Milan Kundera Research Articles

Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth's Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics

Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 1956 “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the text of the report reached the United States by way of Poland and was published in the New York Times. The first secretary's denunciation of Stalinism thus ironically becomes one of the earliest and best-known specimens of the phenomenon of tamizdat—defined as writing from Eastern Europe illicitly smuggled out and published abroad. This essay critically examines the West's and specifically the United States' fascination with tamizdat as symptomatic of the broader politics of representing life behind the iron curtain. It argues that Philip Roth's sustained professional engagement with the Czech socialist experience can be read as his critical refusal to take part in the dominant U.S. narrative of Eastern European suffering and oppression. The essay analyzes Roth's 1985 novella The Prague Orgy and the theoretical implications of the book's central plot device—the narrative of a failed tamizdat mission. The article argues that Roth's work exposes the patterns in which tamizdat, together with the fate of the Eastern European political émigré, becomes a homogeneous, metonymic image for the totality of life under Communism. In The Prague Orgy, Roth situates himself in stark opposition to the representational practices of Milan Kundera by resisting the easy sensationalism of such “writing for the West.” Roth prefers to give voice to an array of internal Czech positions, central among which is that of the dissident author Ivan Klíma. Ultimately, Roth's resistance to stereotypical discourse on the socialist Other comes at an important sociocultural moment in the 1980s, when other American intellectuals prefer the security granted by the narrative of tamizdat.

Post‐communist ironies in an East German hotel

On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now ‘Berlin Mitte’. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie ‐ the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past ‐ marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become ‘hip’. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more playful dimensions of what Czech‐French writer Milan Kundera (1992) has called ‘the joke,’ that is, an ironic form of humor ubiquitous in former Soviet and East European contexts. I engage irony as a situated experience and practice chiefly through the ‘artful lens’ of material culture. In focusing on the Ostel's interior, I am especially interested in irony's ‘critical edge’. I argue that it is this edge that makes it possible to open up critical interpretations of German post‐unification history.

The Folding Screen of Kitsch

Kitsch, a relatively recent concept in Western art and literature, has given birth to a great deal of debate and discussion. Owing to a variety of descriptions it is difficult to define it. Nevertheless, it can be characterized by discussing the impacts it creates over the audience. Milan Kundera. in his novel The Unbeatable Lightness of Being, has addressed the features of Kitsch by being quite faithful to the political reality of the West. However, he has taken efforts to explain them through the development of individual psychology in a social context. This paper examines how the supposed features of Kitsch surface through the experiences of a specific persona in the novel. The examination suggests, arguably of course, that Kundera’s attempts to elucidate Kitsch experiences involve aesthetic misrepresentation leaving far reaching impact on social or political structure.

Charm of Author intervention: Narrative Theoretical Analysis on Milan Kundera’s Works

Article discusses the narrative of "interference" theory. The discussion with the author’s intervention and then gives a detailed and profound discussion. The author uses four ways to carry out the intervention, such as "deliberate go away, having no intention of sneaking, into the intention of the highlights, at random creative". This article talks about the creation of a detailed narrative analysis and has a further exploration about the effect of narrative. Under such theory frame and the synthesis, this article is attempting a utilization of the narrative theory to the text explanation.

Eliminating Diasporic Identities

In The unbearable lightness of being, Milan Kundera, a writer in diaspora, puts Sabina, a painter in diaspora, in the position of the artist facing the imposition of a ready-made identity. Kundera writes:Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organized by a political organization in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. “Her paintings are a struggle for happiness” was the final sentence.She protested, but they did not understand her.Do you mean that modern art isn't persecuted under Communism?“My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!” she replied, infuriated.(254)

Introduction: Intellectuals, Nationalisms, and European Identity

Introduction:Intellectuals, Nationalisms, and European Identity Richard J. Golsan This special issue of South Central Review addresses a number of important, timely, and interrelated questions concerning the past, present, and future of Europe and the idea of the intellectual. These questions fall essentially into three categories. First, what is "Europe," and what is a "European," especially at the present time? How might one define or characterize a "European identity," now as well as in the past and future? What are the constitutive elements of such an identity? Is "Europe" in fact a tangible reality? Or is it rather a destructive illusion (as in its conception and exploitation by the Nazis), or, conversely, an ideal to which the peoples of the continent should aspire? Second, what is "nationalism" in the European context, and how might one define "nationhood" within the framework of the European Union and the Europe of today? Within this context, how might one characterize nationalist sentiments and patriotism in Europe? By way of contrast, how are these notions conceived and understood in contemporary Europe as opposed to the United States, for example? Certainly these concepts have undergone extraordinary changes during recent years, not only as a consequence of the creation of the EU but also as a result of the horrors perpetrated by extreme forms of nationalism in Europe over the last century. The European cataclysm brought about by Nazism comes first to mind, of course, but one should not forget that similar horrors on a smaller scale were perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia less than twenty years ago. The recent arrest of the Serbian nationalist extremist leader Radovan Karadzic on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a grim reminder of this all-too-recent past. A third and final series of questions clusters around the role, function, and definition of the intellectual and, more generally, the artist in the European context, past, present, and future. What role have intellectuals and politically committed artists played in shaping national identity and culture—what role have they played in defining "nationhood" ? Along similar lines, what roles have intellectuals and artists played in defining "Europe," as it existed or exists now? What is the "responsibility" of the artist and intellectual, not only in the democratic Europe of today, but [End Page 1] under the repressive, nationalistic, and even totalitarian regimes of the recent past? Finally, given that the very idea of the intellectual is linked historically as well as in the present to the idea of the nation, and that the traditional notion of the "nation" in Europe is changing rapidly under, among other things, the imposition of a "European identity," what is the role of the "intellectual" today? What will it be tomorrow? Will the intellectual eventually become extinct, or be transformed by events and circumstances into something very different? Among the intellectuals, writers, and artists discussed in this issue are Karl Marx and Thomas Mann from the German context, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre-Andé Taguieff from the French context, the Italian architect Giusseppi Taragni, and the Czech writer and intellectual Milan Kundera. Other important figures including Paul Valéry, Denis de Rougemont, and Maurice Barrès are discussed as well. In addition to thanking the outstanding scholars who have contributed to this issue, we wish to express our gratitude to two distinguished European "public intellectuals" for offering their insights on the important issues addressed here. These are of course Tzvetan Todorov and Pascal Bruckner, both of whom have generously contributed their work to South Central Review before. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Walter A. Strauss, Treuhaft Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Many of us knew Walter professionally, and some of us were fortunate enough to have Walter as a mentor and friend at formative and even crucial moments of our careers and our lives. In every way Walter embodied the ideal of European culture at its richest and very best. Walter was also a man of extraordinary intellectual curiosity, and we would like to think that this issue would have been of special interest to him. Thank you, Walter. Richard J. Golsan Texas A&amp...

Kundera's Variations: Passing Thoughts on Novel and Nation

The appearance of Milan Kundera’s “ Die Weltliteratur ” in the January 8, 2007 issue of The New Yorker provides broad journalistic visibility for a writer more often associated with elite literary venues. That the article in question was excerpted from The Curtain , a new collection of critical essays on the novel, links it to two earlier collections, The Art of the Novel (1986) and Legacies Betrayed (1993), in which Kundera had set forth a defense of major European writers including Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Laclos, Diderot, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Proust. What sets “ Die Weltliteratur ” apart from the earlier collection is a recent poll in the French press whose ranking of influential writers prompts Kundera to assert his Bohemian roots against his current status as a citizen of France. The new collection also positions Kundera as an interested observer whose longtime residency in his adoptive homeland provides a unique perspective on the culture, politics, and history of his native region. A final section relates Kundera’s views in “ Die Weltliteratur ” and in The Curtain to the life of the author’s colleague and friend, Professor Walter A. Strauss (1923-2008).

Traduire l’Europe

Evropa je večjezična, ne glede na način, kako jo definiramo (geografsko, kulturno, politično). Vprašanje »prevajanja Evrope« nas torej nujno vodi k različnosti jezikov, med katerimi ne sme noben veljati kot izhodiščni za druge. V prvem delu se Yves Chevrel sprašuje, ali prevajanje Evrope ne pomeni morda poskus prevajanja sebe kot Evropejca. Naslanjajoč na odlomek iz Kafkovega Dnevnika, opremljenega z opombami Milana Kundere, dokazuje, da književnosti »malih narodov«, šele s tem, ko se uvrstijo v širši evropski kontekst, najdejo najboljšo priložnost, da se jih spozna in da se uveljavijo. Želja po prepoznavanju, po prevajanju sebe kot Evropejca, nas vodi do tega, da bi radi videli, kako drugi Evropejci prevajajo sebe in sporočajo svojo vizijo Evrope. Yves Chevrel tu navaja primer zanimivega uredniškega projekta, učbenika Zgodovine Evrope in sveta po letu 1945, ki so ga skupaj pripravili nemški in francoski zgodovinarji in ga leta 2006 izdali v nemški in francoski različici z istimi dokumenti in razporeditvijo strani. Ali se lahko takšna izkušnja ponovi in razširi na druga obdobja? Doba, ki je v Sloveniji znana kot »preseljevanje narodov« in v Nemčiji kot »Völkerwanderung«, francosko zgodovinopisje imenuje »invasions barbares« – invazija barbarov. Za zgodovino Evrope ni evropskega modela. Zadnji del se dotika branja literarnih del v prevodu, ki jih skuša Yves Chevrel rehabilitirati. Izhajajoč iz misli Wilhelma von Humbolta, ki je razlikoval pojma »das Fremde« in »die Fremdheit«, primerja prevode v različnih jezikih, kar omogoča boljše razumevanje različnih pristopov k istemu delu. Naslov romana Na Drini ćuprija Iva Andrića, ki se v slovenščini glasi Most na Drini, je v francoščini Le Pont sur la Drina, pa tudi Il est un pont sur la Drina. Različno pojmovanje evangelijske parabole o izgubljenem sinu je razvidno v naslovu slovenskega prevoda Gidovega dela Vrnitev izgubljenega sina (Retour de l’enfant prodigue). Chevrel ta del zaključuje z dvema citatoma Alberta Camusa in Virginie Woolf, ki poudarjata bogastvo evropske literarne dediščine. Evropa razmišlja v več jezikih, Evropa je celina prevajanja. Prevajanje posreduje, daje na razpolago, kliče k izmenjavi. Prevod je eden izmed veziv Evrope.

Margaret Garner and the Second Tear

Margaret Garner and the Second Tear Catherine Gunther Kodat (bio) Margaret Garner, an opera. Music by Richard Danielpour; libretto by Toni Morrison. World première at Michigan Opera Theatre May 7, 2005. New production by the New York City Opera performed on various dates in September 2007. I wanted that haunting not to be really a suggestion of being bedeviled by the past, but to have it be incarnate, to have it actually happen that a person enters your world who is in fact—you believe, at any rate—the dead returned, and you get a second chance, a chance to do it right. Of course, you do it wrong again. —Toni Morrison Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. —Milan Kundera Before the 1987 appearance of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, most Americans had never heard of Margaret Garner, the fugitive slave from Kentucky who, in 1856, killed one of her children as she and her family were about to be recaptured in Ohio. It would not be correct to say that Garner became a household name as a consequence of the critical and popular acclaim that greeted Beloved, but her story, if not her identity, certainly became better known than it had been before the novel—for it was Garner's murder of her two-year-old daughter Mary that gave Morrison the idea for Beloved. Morrison has always acknowledged this inspiration, but in interviews published when the novel first appeared she was careful to note that Beloved was engaged in a project rather different from the recovery of a specific lost event. Beloved's reach extends well beyond the bounds of conventional historical fiction, taking both the murder and the task of its narration as opportunities to pose fraught questions about U.S. racial history, memory, trauma, and guilt, and to acknowledge that making art out of this volatile material is a hazardous [End Page 159] endeavor. As Morrison frequently pointed out, Beloved was an invention, and, as her blending of modernist literary techniques with plot devices drawn from gothic fiction makes clear, she had little interest in producing a fictionalized account of a historical figure or event in the manner of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French.1 In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that it is precisely the disappearance of Margaret Garner's case from our national memory that matters most to Beloved, given its preoccupation with the difficulties of recollection and representation—of "passing on," as the novel's closing pages put it. Nevertheless (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the years since the appearance of Beloved have seen several efforts to recover the lost history of this "Modern Medea" (as Garner was styled in Kentucky artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting of the murder). On the face of it, there were good reasons to make the attempt. Though practically unknown to most in the United States, black and white, for much of the twentieth century, Margaret Garner was extremely famous in her lifetime, an abolitionist cause célèbre and the inspiration for scores of essays, poems, pamphlets, and engravings that cast her variously as a nineteenth-century Medea, Virginius, or Mithridates. But as the appeals to characters from antiquity hint, Garner's murder came to the public via prefabricated narrative forms. Almost certainly as a function of its deeply unsettling aspects (some of them acknowledged only indirectly to this day), Margaret Garner's slaying of her daughter was never granted the dignity of a singular human event, an irreproducible meeting of impersonal historical forces with individual circumstance. On the contrary, the story of the woman who murdered a child rather than see it returned to slavery—for so her act was immediately interpreted in the press—was viewed by mid-nineteenth-century journalists, poets, poetasters, and visual artists (proslavery and abolitionist alike) as bringing to life ancient and familiar...

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re‐Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re‐Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions Stephen Schloesser A human condition both catholic and Catholic The Unbearable Lightness of Being: even for those who have not read Milan Kundera’s dense metaphysical novel (or seen the movie based on it) the title is probably familiar. Familiar but also perhaps enigmatic—intentionally so, because the title is a play on words, a joke from the author of The Joke.1 In theory, lightness—in the sense of weightlessness—ought to be easy to bear. A five‐pound bag of sugar is light; a one‐hundred‐and‐fifty‐pound barbell might well be unbearable. It is heaviness, of course, that we would usually find unbearable. But when it comes to being, things are different. It is the lightness, the apparent insignificance of it all, that becomes heavy. This has always been true, but for those of us who live in a post‐Darwinian world, it is especially so. Pattiann Rogers’s poem, “The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation,” puts the problem graphically: Think of the million million dried stems of decaying: Dragonflies, the thousand thousand leathery cavities: Of old toads, the mounds of cows’teeth, the tufts: Of torn fur, the contorted eyes, the broken feet, the rank: Bloated odors, the fecund brown‐haired mildews: That are the residue of his process. How can he tolerate knowing: There is nothing else here on earth as bright and salty: As blood spilled in the open?2 What is true of being is even more true of self‐conscious being. The contingent, the accidental, the ephemeral, the unrepeatable and the irreplaceable—this, paradoxically, is what human being finds unbearable. And so we attempt to add weight, to anchor fleeting things to something lasting. For Milan Kundera, that anchor is beauty. It may not be eternal…but it is as good as it gets in our world of space‐time. Thoroughly post‐modernist, Kundera reaches far back into pre‐modern antiquity to construct his fundamental framework. On the one hand he invokes Parmenides to represent the One: it does not change, it is unitary, it is reliable, it is weighty. It is Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.3 On the other hand, Kundera (implicitly) invokes Heraclitus to represent the Many. All is flux learns every college freshman in Philosophy 101; panta rei reads the t‐shirt—you can’t step into the same river twice.4 All is changing, fragmentary, utterly unreliable, lighter than air. Paradoxically, this constant perishing—weightless as young Icarus falling from the sky with nary a notice from bystanders5—this blip on the vast canvas can be unbearably insignificant. “Einmal ist keinmal [Once is never],” Tomas says to himself in The Unbearable Lightness. “If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”6 And so Kundera negotiates two things he cannot accept: he not only cannot reconcile himself to a world of only passing shadows…but he also cannot accept religious belief. He provides an instructive “catholic” contrast to the “Catholic.” Like Catholicism, Kundera needs to root the flux in something more sturdy—root the many in the one. Unlike Catholicism, Kundera cannot tie the flux to Eternity. Memory’s long duration must serve as a finite substitute for Eternity. Memory connects the coincidences in our lives. They become our lives’ leit‐motifs, and if we take note of them, their gradual accumulation gathers weight and gives our lives substance. For Kundera, noticing coincidence functions as a kind of catholic (which is to say “universal”) imperative: “but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”7 As these leit‐motifs recur our lives become musical compositions.8 The many changing variations—while different and unique—are nonetheless recognizable because they contain repeated motifs. True: repetition is not forever—it is not an eternal return. But repetition recurs often enough to anchor our shadows. Memory provides the weight, paradoxically, that lightens the unbearable burden of being. That weight is the beauty that comes through remembrance. These are heady...

Invisible in Oxford: Medieval Jewish History in Modern England

Medieval Anglo-Jewish history has only very recently begun to be included in scholarly histories of England and is still relatively absent unless the history is specifically concerned with the Jews of England. Unfortunately, the relative invisibility of medieval Jewish history in British historical scholarship is mirrored in the semi-scholarly "public face" of British history as it is represented in historical and heritage materials, guidebooks, memorials, and other informational sources for travelers and history in England. While it is often the nature of heritage groups to sanitize and homogenize the past, the degree to which this is done with regard to the medieval Anglo-Jewish past requires response and action, particularly in the context of an alarming world-wide rise in antisemitism. If knowledge is an essential context for understanding and tolerance, more visible and accurate accounts of medieval Jewish history are a necessary first step towards effecting social change.

Rewriting Histories , and: Bodies and Representations (review)

Reviewed by: Rewriting Histories, and: Bodies and Representations Lenka Pánková (bio) Rewriting Histories. Edited by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith. Volume 1 of Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. Bucharest: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2005. 180 pp. 14.50 Romanian lei. Bodies and Representations. Edited by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith. Volume 2 of Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. Bucharest: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2006. 204 pp. 17 Romanian lei. Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe is a collection of essays thematically divided into two volumes, Rewriting Histories and Bodies and Representations. Its intention is to examine "the set of current questions raised by or regarding women authors in the [Central/Eastern European] region" (1:11) beyond the narrow confines of national literatures. The socio-cultural space discussed here is enormous, reaching from Estonia, through Latvia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland to the Czech Republic. A certain partiality for Romanian literature will hardly surprise in a text published by the University of Bucharest. I agree with the editors' opinion that "Eastern and Central European countries know little about each other's literatures" (1:7). As Milan Kundera rather harshly pointed out in his essay on Weltliteratur in The New Yorker ( January 8, 2007), this also tends to be true with respect to academics specializing in specific literatures. Considering this scope, it is especially praiseworthy that Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe remains true to the intention of meticulously contextualizing its various topics. No sweeping statements covering the whole Eastern/Central European space in one sentence will be found in this book. The one objectionable type of excessive generalization present is an altogether different animal, and I will mention it in due course. Another feature that makes Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe quite a feat of comparative literature is the pattern in which multiple essays (in multiple cultural contexts) gravitate towards larger topics. These include, for example, the exilic condition (internal exile, external exile, exile and the creative process) or the subversion of various patriarchal master narratives (communist and nationalist propaganda, official histories, glorification of anti-communist dissent, the female body's commodification [End Page 261] in the post-communist context, etc.). For instance, having perused volume one, even the staunchest anti-comparatist cannot but compare the ways in which several Croatian, Czech, Latvian, and Romanian women writers attempted to rewrite master narratives about the past. The collection's comparative nature is further strengthened by Iva Popovičová's essay on the non-literary media used by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra to undermine "the normative parameters and taboos associated with femininity and nudity in Polish culture" (2:161) and Lilla analysis of Binka Zhelyazkova's film The Tied Balloon. Several scholars point out contrasts and correspondences between works by a particular author before and after the fall of communist/socialist regimes in Eastern Europe (for instance, Marlowe Miller or Rodica Mihăilă). The space devoted to pre-1989 works in a publication focused on times post-communist, nevertheless, seems occasionally overly large to this reviewer. A rather problematic inconsistency emerges with respect to a potentially highly interesting problematic: Exactly how useful is it to apply Western feminist (or postcolonial) theory to Eastern/Central Europe? The editors themselves draw our attention to this quandary in their introduction to volume one, when they claim that "[f ]eminist studies in the region in 1999/2000 displayed (and still display) a mimicry of Western attitudes. There is little, if any, feminist theory produced in the region or, if there is, the connection with the practical side of women's experience in Eastern Europe nowadays is often missing" (11). In its goal to take "one step towards a theorisation" in this area (11), Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe falls short of the mark. The only scholar to seriously question the application of Western feminist theory here is Lilla . The collection's strength, without any doubt, lies in practical analysis rather than theory, even if Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler...

The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of “Right Life”

The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of “Right Life” Adam Arola When confronted with subcultures that understand themselves to be rebellious and define themselves around a particular aesthetic movement, anyone who has spent time reading Adorno cannot but find him- or herself confronted with a particular array of questions and concerns: Can any kind of potent, critical labor be actualized by an aesthetic movement that does not attend to the material conditions of its emergence? Furthermore, do all attempts at rebellion necessarily fall into the trap of replicating the patterns of social life against which they are reacting? Finally, do all “failed” attempts at rebellion necessarily amount to precisely that, exhaustive failures? Are we in fact, as Ian MacKaye put it in 1982, just screaming at a wall—but a wall that will never fall? Or might there be a certain kind of rebellion through art—in this case, certain varieties of punk rock—that, as Adorno says, “is true insofar as what is speaking out of it and it itself is conflicting and unreconciled” (1997, 168)? In other words, is there a kind of failed attempt at rebellion that, in recognizing the necessity of its failure, simultaneously serves as an exposé of certain ideological overdetermination and frees us up for thinking anew? And what might this thinking otherwise look like? In light of these concerns, the objective of this essay is to investigate the relationship between a model autonomous subjectivity, the certain trope of authenticity, and social movements—particularly the culture that surrounds punk rock—that posit and understand themselves as rebellious. To that end, this article will take place in four sections. First, I discuss the connection between authenticity and punk rock, that is, punk rock’s critique of the “mainstream.” Second, I turn to investigate the model of individuality that lies as the subject of predication for the adjectives authentic or inauthentic—in doing so I hope to connect this model of the individual to a certain understanding of political sovereignty, the very model punk rock generally wants to reject. Third, I will show that this model of the individual is not only problematic but also untenable via a discussion of the problem with reactionary rebellion. Finally, through Adorno’s famous quote from Minima Moralia, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” that is, “There is no right life in a false life” (1980, 43), we will attempt to see what the limits of any critical [End Page 291] activity based in a reductive concept of authenticity might be. My claim is that insofar as punk rock reinstantiates the same pattern of life—that is, the falsehood or false life that Adorno points to in this aphorism—in its model of authenticity, its alleged subversions do nothing but reinforce what it is attempting to escape. That is to say, that insofar as subversive subcultures do nothing but replicate that which they are attempting to critique, they lack the possibility of authenticity thought robustly, because all possibility of propriety is lost. The generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity requires a transformation of the structure, what Adorno calls the constellation or force field, itself—not swapping which position one fills within it. This whole may be false, but we must wonder if all forms of life lead to such tyranny. My conclusion, tentatively stated, is no. I. “I’m More Punk than You” Let me begin the article with a quotation from Milan Kundera’s Immortality, which is to serve as our entryway into a discussion of the individual and authenticity. He writes: “In our world, where there are more and more faces, more and more alike, it is difficult for an individual to reinforce the originality of the self and to become convinced of its inimitable uniqueness. There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura’s method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more...

Ephemeral China/Handmade China

A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to paraphrase Milan Kundera). Does all this then suggest that China, as solidified in its buildings and cities, is no longer ‘handmade’ in the sense that memory and a sense of history are redundant (particularly for a country that has a recorded history of more than 5000 years, which have been so lovingly recorded in handmade artefacts)? The true meaning of the handmade, which absorbs labour — an ‘honourable labour’ as Joseph Conrad lovingly put it in his Mirror of the Sea, as well as memory, like that of a home, is a static artefact, which harbours our changing emotion, the frailties of human life, and indeed, the growing awareness that comes with time of our mortality: the handmade offers the necessary enshrinement of life’s vulnerability. Let me assure you, the seemingly fast-changing China, as represented in its new architecture and city forms, as well in its frenzied urbanisation and booming economy, is but a smoke screen. It is, in other words, ephemeral. The other China is, or has to be, handmade.

Ephemeral China/Handmade China

A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to paraphrase Milan Kundera). Does all this then suggest that China, as solidified in its buildings and cities, is no longer ‘handmade’ in the sense that memory and a sense of history are redundant (particularly for a country that has a recorded history of more than 5000 years, which have been so lovingly recorded in handmade artefacts)? The true meaning of the handmade, which absorbs labour — an ‘honourable labour’ as Joseph Conrad lovingly put it in his Mirror of the Sea, as well as memory, like that of a home, is a static artefact, which harbours our changing emotion, the frailties of human life, and indeed, the growing awareness that comes with time of our mortality: the handmade offers the necessary enshrinement of life’s vulnerability. Let me assure you, the seemingly fast-changing China, as represented in its new architecture and city forms, as well in its frenzied urbanisation and booming economy, is but a smoke screen. It is, in other words, ephemeral. The other China is, or has to be, handmade.

Piscines et plages chez Kundera

Swimming pools, stricto sensu, are a newcomer in the gallery of western topoi, linked as they are to 20 th century consumer culture. For obvious reasons they have become a recognized cinematographic topos, but - more surprisingly -they have also made their way to novel. For instance you find a lot of swimming pools in the novels of Milan Kundera. This is in fact quite astonishing. Kundera is not an author with a great sense of place. As far as descriptions and portraits are concerned, Kundera obeys a principle of maximum economy. However there are some exceptions to this rule, because sometimes objects and places can contribute to enlighten and explore what Kundera calls the existential code of the characters. The swimming pool is such a place. This purpose of this paper is to question the thematic concerns highligthened by the swimming pool. These concerns evolve around questions of sexuality, identity and nihilism in a mode that is much darker and more troubled than one would expect.

"It's the Sense of Touch": Skin in the Making of Cinematic Consciousness

"It's the Sense of Touch":Skin in the Making of Cinematic Consciousness Tarja Laine (bio) It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something. —Crash In the context of classical cinema, the organization of narrative as an activation of knowledge to construct meaning is often understood in terms of spatial and temporal causality. Within the context of post-classical cinema, however, narrative more often than not unfolds from any spatial and temporal point rather than through a causal development in time and space.1 One only has to think of films such as Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005), Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) and many others as examples of the films that escape the organizational control of narrative. In these films, causality is replaced with disentangled lines of action that randomly intersect, and that are [End Page 35] almost impossible to reconstruct in an exact chronological order, at least from memory. As a result, the spectator's experience is not about constructing meaning along some sort of logic of cause and effect, but rather about forming patterns along how different points of time and space coincidentally traverse.2 The spectator's experience of the films of this kind is therefore also more of a journey from one spatial and temporal crossroad to another, without necessarily the sense of a totalizing overview. Such an experience is therefore best approached through the concept of touch as a mode of knowledge that constantly forms and reforms itself in a large network of connections. The figure of the membrane in this configuration is not just a mediator but a shared existence, "circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence" (Nancy 3). Paul Haggis's 2004 film Crash illustrates the workings of touch in particularly suggestive ways, since it not only lacks causal relations between the events that occur both between and within scenes, but it also treats these events as "membranes" that co-creatively shape one another in their shared encounters. The film opens with haptic, tactile, blurry images of snow and car lights on a highway on top of which the opening credits appear. We hear Graham, played by Don Cheadle, uttering the words: "It's the sense of touch," after which his face is brought into sharp focus in the foreground of the image. Racking focus alters between the different planes of the image where the characters appear, bringing them into contact with each other and directing the spectator's attention not to the characters themselves, but to this contact space between them. Selective and racking focuses occur throughout the film, extending the optical vision to the haptical, a vision that is hardly distinguishable from the layered texture of the image, a mode of knowledge that is touch and even coincidence. The dialogue from the opening scene continues while the image fades in and out, cut against the rhythm of speech. There has apparently been a car accident. The scene ends with the image fading out in white, after which the story starts to unfold from yesterday onwards. The narrative of Crash is a weaving together of random incidents, instead of a linear chain of cause and effect. Accidents, coincidences and chance encounters are more significant than any causal motivations between them. Milan Kundera has written that our daily life is "bombarded [. . .] with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. 'Co-incidence' means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet" (51–2). Similarly, Michel Serres argues that world and human lives [End Page 36] are composed in precisely such a fashion, according to the logic of the clinamen that creates order out of chaos. For Serres, the clinamen is the way in which world is organized by the logic of accident and chance, but it is important to keep in mind that this is merely the way...

Francophone postcolonialism from Eastern Europe

This article draws from recent research that makes an argument for studying literature from what David Chioni Moore calls the post-Soviet sphere under the rubric of postcolonial theory. It contends that conceiving of countries formerly under Soviet rule as having some characteristics in common with countries once under French colonial rule can yield productive results. It is quite possible that the concentration in literary studies on relations between the First and Third Worlds has left a void with respect to the Second World, at least with respect to francophone writers. We can begin to fill this void by studying texts in French by writers from places formerly under Soviet domination, and this article examines the fictional and theoretical works of Julia Kristeva, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Andre Makine and Brina Svit. Their insights are used here to explore the extent to which intellectuals from small Central and Eastern European countries find themselves in a postcolonial position politically and linguistically similar to that of francophone scholars and writers from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa or the Antilles.

Violence and Memory in Milan Kundera

Partint de la filosofia de la memòria de TW Adorno, aquest article defensa la tesi deque la literatura té una major capacitat que la història o la filosofia per explicar Enquin consisteixen els règims totalitaris i per salvaguardar la memòria de les seves víctimes. Amb aquest propòsit, pren com a exemple la literatura de l'escriptor txec Milan Kundera yanaliza algunes de les seves obres, especialment El llibre del riure i l'oblit, La insoportablelevedad l'ésser i el seu assaig L'art de la novel·la.

Kulturel liminalitet i Don Quixote

Cervantes og den »algierske erfaring« Cultural Liminality in Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes’ two-volume satire from 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote de la Mancha, has often been been proclaimed the first European novel, especially by the continental theory of the novel. Most renowned in that regard is Milan Kundera’s description in The Art of the Novel of Don Quixote as the first narration in the literary history of Europe testifying to the absence of God. Thus for Kundera, Cervantes’ master piece demonstrates the close relationship between the genre of the novel, on the hand, and the rise of a scepticist, secular and worldlyminded mentality characteristic of the European Enlightenment, on the other hand. Being influenced by the general »re-historizing« of the literary studies that we are facing in these years, more recent Cervantine research has taken up topics that played a central role in the the cultural history of Golden Age Spain. Consequently, we have been witnessing a lot of studies focused on the representation of gender, ethnicity, identity politics etc. Within the frame of the cultural history approach to Don Quixote we also see examples of new biographical readings basing the literary analysis on a thorough historical reconstruction of Cervantes’ life and times, in particular with regard to his involvement in the war against the Turks. In my article »Cultural Liminality in Don Quixote. Cervantes and the Algerian experience«, I approach the question of Don Quixote as the first novel by combining the Bakhtinian theory of the novel with recent attempts at historical reconstruction.