The Experience of the May 18 Uprising and the Communal Imagination

There was a collective commune in the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, and the memory of this experience has become well-known as an ideal. It is composed of three phases: first, the early struggle phases; second, the phase of liberated Gwangju; and third, the phase of the last armed defense of civilian power. Perspectives that endow the Gwangju Uprising with the image of a community or a commune, for example, the United World theory, the Commune theory and the Absolute Community theory, tend to focus on either the first or the second phase in order to examine the community characteristics. For the theoretical formulation of the communal experience in the Gwangju Uprising, the final phase should be emphasized because of its historical insight. It was a struggle for truth, a transcendence of secular life and the creation of a new historical community. This transcendence of the historical community is the origin of the emotions and the drive to continue the fight for Korean democracy in the 1980s.