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The World as Farce

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Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics

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Abstract

This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary introduction to the notion of the political world as farce. More exactly, it advances the argument that, despite experiencing the world as a joke of cosmic proportions, an individual can still create meaning even in the most meaningless conditions (concentration camps, totalitarian societies and the like). The paper traces the presence of the topic in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo and discusses the particular case of Milan Kundera, for whom the historical world appears as nothing but a cruel joke.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

  2. 2.

    Of course, Fyodor Karamazov touches here on the old Dualistic (Gnostic, Manichean, Cathar) notion of the world as the creation of an ‘evil god’ (‘principle of darkness’). Fascinating as it is, a discussion of Fyodor and Ivan’s position in relation to the Dualistic theology exceeds the scope of this paper.

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Acknowledgments

Under the title ‘To die laughing,’ a different, longer version of this chapter has been published in a special issue of the journal East-European Politics & Societies dedicated to ‘totalitarian laughter’ and guest-edited by Serguei Oushakine. I researched and wrote this chapter while holding a Solmsen Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. I am grateful to the Institute and in particular to its director, Professor Susan Stanford Friedman, for their very generous support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Costica Bradatan

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  1. Costica Bradatan
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Correspondence to Costica Bradatan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Alistair Welchman

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Bradatan, C. (2015). The World as Farce. In: Welchman, A. (eds) Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9448-0_9

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