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

By Jason M. Wirth

Commiserating with Devastated Things seeks to understand the place Milan Kundera calls “the universe of the novel.” Working through Kundera’s oeuvre as well as the continental philosophical tradition, Wirth argues that Kundera transforms—not applies—philosophical reflection within literature.

Reading between Kundera’s work and his self-avowed tradition, from Kafka to Hermann Broch, Wirth asks what it might mean to insist that philosophy does not have a monopoly on wisdom, that the novel has its own modes of wisdom that challenge philosophy’s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823268214

Book preview

Commiserating with Devastated Things

Series Board

James Bernauer

Drucilla Cornell

Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart

Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion

Adriaan Peperzak

Thomas Sheehan

Hent de Vries

Merold Westphal

Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

JASON M. WIRTH

Commiserating with Devastated Things

Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wirth, Jason M., 1963–

Commiserating with devastated things : Milan Kundera and the entitlements of thinking / Jason M. Wirth. — First edition.

pages cm. — (Perspectives in Continental philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6820-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Kundera, Milan—Criticism and interpretation.   2. Kundera, Milan—Knowledge—Literature.   3. Literature—Philosophy.   I. Title.

PG5039.21.U6Z94  2016

891.8'635—dc23

2015006027

Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For Elizabeth Myōen Sikes, garden of marvelous delight

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. Tamina at the Border

2. Caught Looking: The Universe of the Novel

3. Laughter

4. Dogs and History

5. Kitsch

6. Idiocy on the Verge of the Novel

7. Novel Idiocy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina and Franz understood different things by the words light and darkness. For Sabina, the enemy of kitsch, light and darkness were the two poles within which seeing was possible. Too much light and one is blinded. Total darkness was the opposite extreme, but some darkness also made seeing possible. This may explain why Sabina was averse to extremism: extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and politics, is a veiled longing for death (ULB, 94). Her lover Franz, however, associated the light with its source. Like Plato’s sun outside the cave, it illuminated the true and the good. Beyond the light, however, was not death, but infinity. Darkness was without borders, free of limits. When having sex with Sabina, he left the light on, but closed his eyes and lost himself in the infinite. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders (ULB, 95). Sabina found Franz’s transport to the infinite distasteful, and so she too shut her eyes, but for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her it meant disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see (ULB, 95).

This is a book by a philosopher about Kundera’s universe of the novel, including his remarkable critical reflections on that universe. It is aware that such an enterprise risks debacle, being like Plato attempting to seduce Sabina. Kundera shuts his eyes in distaste for philosophy’s clumsy and aggressive relationship to truth, to its devotion to the light of certainty and its need for transcendence (an infinite darkness that negates the here and now). Its often importunate mood is impatient with the novel’s cultivation of ambiguity, polyvalence, humility, irreverent humor, irony, complexity, broadness of theme (all things human), and its insistence on understanding rather than judgment, patience rather than conclusions, polyphony rather than fixed systems, and solidarity with humans in their folly rather than blanket condemnation. Philosophy, however, has not exhausted its historical possibilities and it belongs to its dignity to renew its sense of wonder about its vocation and powers. Philosophy’s ongoing self-interrogation is often neglected and philosophers sometimes act as if the art of philosophy is something that we can take for granted. I do not do so and the present study strives to bring the plastic powers of philosophy to the border beyond which one finds the universe of Kundera’s novel, with its history (Broch, Musil, Kafka, and Gombrowicz, but also Cervantes, Rabelais, and Diderot), its discoveries, and its challenges and joyful opportunities for thinking.

This is a book written at this border, and it knows that this border, as Sabina discovered, makes possible seeing. It respects the autonomy of both universes (what only the novel can do and what only philosophy can do), leaving in the end these complex and internally contested arts to themselves. It wagers, however, that these two universes can and do communicate with each other as well as mutually provoke and benefit each other. It seeks to read Kundera on his own terms, but also with an eye to his unexpected and perhaps unintended gift to the friends of wisdom.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my good friend Rustam Singh (Bhopal, India), a beautiful writer in his own right, for his careful reading of an earlier draft of this text and for his supportive and helpful remarks. I would also like to thank my outside readers, Leah Kalmanson and Martin Matuštik, whose comments were very helpful and appreciated. A special thanks and deep appreciation are due to the late Helen Tartar (1951–2014), who first acquired this text. Her contribution to philosophy and to letters more generally is incalculable. Her loss is enormous and she will be missed. Finally, I would like to thank my current editor, Thomas Lay as well as my copy editor, Michael Koch.

Abbreviations

. . . and because we did not know how to commiserate with the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well.

—Milan Kundera, The Joke

1

Tamina at the Border

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

—Octavio Paz¹

Giving the Spiders a Rest

In Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, Helena, underway to an affair with Ludvik, convinced herself that she was doing so to avoid crossing a border, a border beyond which her habits of being, her life commitments, would become meaningless. Having an affair with someone you love, despite being a nuptial infidelity, at least remains faithful to the idea of love, an idea that made Helena recognizable to herself. On the other side of the border, a border already operating within her own body, the Sirens called: there is no meaning to bodies coming together; it is just a sick joke, the unbearable lightness of being. Unlike Ivan Karamazov, Helena did not need to collect stories of our cruelty to innocent children and animals to experience the vacuum of a godless universe. Without love to endow the sexual body with meaning, she would cross the border into the realm of that monstrous freedom where shame, inhibitions, and morals have ceased to exist, that vile, monstrous freedom where everything is permitted, where deep inside all you need to understand is the throb of sex, that beast (J, 21–22).²

That beast, so unbearably light that it makes all human affairs suddenly float like feathers (everything is permitted, nothing has gravity), haunts the border of meaning itself, but it does so in such a way that it ceases to be merely an academic problem. Ludvik, his revenge absurdly foiled, suddenly felt the oppressive lightness of the void that lay over my life (J, 250). Helena stood before the border beyond which the gravity of her identity lost its weight. In the early short story (from Laughable Loves), The Hitchhiking Game, a young couple (a young man who adores the soul, the heavenly purity, of his girlfriend, and a shy girl who worries about her boyfriend’s less pure past) embarked on a long anticipated vacation. Underway, they stopped at a gas station, and after the girl returned from bashfully peeing in the woods, the boyfriend swung by and picked her up and they found themselves pretending that he had just picked up a licentious hitchhiker. Under the presumed cover of these masks it became less and less obvious that they were only playing, allowing their identities to go on holiday, and the girl, not without pleasure, crossed the forbidden boundary (LL, 105). Suddenly the weight of shyness and prudishness lifted, and as a hitchhiker, she "could do anything: Everything was permitted her; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked" (LL, 96). The boy, who had taken refuge in the gravity of her soul (he believed that she would never cross the boundary into being a mere body), was suddenly gripped with a great hatred, realizing "that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity" (LL, 100). In a consuming rage, he succumbed to something that Friedrich Nietzsche once observed, apropos of the sappy romantic men who idealize women: one closes one’s ears to all physiology and declares secretly to oneself, ‘I want to hear nothing about the human as other than soul and form!’³ Soon he was humiliating her (he, too, stood before his own amorphousness as his seeming nobility crossed the border into sadism, and his love revealed itself to be laughable). As they subsequently reclined in bed, the girl cried and then bawled, endlessly repeating this pitiful tautology: ‘I’m me, I’m me, I’m me . . .’ (LL, 106).

This pitiful tautology stood at the border, a border so unsettling that the hitchhikers were pushed to seek refuge from the great unknown by settling once again into the same unknown (LL, 106). But as Nietzsche already observed: We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers.⁴ On the other side of the border: not only the enigma of our selves, but also the enigma of all things in a world that has lost its faith in the gravity of divinely guaranteed meaning. But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being (AN, 41). Such a void drove Eduard (in Eduard and God), without renouncing his atheism, to nonetheless yearn for God, "for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be" (LL, 287). At the border of the longing for pure being, however, was the realization of the lightness of his affairs—a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously (LL, 287). At the twilight of the collapse of Platonism’s obdurate insistence on a remote intelligibility as the meaning of the sensible, we find ourselves in the endgame of its inversion: mute sensibility, the mere shimmering of surfaces in their stupidity, the sudden upsurge of the sublimated unbearable lightness of being, without recourse to a stabilizing intelligibility beyond itself.⁵

The problem of the void is not first and foremost a detached academic topic, kept at a safe, scholarly distance. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate philosophy major, I happened upon Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was quickly captivated. I was immediately taken by the philosophical sounding title and the opening discussion of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the existential DNA of Tomas⁶—that things do not return again and again makes them appear light and trifling and thereby in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted (ULB, 4). Without the gravity that enables us to take at least something seriously, we sink into absurdity and irresponsibility; without some levity, however, such meaning becomes deadly serious. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all (ULB, 6).

The pervading sense everywhere that the novel, precisely as a novel, was opening a whole new world of thought was invigorating. Kundera’s novels had a freshness and directness that I had not found in my philosophy courses, but I could not say that what had originally drawn me to philosophy, whatever that was, was somehow absent in Kundera’s writing. To the contrary: the sense of wonder, the therapeutic discontent with the official and received account of things, the thrill (and sometimes terror) of the investigation of the great questions and problems, was everywhere here, but it was not that I was finding nifty novelistic applications of the big guns that I had studied in philosophy. Kundera is not in the business of producing knock-down philosophical arguments, nor does he repackage classical arguments in the sweeter guise of fiction. In Kundera’s practice of the novel, thinking was simultaneously more dangerous, complex, and exciting. The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters (AN, 83), and the coherence of its meditations is maintained by its themes (questions and problems), which vary according to characters and their situations like a thing reflected in three mirrors (AN, 82–83). Although I went on to devote my professional energies to philosophy, my discovery of Kundera, his influences (what he calls Pleiades), and the universe within which they were created shadowed me.

Listening to very serious academic conference pronouncements in which we would decolonize this or utterly rethink that or expose so and so’s immense hidden debt to some other very important but misappreciated philosopher, I sometimes took solace in Kundera’s devilish sense of humor (he was born on April Fool’s Day), a sense of humor that I found rarely in either philosophy’s historical canon or its contemporary practices. It reminded me of Nietzsche and Montaigne and the great Zen Masters, but then again, it is the philosopher’s perennial prejudice that anything that the novel does of intellectual merit must owe its existence to philosophy’s conceptually purer and more original version of it. This was not, however, my experience of Kundera’s novelistic thinking. When philosophers appeared in Kundera’s novels, they appeared on the novel’s terms, not on their terms. It was as if the novel were resuscitating philosophy not by engaging it on philosophy’s own terms, but by replanting it in new, more nourishing soil or by transposing it into another universe where it had more air to breathe. When Nietzsche exclaims that if you want fresh air, you should stay out of a church, this sounds scandalously flippant to the serious mood of philosophy, as if Nietzsche were also challenging us that we have paradoxically not taken the opening of philosophy seriously enough precisely because we have confused the hard work of philosophical thinking with taking ourselves seriously.⁷

This is a problem for philosophy and for philosophers, but it is not a problem for the universe of the novel, which Kundera tells us is born of a very different mode of attunement. The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor (AN, 160). This does not mean that novels have to be funny to partake in this birthright, but it does mean that philosophy’s obsession with the gravity of the apodictic, the knock-down argument, metalanguages, and systems, and with being at all costs right, produces a climate of investigation and exploration incompatible with that of the novel. There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think (AN, 78). When Nietzsche took Spinoza’s recourse to the system to task, arguing that this determinate article is a dishonest way of packaging in the language of the universal what is really just my system, his approach had broad implications for philosophy. Zarathustra counsels his auditors to leave him, fearing that he may have deceived them, and implores: This is my way. What is your way? This humbling of the distributive range of philosophy (no immutable and universal truths, no transcendent realities) is at the same time an unprecedented expansion of the thematic range of philosophy (what counts as philosophy is again up for negotiation).

What makes Nietzsche exceptional in philosophy is not exceptional in the universe of the novel. Indeed, it is the spirit out of which it is born, as if Nietzsche allowed the spirit of the novel to sneak back into the polis, millennia after Plato (or at least Platonism) expelled the tragic poets and elevated the concept over the image and universal abstractions over both characters and the situations that shape and reveal them. In the universe of the novel, there are no identities as such. At what moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border (ID, 167)?

This book attempts to accompany Kundera, the novelist and critic, as well as his influences—especially Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz, the four Pleiades of Central Europe’s great novelists, after the hot blue cluster of stars, each of them . . . surrounded by space, each of them distant from the others, each of them solitaries (C, 50–51).⁸ But what does it mean to keep such company? It does not mean that the task of this book is to explain Kundera because he is already one of the great expositors of his work. It certainly does not mean that I hope to issue him new identity papers and return him to the philosophers and academic bureaucrats from whom he has so assiduously escaped. Kundera’s work neither begins nor ends in philosophy. It does mean, however, that I will attempt to be very explicit about what it means, for both philosophy and the novel, for a philosopher to approach his work. This is a book that, in thinking with Kundera, in appreciating his remarkable novelistic accomplishments, also wants to think explicitly where I stand when I discuss Kundera and his influences.

To put it more succinctly: what entitles the novel to do what only the novel can do, and what entitles the philosopher to do whatever sorts of things that philosophers imagine themselves to be doing, and what entitles a mode of thinking that inhabits the borderlands between these two sorts of universes to do what it does? What manner of thinking occupies the pause, the gap, and the barbarian moment between these two universes? Philosophers have often accorded themselves the privilege of beginning these sorts of investigations, but this usually means that philosophers thereby control the terms and the values of the discourse, allowing philosophy to conduct a monologue about its competitors. Since philosophy assumes that it is coextensive with all serious thinking, it assumes that all other serious forms of thinking are just philosophy by other means. I think that this is not the case and this book is an attempt to overcome this ineradicable error (C, 63), to take on the daunting task of approaching Kundera’s work in a manner that allows it to speak on its own terms, that grants the universe of the novel its own space—a space that asks philosophy, as did Nietzsche in his own way, to reconsider its own entitlements and birthrights. In disallowing philosophy either the first or the last word while at the same time not conflating its possible universes with the universe of the novel, what other forms of thinking emerge?

Since I am not writing a novel about Kundera’s novels, on what terms am I engaging them? This book does not want to participate in the triumph of the theoretical spirit over the devil’s laughter. This is not the angels’ revenge. We could engage this question by following Deleuze when he argues that we must also ask again: what is philosophy? Deleuze was speaking of the remarkable provocation of cinema, itself a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.⁹ Certain works of cinema challenge us not to draw routinely from the stockpile of philosophical materials, but also to be productive and creative so that we can meet the philosophical demands of cinema. In such a practice, however, we are not once again subjugating the image to the priority of the concept, but rather using philosophy creatively to allow cinema to speak on its own terms and to develop a different kind of sensibility for the singularities of particular works. Cinema is a child compared to the novel, which came on the scene as European conceptual practice was beginning its disengagement with theology and the political muscle of the Church. Although philosophy, after almost utterly ignoring the new modes of disclosure that cinema discovered, has recently begun to engage with it,¹⁰ it has not been that much better with the novel, generally preferring to regard it as either the illustration of philosophical positions and arguments or as fodder that can be repurposed in order to exemplify philosophical positions.

The novel went the way of Rabelais and Cervantes, while concept production went the way of the rationalists and the empiricists. Descartes’s evil genius god, hopelessly tricking us at every turn, seemingly bequeathing us no reliable ideas except for the solipsistic nightmare of ourselves, was an opportunity to unleash a variation of the ontological argument for God’s existence. Because the idea of God is the idea of an utterly perfect being (nonexistence is a defect and imperfection), it turns out that God is incapable of such trickery. God, being good, would not trick us, and therefore we are the source of our mistakes, not anything external to us. We can overcome our mistakes and build the house of knowledge on unimpeachable foundations. Don Quixote, in contrast, is ceaselessly bewitched and when windmills turn out not to be giant marauders, it is not Don Quixote who is responsible for his errors. Who could have concocted such an extraordinary deception, an error so grand that it could not be attributable to an intellectual failing? In a kind of argument from intelligent design gone mad, it is clear that the worthy are dignified by attracting the torment of evil genius gods; in this case it is Frestón the Wise who conspired to turn the giants into windmills expressly to deprive Don Quixote of the glory of vanquishing them. Descartes, writing in an era that knew the horror of the Thirty Years’ War and the unsettling of theological foundations and Church authority, made it safe to know. Cervantes made it safe to laugh, but dangerous to know.

Although I have no intention of reconciling the spirits of philosophy and the novel, this book, as an exercise in the practice of concept creation, will attempt to revisit the looming gap in which the evil genius god fights for its life. The present work therefore is not a systematic work, not an exhaustive historical accounting or analysis, not a work that fully participates in the philosophical universe nor accords it automatic privilege. The evil genius god haunts the liminal space between the universe of the novel and philosophy’s unwise securitization of its practices.

Kundera applauds Nietzsche for recognizing that systems "must try to present their weak points in the same style as their strong points" (TB, 150). Although Kundera speaks of his own practice of the novel as being within a universe of the novel, that is, within a sense of what practices and what kinds of content belong by right to the creation and appreciation of novels, this sense of the whole, as a universe, is not a system and it does not fill in all of the gaps with such asphyxiating thoroughness that thinking has nowhere else to go, nothing left to do. This is the contemporary terminal paradox of our age-old hope for a harmonious oneness among the members of our species: our dream of unity has not produced the further dispersion of our kind, a new tower of Babel, but rather the nightmare of globalization and the totally administered world. Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere (AN, 10–11).

One might, following Deleuze, think of the whole as a kind of plane of immanence, of a slice of the chaos of infinity that allows characters and situations to appear, including those of the reader, but in the half-light and limited visual range of a plane in fog, without panoptic clarity. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in the fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react (TB, 240). Kundera admired Nietzsche and his elliptical style for capturing a thought the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing (TB, 150). Thoughts depend on the fog-shrouded planes upon which they appear, but this does not mean:

These thoughts can be turned into a system, buttressed so as to exclude all competing thoughts and hunkering down to ward off the play of chance. This is dishonest. Writing is more faithful to the advent of the not-yet-thought and the in itself unprethinkable (das Unvordenkliche, to use F. W. J. Schelling’s felicitous term). Vigilance must be kept against the siren call of the system, a temptation for all writing, including the present book. This is the temptation to describe all of the implications of his ideas; to preempt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas (TB, 174). The painful irony of barricading this book about the dangers of barricades is not lost on me. The fluid borders of the present work are not barricades and they do not seek to deliver Kundera back to the arachnid curators of thought. Experiments in knowing, the novel’s only ethical imperative, disclose fragile truths as well as the fragility of knowing, what François Ricard in his beautiful study calls puzzled knowledge, riddled with things unknown, with contradictions, with fog; knowledge of the very unknowability of the world and of existence.¹¹

The nonsystemic range of thinking condemns thinking and creation to personal production. Nothing could be farther from the case. The creation of characters reveals the enigma of both creativity and the created by revealing the lack of a fixed, identifiable subject operating with authorial agency. ‘I think.’ Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, ‘a thought comes when it wants to, and not when I want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject I is necessary to the verb think.’ (TB, 149).

The closed system conceals the fact that it is my system (what has come to me in my solitude). The dishonesty of closed systems does not own up to either: (a) the systematic immobilization of thinking and (b) the lack of a fixed person (author) constructing the system. The enigma of thinking includes the enigma of thinking about oneself. Thinking may strive to fix the self, but the thinking that does so is not itself fixed or fixable. Philosophically, this was the great discovery of Fichte and Schelling, respectively. They radically engaged the Kantian critical project and overcame the illusion of a Cartesian fixed subject. This, however, is a chapter in the history of modern philosophy. Cervantes’s good Don loses his mind right from the get go. All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self (AN, 23).

Although this may be a modern discovery within the traditions inspired by Europe (which were responding first to the problem of an eternal soul and then the fixed subject discerning itself and its world as objects of thought), it is an ancient problem in other parts of the world. The great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253), for example, in his celebrated fascicle Genjō Kōan, proclaims that to study the way is to study the self, but to study the self is to forget the self. He likens the illusion of the fixed-point subject to the illusion that the shore is actually moving when you see it from a boat:

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing has unchanging self.¹²

The novel did not wait for thinkers like Nietzsche (or Hume, or Fichte, or Schelling, or Freud, or Heidegger) in order to overcome the illusion that we are obvious to ourselves and, as such, self-possessed vantage points on the world. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s refusal of both the fixed subject of thinking and the systemic sclerosis of thought has for Kundera other consequences. Nietzsche’s writing and the novel are unsystematic, undisciplined, and experimental, forcing rifts in all the idea systems that surround us (TB, 174). The experimental turn also makes possible an "immense broadening of theme; the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher’s thought" (TB, 175).

This expansion of what can count as