The Individual and the Political are ONE: A Parallactical Reading of Milan Kundera’s The Joke

Abstract

Milan Kundera believes that science and reason understand what we call ‘being’ through the binarism of subject/object and, in the process, have reduced the world into pure instrumentality. To him, novel is the genre that strives to explore ‘being’ beyond this binarism. His fiction investigates different modes of being like the personal and the political, body and soul, and the particular and the universal. This article analyses the antagonism of the personal and the political in his novel The Joke using Slavoj Zizek’s idea of parallax view. Parallax is the change of the position of the observed with the change in the position of the observer. Zizek applies this concept on the social and political field to prove that these two antagonistic positions might seem two but, actually, are ONE. Zizek has used Hegelian/Marxist theoretical framework to prove this ONENESS. The article, using Zizekian insight, argues that the perceived difference between the personal and the political is parallactical and both are, in fact, ONE. But this ONENESS should not be understood as an imposition or coercion but a necessary condition for the social field to function. Moreover, the article posits that the one-sidedness on the part of the individual when it comes to antagonistic modes of being, gives birth to extremist positions that ought to be avoided. A Parallactical reading of the selected text offers a critique of social and political polarization that has gripped the world in recent decades.

Keywords

• parallax, the individual, the political, one,