전략적 침묵과 우회적 발화:『이니쉬만의 크리플』의 장애와 증언

초록

This paper examines how the disabled protagonist Billy in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) emerges as a testimonial subject through strategic silence and fabricated speech. Approaching the play through the ethics of disability representation, and drawing on disability studies, affect theory, and trauma theory, it argues that Billy’s silence and false declaration of imminent death function as performative acts that negotiate speech within a community structured by stigma and exclusion. Rather than reducing disability to narrative prosthesis or individual lack, Billy is situated within communal gazes and biopolitical hierarchies that render his life only conditionally grievable. His illness thus operates as an affective form of testimony whose force lies less in factual truth than in its capacity to expose the social conditions under which recognition and care become possible. Conceptualizing subjectivation as an affective process between silence and articulation, Billy’s fragmented speech sustains an ethical tension in which silence and testimony coexist. Ultimately, the play reveals how disabled suffering becomes only precariously legible within a community that resists witnessing it.