By Yanis Iqbal

In KPop Demon Hunters (2025), the lore tells us that demons led by their ruler Gwi-Ma “steal souls” and draw strength from this theft, implying a form of parasitic extraction of psychic or libidinal energy. Yet, in this cosmology, the resistance to this force is not collective rebellion or communal organization, but the emergence of three special women who are “born with voices that could drive back the darkness.” 

These demon-hunters are mythic saviors who channel the curative power of music to fight evil. Celine, an ex-hunter, says: “Our music ignites the soul and brings people together,” but this “bringing together” is paradoxically orchestrated from above. The affective glue of community (the “Honmoon” magic barrier that protects the human world) is the product of a technical mastery of performance, a spiritual bio-politics mediated through elite figures rather than self-governed social forms.

Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly 

It is because of the individualization of social forms that the movie keeps ignoring the structural character of the problems it addresses. For instance, consider the workings of Gwi-Ma. The creature uses a parasitic form of psychological domination rooted in shame, misery, and internal torment. Jinu, a demon, reveals that they are beings who are consumed by feeling, particularly by overwhelming shame. The physical marks borne on their bodies are visceral inscriptions of past failure, guilt, or unresolved pain. 

Where does this guilt or pain come from? The case of Jinu demonstrates that it is socio-historic in nature. Jinu was a young artist facing the crushing weight of poverty and social abandonment. Faced with the inability to provide for his family or secure a meaningful future, Jinu is approached by Gwi-Ma, who gives him a beautiful voice. This lands him a job at the king’s palace. But this offer doesn’t extend to Jinu’s family; only he gains the chance to live in the palace.  

Jinu initially tells demon hunter Rumi a story of nobility. In his first version of events, he accepts Gwi-Ma’s offer to lift not just himself, but his entire family out of suffering. For a while, he and his family live comfortably in the palace. However, Jinu is soon condemned into the demon realm, which leads to his family being kicked out of the palace. This narrative allows him to maintain a sense of moral worth: he failed while trying to do good. But this version is a lie. The truth, which Jinu later confesses to Rumi, is that he left them behind. 

The decision was selfish, and he knows it. “I left them,” he repeats. His demonhood, then, is not simply the result of making a deal, but of refusing to acknowledge the ethical cost of that deal. The patterns of possession that consume his body are symbolic of a deeper possession: his refusal to confront the truth of his own betrayal. This is what makes Gwi-Ma’s power truly insidious. He doesn’t corrupt people by force; he waits until they are cornered, then offers them an “escape” that leads to deeper emotional imprisonment. 

Once Jinu takes the deal, shame becomes the instrument of control. His guilt metastasizes, occupying his entire identity. In Gwi-Ma’s world, a wrong choice under social pressure becomes totalizing: you are what you did. Jinu’s guilt is thus not a private, psychological event; it is the political and historical residue of survival under structural injustice. 

If the guilt on which Gwi-Ma feeds is a product of structural injustice, shouldn’t the antidote to it be the removal of these circumstances? The movie, however, opts for a false solution, in which it is the individual’s moral power that repairs all wounds. After listening to Jinu’s story, Rumi says, “You were a good person, and you still are. You just made a mistake.” Here, the former’s decision to abandon his family is understood not as a result of structural conditions beyond his control but as a “mistake,” as a moment when his moral power falters. Theodor Adorno once said that that “[w]rong life cannot be lived rightly,” emphasizing how society functions in such a way as to force us to participate in blatantly immoral activities. In other words, there are situations where ethics is decided not by the individual but by the frozen, self-perpetuating structures of society. 

Rumi, on the other hand, believes that nothing constrains us from being good. In fact, even when we behave evilly, we can remain a “good person”. The individual is the supreme agent of morality, always possessing the power to make things right, with the occasional “mistakes” being the only thing that distract them from their true nature. Rumi seems to believe that this true nature can be discovered by being hopeful about the possibility of self-transformation, a hope that is entirely controlled by you. In her words, “That’s the funny thing about hope. Nobody else gets to decide if you feel it. That choice belongs to you.”

That this true nature, this essential goodness, can be recovered through the power of personal “choice”, is something that remains unaffected by history. When Jinu painfully recounts to Rumi how he left his sister and mother, the latter says, “But that’s not all you are. This is just your demon talking. You have to fight it!” In that moment, Rumi seeks to comfort Jinu, but in doing so, she enacts the very ideological gesture that buries the moral crisis he is trying to articulate. Her line treats the confession as if it were merely the voice of trauma or possession, as if guilt is a psychological ailment to be expelled rather than a symptom of real historical violence.

In this view, Jinu’s betrayal becomes detachable from who he is, as though one can surgically extract “the demon” from the “true self.” But this is precisely what forecloses the moral truth of Jinu’s condition: that he has in fact been reduced to his actions, and that this reduction is not a moral failure on his part alone; it is the result of a world in which individuals are systematically forced to make unethical choices for bare survival.

This is the deeper tragedy, and the real political dilemma. Jinu did not betray his family because he strayed from his true self. He did so because he lived in a world without collective alternatives, where self-preservation is privatized, and where access to a dignified life is granted only in exchange for complicity. The moral problem is not that Jinu was “weak” or “flawed,” but that society itself offers no way to live justly without incurring guilt. It reduces people to the sum of their unethical choices because it deprives them of any collective mechanism for self-determination. The immorality, then, is not just personal but structural. And any redemptive framework that avoids this truth risks being complicit in it.

Rumi, in this scene, displaces the political into the psychological. Instead of recognizing that Jinu’s actions are embedded in a world that demands betrayal as the cost of success, she projects a pure self beyond history, a soul untouched by class, abandonment, or the economy of survival. But this move, however emotionally sincere, is ultimately conservative. It allows the present social order to remain intact by framing moral repair as a matter of inner strength rather than social transformation. It privatizes responsibility and thereby obscures the real task: building a world in which people like Jinu would never be forced to choose between hunger and guilt in the first place.

Only a new society, based on collective ownership of life’s means, can undo the conditions that made Jinu into what he did. And it is this political horizon, this demand for another form of life, that Rumi’s therapeutic discourse cannot see. Her forgiveness is not dangerous because it is too generous, but because it absolves without changing the world that necessitated betrayal to begin with.

Can We Talk It All Out? Habermas and the Illusions of Communication

In the movie, change is never oriented towards transforming the world but always aimed at the change of the self. This takes place through the central role accorded to communication. Rumi’s duet with Jinu constructs a therapeutic ideal of communication as an inherently healing force, capable of unlocking suppressed parts of the self and reintegrating them into a coherent, expressive identity. “Since I’ve met you, and the more I talk to you… my voice has healed,” she says, locating transformation not in struggle or structural change, but in the unfolding of a dialogical relation. This is the fantasy of speech as self-realization: a cathartic, almost magical channel through which shame is dissolved and internal blockage – “the words kept catching in my throat” – is lifted simply by mutual emotional access.

The point, according to Rumi, is to release those “words” or self-aspects, that have been kept in “chains”: “All the secrets that keep me in chains and all the damage that might make me dangerous.” To remove these chains, one needs to “face” the “dark side” that resides in us. Through act of facing the “dark side,” our oppressive past becomes “weightless”. In this entire cinematic universe of self-emancipation, the metaphor of “chains” does a lot of heavy-lifting. It represents oppression as a kind of perceptible, external constraint wrapped around words that contain hidden truths about the self. To remove these chains, one must “face” the “dark side” within. Through this act of internal confrontation, the past becomes “weightless,” as if liberated by a kind of inner clarity or expressive catharsis. Self-liberation, here, becomes a psychodramatic act of communication: by revealing what is repressed, the subject regains autonomy.

But this imaginary of power as bondage – visible, static, and concentrated in the individual – runs counter to Michel Foucault’s account of how power operates. In his analysis, “when man is in chains,” this is “not a power relationship” but “a question of a physical relationship of constraint.” In other words, power is not equivalent to total domination or absolute repression. Rather, power requires the subject’s freedom – it is “a mode of action upon the actions of others,” operating within “a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized.” Where no such variation or recalcitrance is possible, where action is physically immobilized, we are no longer dealing with power but with brute force.

The film’s metaphor of chains suggests precisely the kind of saturation of constraint that forecloses any field of maneuver. It imagines oppression as something so immediate and material that the possibility of agency lies only in a total rupture, one that the individual must enact alone, by confronting their inner darkness. But such a conception remains locked within what we might call a phenomenology of immediacy: it focuses on the subjugated body-in-pain while neglecting the relational field in which that body exists.

Foucault’s framework invites us to shift attention away from the isolated individual and toward the collective movement of bodies, toward prison-breaks, resistance networks, and social collisions. Change arises not through personal healing but through the unpredictable openings created by collective action. As long as the film remains trapped in the image of “chains,” it remains unable to conceive how resistance emerges not from interior strength alone but from the interplay of social relations.

Liberation, then, cannot be reduced to the individual’s magical capacity to heal themselves by voicing their trauma. It requires a recognition that the subject is not simply an atom passively dominated, but a socially embedded agent whose connections, affiliations, and solidarities create the very conditions for power to be resisted. The movie’s investment in a psychologized and individualistic model of power blinds it to this more complex, and politically potent, vision of how liberation actually takes place.

The movie’s individualist-communicative model of emancipation has a precursor in the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’ belief is that linguistic understanding (Verständigung) enables reconciliation, that intersubjectivity grounded in truthfulness restores what has been broken. He consistently grounds the possibility of normative innovation in the pre-existing capacities embedded within linguistic interaction itself. He asserts that “linguistically established intersubjectivity of understanding marks that innovation in the history of the species which first made possible the level of sociocultural learning.” That is, the very condition of possibility for social reproduction and transformation lies in structures already inherent in language, a communicative rationality that, while not always manifest, remains structurally available. From the ease with which Jinu and Rumi duet with each other and reach catharsis, it isn’t hard to observe the movie’s deeply Habermasian belief in the healing powers of communication/language. 

Michael J. Thompson offers a trenchant critique of Habermas by identifying the neo-Idealist foundations of his theory of communicative action. Thompson’s central claim is that Habermas detaches the genesis of normative values and critical consciousness from the material structures of society. For Habermas, moral and rational self-constitution occurs through communicative acts oriented toward mutual understanding and normative justification. As Thompson notes, this relies on “the thesis that the symbolic and cognitive elements of social action are causally and empirically distinct from the material structures of social life.” This separation marks a decisive turn toward neo-Idealism, wherein norms are legitimated through discourse alone rather than through critical engagement with the objective and coercive structures of social domination.

Thompson traces this orientation back to Karl-Otto Apel’s ethical project, which attempted to eliminate any ontological grounding of morality in favor of a universal communicative duty. Ethics, under this paradigm, becomes a matter of deliberation and dialogic assent, not a confrontation with systemic domination. But as Thompson incisively argues, “the normative structures of meaning that individuals use are themselves rooted in and, in part, expressions of the material organization of power in which they are embedded.” In other words, discourse does not float freely above society; rather, the very capacity for communication and recognition is conditioned by the social relations within which subjects are socialized especially those shaped by capital and its functional requirements. By denying this embeddedness, Habermas abstracts discourse from the real-world mechanisms of social reproduction, thereby losing sight of the very forces that shape, constrain, and often neutralize communicative action.

This detachment, Thompson argues, undermines the emancipatory claims of critical theory itself. Neo-Idealism posits that critique can emerge immanently from within intersubjective practices such as communication and recognition, but fails to account for how the “content and form of consciousness is shaped and determined by structural-functional logics” that reproduce domination. This illusion of autonomy is the hallmark of reification, which, following Lukács, Thompson reinterprets not as a cultural phenomenon or a failure of moral sentiment, but as a “cognitive pathology,” a fundamental distortion of the subject’s ability to grasp the social totality. In neo-Idealist thought, reification is mistakenly treated as external to communication, as if discourse could remain untouched by the forms of instrumental reason and economic rationality that structure modern institutions.

Habermas’s turn to hermeneutics and communicative action tries to carve out a space for critique outside the positivist logic of the empirical sciences. But in doing so, he splits the dialectic between being and thought that Marx maintained. Habermas writes that “hermeneutics maintains the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding,” suggesting that reason can unfold in a quasi-transcendental domain of dialogue. Yet, as Thompson stresses, this very move is what breaks the link between critical consciousness and the material relations of domination. Communicative rationality, stripped from its social embeddedness, becomes incapable of addressing how the norms it appeals to are already inscribed with ideological functions, functions that stabilize the very social order it seeks to reform.

Thus, neo-Idealism not only overestimates the autonomy of intersubjectivity but underestimates the degree to which reification infiltrates even the most seemingly democratic forms of interaction. “Reification,” writes Thompson, “can infect communicative action and discourse ethics, neutralizing their supposed power to shape critical consciousness.” It is not enough to rely on the presumed healing or ethical capacities of discourse; rather, critique must expose how communicative forms are already overdetermined by the requirements of capital, bureaucracy, and domination. In this way, Thompson challenges Habermas’s foundational optimism about the redemptive power of communication, arguing instead for a theory that reconnects critique with a historically grounded analysis of power and material reproduction.

Against the Fetishism of the Voice

KPop Demon Hunters concludes in a way that doesn’t even attempt to address the problems it had raised earlier. Instead of focusing on the foundation on which the demon world is built, namely socially caused human guilt, the movie shows Rumi singing a new song addressing shame and fear, which re-unites the demon hunters. Together, they kill demons and erect the Golden Honmoon – a final seal that banishes demons permanently. Again, it is the elite power of the demon hunters, itself a symbol of individual choice more broadly, that wins the day. 

The three demon hunters are shown floating in a hazy, luminous sky after creating the Golden Honmoon, which brings to one’s mind the aesthetics of Nazi Cinema. Nina Power has remarked how Nazi cinema was characterized by “the relentless presence of mist, cloud, fog, steam, shimmering light, dust, haze, the fluttering of flags – anything to prevent the emergence of reflexivity or critical resolution. Cinematic fascism, or rather the cinematic attempt to aestheticize fascism, precisely depends upon occult confusion and the attempt to make impossible any clarity of thought.” 

The logic of obfuscation is present not just in the visual imagery that the movie uses but also in the glory that it tries to cultivate around the voices of the demon hunters. Since voice cannot be represented directly in the form of an image, it is represented narratively by functioning as the center around which the entire story rotates. Throughout the movie, it is the voice of Rumi, the voices of demon hunters, that makes and re-makes the world. Given the cosmic status of the demon hunters, the cinematic focus is not on the conveyance of meaning through songs but more on the production of aura, a felt intensity, an embodied, personal presence that can capture attention and generate attachment

This is emblematic of the wider cultural phenomenon of the KPop idol. In contemporary K-pop, it is not the song that takes center stage, but the idol. The K-pop idol is no longer a medium for musical expression in the traditional sense but has become the focal point around which a sprawling aesthetic economy revolves. Songs, while catchy and often sonically elaborate, function primarily as vehicles for the projection of the idol’s persona. What matters is that the idols sing, and how they appear while singing, how their voice sounds, how their emotion is visually and aurally staged etc.

The voice, in this system, is highly mediated: auto-tuned, harmonized, embedded in complex arrangements that blur genre boundaries and drown semantic clarity. Lyrics are often multilingual and secondary; meaning is scattered and disjointed. Yet this lack of lyrical coherence does not weaken the music’s appeal buy strengthens it, by shifting attention from verbal meaning to the idol’s performance of meaning. What is consumed is the aura of the idol: their gestures, their visual styling, their choreographed vulnerability. 

Mladen Dolar’s psychoanalytic critique illuminates this dynamic: the singing voice appears to express something ineffable, primal, even sacred – what “cannot be said.” When we sing, it feels as though the voice delivers something ineffable, something prior to or beyond language: “expression beyond meaning, expression which is more than meaning.” This feeling, Dolar argues, is a structural illusion. The illusion lies in the idea that singing restores access to a lost unity, a primal authenticity: either a return to nature (the unmediated body) or an ascent to divinity (the sacred). The voice, then, appears to be a healing agent, as in the myth of Orpheus, capable of bending gods and beasts, of restoring what culture and the symbolic order have supposedly fractured.

But this is precisely where Dolar intervenes with a psychoanalytic objection. The seductive power of the singing voice stems not from a mystical essence, but from its proximity to the lack, to the constitutive castration that structures subjectivity. Singing fetishizes the voice, transforming it into an aesthetic object of reverence and enjoyment, a sonic surface that conceals rather than reveals the void it surrounds. As Dolar remarks, “Music evokes the object voice and obfuscates it; it fetishizes it, but also opens the gap that cannot be filled.” 

Thus, K-pop, in all its visual-sonic saturation, both hides and reveals the wound: the unbearable desire for immediacy in a world that we can’t democratically control. The idol’s voice is not a spontaneous overflow of inner truth, but a technical production that simulates such truth in order to cover its absence. That is why K-pop is so emotionally gripping: it stages a spectacle of nearness, of confession, of affect, while structurally disavowing the very lack that fuels this spectacle.

What would an alternative to the fetishism of the voice look like? With regards to the movie, it would mean the de-linking of voice from the cosmic powers of the demon hunters. The demon hunters are singers who protect the world from demons by using their musical voices. When the voice is treated as an autonomous bearer of truth or authenticity, as if its very sonority guarantees access to emotional or ethical truth, it becomes a fetish that obscures the underlying structural dynamics of power. 

In his reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, Grahame Hayes identifies this danger in the TRC’s slogan “revealing is healing,” which assumes a direct, almost magical link between speech and catharsis, between vocalizing pain and resolving it. But, as Hayes notes, this formula “significantly privileges the curative powers of talk,” without accounting for the conditions under which talking might actually lead to psychic integration.

What is at stake here is not the value of speech itself, but the fetishistic overestimation of its expressive immediacy. As Hayes writes, “the mere presence, ‘availability,’ of our stories before the TRC” does not ensure “the necessary emotional work of integration and resolution.” Just as Dolar warns that focusing too much aesthetic or affective attention on the voice turns it into a fetish object, Hayes warns that foregrounding testimony in overly dramatized, cathartic modes may short-circuit the actual process of working-through. 

In both cases, what is concealed is the temporal, repetitive, and laborious nature of healing – whether psychoanalytic or political. The fantasy of a singular, cathartic purge mirrors what Dolar calls the “illusion of transcendence” carried by the singing voice: that speech can somehow bridge the void or undo the lack that structures subjectivity and historical trauma alike.

Hayes also problematizes the pace and staging of healing, cautioning that “healing doesn’t come all at once, and maybe, in hindsight, the revealing shouldn’t have come all at once either.” This critique echoes psychoanalytic resistance to the idea of cure-through-discharge, associated with early conceptions of catharsis under hypnosis, which Laplanche and Pontalis describe as aiming at a “purgative” release of affects. What is missing here, Hayes insists, is the temporal dimension: healing is not an event, but a durational, uneven, and deeply mediated process. In psychoanalytic terms, it is not merely the uncovering of truth, but the symbolic working-through of the effects of that truth in relation to the subject’s desire, guilt, and unconscious fantasy.

In this way, Hayes offers a powerful counter to the musicalization of speech, where the rhythm, tone, or dramatic intensity of vocal expression is confused with its truth-content. He insists, instead, on a more rigorous, less aestheticized notion of testimony and healing, one that recognizes the voice not as a privileged site of authentic expression, but as a complex mediator, suspended between meaning and affect, history and its disavowal. Healing, for Hayes as for psychoanalysis, is not about revealing everything all at once in a cathartic spectacle. It is about sustained confrontation with what remains unreconciled, with what resists being voiced smoothly, and in that, he implicitly affirms Dolar’s claim that the true object voice is not what is sung or heard, but what circulates as a gap, a void, within and beyond articulation. Hope is to be found in that void, not in the certainty of individual choice. 

Bio – Yanis Iqbal (he/they) is studying political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published over 350 articles on social, political, economic, and cultural issues. He is the author of Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books.