addressable.

Not the “grand narrative” of Gwangju, but the memory of an unspoken Gwangju—because it entails death—passes through the living and thereby gives form to the very impossibility of testimony (Jun 2022, p. 129). Just as, in Lamentations, voices “drift away” from one another and remain by “accepting” the conflict (Ku 2024, p. 23), the conflict of memory is also written as arrested movement at the level of ritual and affect:

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.

After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck.

After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain.

(Han 2016, p. 108; italic in original)

Your [the boy’s] absence makes blood boil; with a force of pain and rage as if the heart might burst, the boy’s death continues within a life that has become an unhealed wound for those who survived (Y. Kim 2015, p. 464). This is affect as a dynamic force that seeks to transform reality, and as a leaning of the body toward another’s pain (Y.-s. Kim 2014, p. 321). The resonance of this affect arises not from an individual body but from the collision between bodies.

Arrested movement, then, is the condition—and the contest—of those who remain after ruin: the terrain where memory and affect are fought over, and where lament keeps the dead publicly addressable. Lament becomes a politics of remaining—resistant passage within enforced immobility—without resolving responsibility into a single voice or a finished story.

5. Conclusions: Politics of Lament as Remaining on the Ruins

This study argues that fourth-person lament is not a stylistic curiosity but a political form of address on the ruins. In Lamentations, the ruined city’s “you” gathers multiple parties into a contested field of responsibility that the book refuses to resolve into a single moral position (Lam 1:12; Heim 1999, pp. 146–53; O’Connor 2002, pp. 84, 86). Yet this unresolved address does not remain at the level of voice alone: it is mediated through remaining bodies—unburied dead, hunger, exhaustion, tears—through which catastrophe stays publicly felt and contested (Lam 2:11–12; Joyce and Lipton 2013, p. 60). Here Bakhtin’s account of dialogic truth and grotesque openness clarifies the stakes: truth is generated “between people” in dialogic interaction (Bakhtin 1984a, p. 110), and the grotesque body is “not a closed, completed unit” but “unfinished… transgress[ing] its own limits” (Bakhtin 1984b, p. 26), so that degradation “coming down to earth” can bear a regenerating force (Bakhtin 1984b, p. 21). Finally, “arrested movement” names how this politics persists under forced (im)mobilities: fear materially restricts mobility (Ahmed 2014, p. 69), and shared memory is governed by institutions that determine what is carried forward and what is permitted to disappear (Margalit 2002, pp. 58, 78). Lament, in this register, is resistant passage within enforced immobility—an insistence that the dead remain publicly addressable, and that devastation not be sealed into closure or a single authorized story (Linafelt 2000, p. 60; Han 2016, pp. 108, 220).