Coexisting With Others as Homo Symbiøus: From the Interracial Encounters in The Tiger Factory and Bandhobi

Abstract

This paper creates a Bandungist comparison between The Tiger Factory (2010), a Malay independent film by Woo Ming Jin, and Bandhobi (2009), a Korean counterpart by Shin Dong-il. Although the two movies both present relationships between Southeast Asian males who are illegal migrants and East Asian females who are also socially marginalized, they arrive at contrasting endings: one finishes with betrayal, while the other finds genuine solidarity. Thus, focusing on how the characters in each film formulate, break, and perhaps re-connect the bonds with one another, arriving at different conclusions, this paper seeks an ethical direction regarding inter-subjective communion. In this process, most characters in The Tiger Factory are revealed as primarily depicting an otherizing tendency of Lacanian phallic jouissance, which reduces the other as a mere means and thus violates the imperative of Kantian personalism. On the contrary, Bandhobi’s main protagonists, Karim and Min-seo, discover themselves within each other, thereby replacing alterity with Gayatri Spivak’s planetarity. Therefore, the paper concludes that Karim, Min-seo, and the sole personalist character in the former movie, Kang, are Homo Symbiøus─human beings who coexist with others based on the hybrid of Kant’s and Spivak’s ethics─borrowing the mathematical concept of the empty set (ø).