A Trauma-Ridden Body Lifted High: Eschatological Imagination in a Public Square

Abstract

Public demonstrations shed much meaning when the precarity of the human body's standing in the public space is considered. This article seeks to decipher the complex messages such instances communicate through a case study of a one-person protest against a multinational conglomerate on a CCTV pole in Seoul. It describes how the body's precarity generates transformative social imaginations through interdisciplinary analysis. Starting with a thick description of the protester's and his community's history, this article interprets the message conveyed in this particular public space through interdisciplinary analysis. The resulting interpretation allows the formation of an eschatological theological imagination which brews with the possibility to transform the public onlooker into participants in such imagination.