The prevailing theme of "Literature and Politics" in the Letters of Republic in South Korea provokes me into reflecting on the "function-or rather malfunction-of criticism in the present time." I refer to the peppering of foreign celebrities such as Ranciere, Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, to name just a few. Of course, the predominance of Western intellectuals in the South Korean criticism industry is not new; due to a rapid succession of colonial and postcolonial conditions, South Korea has been particularly vulnerable to Western imports both material and immaterial. What is new is to take the ``politics`` of criticism for granted. The generation of the intellectual big shots who came of age in the turbulent 1960s is in the main political thinkers; if some of them have turned their back on the politically active past, they have continued to wear politics on their sleeves. My argument is that the predominance of these thinkers in the critical establishment of Korea has led to an easy equation of criticism and politics which, I believe, resulted in evading the issue of criticism in and out of politics. But in so far as Rancierian aesthetics keeps the tension of contradiction alive between "the ``orphan letter`` of democratic literarity and the glorious incarnation of truth in the word, it would not be difficult at all to make a common ground between Rancierian aesthetic regime and sui generis Realism in South Korea. Actually, there is a close affinity between the aesthetic regime of art and the "genuine realism" vindicated by numerous literary critics in Korea. How can we embody ``the sensible`` that the aesthetic regime of art aims to make democratic, if not for the Realism`s "endless battles against metaphors fought through metaphors" which thereby make a stand against the establishment of words and letters in a hierarchical stereotype? This rhetorical question clarifies the fact that a critique of the hierarchical distribution of the sensible should not necessarily lead to dumping representation along with Aristotelian mimesis. The deconstructive impulse inherent in genuine realism questions not only the hierarchy but also the very concept of representation. But this impulse becomes creative only when it captures the tension between will-to-the-revelation of the word and non-verbal awareness of reality. Our final account of realism then is up to its creative encounter with theoretical challenge from in/outside, Rancierian aesthetics among others.