Getting Vertiginous (again) with Angels in America

In Millenium Approaches, the first half of his two-part dramatic epic Angels in America (which can and does stand alone as a work), Tony Kushner poses what Russian thinkers have called "the accursed questions"--those big philosophical topics that include the role of the nation, man's place in society, the social function of art,  and so on. We'll be wrestling with these issues (like Jacob/Yakov and the Angel), as well as the ones you post below for next Tuesday's class. You may find it fruitful to consider the play in conversation with Unbearable Lightness, since both works struggle to make sense of the movement of history, and the possibility of acting ethically in moments of personal and epistemic crisis. Enjoy--this is a goodie! 

Shitty metaphysics, at last!

Finally we've traveled far enough into the bowels of this unbearably beautiful book (AKA the birthplace of Tereza's soul) to talk shit in tomorrow's class! Taking a cue from Tomas's anal fixation and the stomach-turning latrine regime of Stalin's son, please contemplate the kitschy connections between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the text in your comments below.

Of course, all roads lead back to the bathroom in ULB anyway, so you should feel truly free to post on any topic that interests you--just be prepared for the nauseating, vertigo-inducing acts of interpretation we'll be undertaking as a class. Those with delicate sensibilities may want to pack a dramamine tab and an airplane paper bag along with your notebook and the novel before heading to Thursday's class!

Inevitably--but hopefully bearably--we're mutating our motifs!

What a vertiginous discussion we had today! To repurpose a Stalinist metaphor to radically un-Stalinist ends, I'm dizzy with its success at destabilizing all meaning, as frustrating and unbearably light as that situation may be.
In sync with this swiftly tilting planet the novel has us inhabit, we'll shake up the function of motif groups in our next class. (The groups, however, will remain the same.) Please channel Sabina by betraying the original assignment, and reverting to old forms of marginalia or improvising new ones for the next ULB-based meetings.
For this purpose, I'd like you to use the blog to post questions for your group to consider on Tuesday, tethered however you like to your side of a given existential code. At the same time, try to channel your observations or questions into the issues of publicity and privacy, politics and personal life, intimacy and history. We'll start with Havel, and take Tae's presentation as a springboard for small group and collective class discussion about these topics.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Done with Midterms

Congratulations on completing the first major piece of writing for this class! And welcome to the wonderful world of Milan Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This work intricately interweaves the lives of one protagonist with one another, their lives with that of the nation and its history, and these personal and collective histories with different ideas of history or historiographies. Thus we should read it as a philosophical novel, since it is also a self-conscious piece of literature, constructed with leitmotifs and other literary principles (of which the fictional characters themselves are aware). I urge you to take up the question of history posed by the first chapters of the book, or start tracking the major motifs, whose significance continues to accrue as the story progresses in not so linear ways.