Abstract

This article aims to make an aesthetic notion of the word Yopki, by taking it as a secondary notion and not as a familiarized one in the everyday life. Most Koreans imagine at first cruelty and fear when they think about its meaning. As it represents the grotesque, which arouses a curiosity, it could hold the fear of strangeness as a conceptual element. But how can it be associated automatically with cruelty? To answer this question, we seek firstly a history of the taste for 'Yopki' since 1930s to nowadays and analyze the modifications of its meaning. It is toward Freud's aesthetics of Unconsciousness that our perspective is oriented. In this objective, we do also a very detailed analysis of the two chinese ideograms which constitute the word, to associate them with the return of the repressed, by calling for some Freud's notions like uncanny, pleasure principle, death instincts. By that, we can see the possibility to link the characteristics of Yopki with fear or angst which are produced by the return of the repressed. To finish, observing that the boredom and the narcissistic wound of an isolated individual in his hyper modernized life make his imagination aggressive and destructive, we can finally say that cruelty remains under the meaning of yopki in spite of its widespread and familiarized usage.