The Gestures of Existence: Milan Kundera’s Phenomenological ExistentialismGesture, says Milan Kundera, “cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is the gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations”(Kundera 7). I propose that this fascinating notion of identity, posed in bodily and existential terms, might be analyzed in light of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both writers emphasize existential experience, but both contain a similar emphasis on symbolic, essentialist reductions as the only true manner in which to comprehend that existence. I am intrigued most not by the notion that gestures form identity, but that through their reduction, a more expansive human experience is opened up—through the restriction itself, existence is formed. I propose a project which merges the two approaches on the ground of this similarity, taking Kundera’s “gesture”(7) as a conceptual parallel for Merleau-Ponty’s “ideality”(xvi), as representative of the same drive to understand human existence through the symbolic realities one both creates and is created by. |
Smith, Evan |