Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlement of Thinking

Abstract

Kafka and Kundera were both natives of Prague yet neither felt at home there. They inhabited both sides of a border. Their attempts to deal with this double life, their unheimlichkeit, however, did not migrate towards the security of philosophy and systems but to irony and humour, into idiocy, into the world of the novel. Wirth’s enquiry places itself carefully at this borderline between philosophy and the novel. After dealing with the relatively rare texts that overlap it such as the Platonic dialogues, Nietzsche’s fragmentary texts or Montaigne’s essays and obviously philosophic novelists such as those of Sartre, he homes in on Kundera with careful readings of the texts. His sources include a whole swathe of intellectual history from Plato, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka to Deleuze and Heidegger. He also draws on telling moments of eastern thought that illuminate his discourse. Philosophy (and Wirth apologises for the fact that he is in fact a philosopher) affirms, its statements straining towards certainty. It seeks a truth that is democratic, that is everyone’s and therefore no-one’s, like the ergonomic chair that makes everyone who sits in it uncomfortable. The act turns solid, into memory, into something fixed. Philosophy, biography, critical approaches interpret the text through a preconceived critical apparatus. They aim to thematize the look of things. They are ‘serious’. The novelist, on the other hand, presents how things are, seeking nothing other than experience. It is more of a game, one of questions rather than of answers. It is polyphonic and wants to remain so. The scene is muddled by the fact that no great philosopher writes badly and no great poet or novelist is not also, at least partly, a great thinker. Kundera writes: ‘It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most.’1