Fiction Series: Immortality, Recognition, and Spectacle (Kundera, Hegel, Debord)

Hi everyone! Welcome back to fiction group! Please join us on Thursday, August 27th for the first section of Milan Kundera’s Immortality. We will have quite a few philosophical selections paired with this piece, so buckle up. The first meeting will be paired with excerpts from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. (I know that sounds pretty hefty, but I believe in you all!) Though definitively unclassifiable, Immortality is a novel of seven parts, exploring the nature of eros, longing, nostalgia and images under the reign of mass ideology. As we observe conversations between Hemingway and Goethe, the revolving lives of Agnes and Paul, and even Kundera’s own commentary, our essence (and our limitations) are left exposed. Required reading includes the following: Part I and Part II of Milan Kundera’s Immortality (pages 1-90 of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition) Section B “Self-Consciousness,” from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (pages 102-135 in this linked edition) “Chapter 1: Separation Perfected,” from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (pages 10-21) BONUS: “Approaching Literature’s Space,” from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (Just one page! Please use the hyperlinked table of contents) Unfortunately, I do not have a PDF copy of Immortality available. If you need any help acquiring a copy, please reach out to me directly, and I’d be happy to help! Additionally, I’d like to provide a quick quote from Kundera’s The Art of the Novel to be thinking about before our meet-up: "As a model of this Western World, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe. This incompatibility is deeper than the one that separates a dissident from an apparatchik, or a human rights campaigner from a torturer, because it is not only political or moral but ontological. By which I mean: The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning, it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.” We will be meeting on Thursday, August 27th at 7pm at Spritzenhaus33 in Williamsburg. If you have any difficulty finding us, please don’t hesitate to message me directly. See you there! Please excuse any anomalous typographical errors in here--I think MeetUp is going a bit haywire on my end!