“Writing, the test of the political” (Écrire: à l’épreuve du politique)—this enigmatic phrase, coined in 1992 by the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, inspires, among possible intellectual reflections on its meaning, the main topic of this book: the shift of paradigms from political interpretations of literary texts to literary interpretations ofthe political.¹ This noun awkwardly and reluctantly translates into English the French termle politique(and the Germandas Politische), a word that carries in its philological biography meanings that convey the conflicted identity of modern political communities. These meanings take shape through writing and bear witness to...

Can literature and art mediate our relation to the historical present? If we want to be contemporary, we cannot avoid this question. At the end of the twentieth century, we witnessed an “epochal threshold”: a picture of the world ended and a new one (the end of History) timidly emerged, only to be violently replaced by new representations of the global era, dominated by ever more expansive networks—military, technological, financial. At the same time, we discovered the return of the repressed: unruly politics without public discourse; deceptive myths of social and economic opportunity; religious fanaticism; and the near free...

Orson Welles’s 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’sThe Trialpresents Joseph K.’s wanderings in the labyrinth of a perversely enigmatic justice system as the setting for a paranoid conspiracy. In this process of literary adaptation, the skin of the Kafkaesque fiction is stretched to cover the anxiety signified by the Cold War moment in the history of political modernity.The Trialwas filmed in Zagreb, at the time a town in Communist Yugoslavia, and in the deserted train station on the Parisian Left Bank, the future Musée d’Orsay. In Orson Welles’s political film, the fictional world of the novel, and...

In Milan Kundera’sThe Joke(1967), Cold War themes—such as the expansion of Soviet—style Communism in Eastern Europe—make up adistantyet relevant context. The novel describes how the fairy tale of the Communist dream transforms into a tragic farce of historical proportions whose protagonists are common people with specific roles in the fictional representation of totalitarian society—the Communist fanatic, the opportunist bureaucrat, the innocent victim. At the same time, given the importance of temporal perspective to the narrative design of this interpretive novel, we may, in fact, need to address the role of a different...

The assumption that, in the second half of the twentieth century, literature was able to engage the politico-historical dimensions of our age appears in literary criticism as the central element of the shift from high modernist aesthetics to a new model, postmodernism. Classic studies on the much-debated concept of literary postmodernity suggest various political acts that tacitly point towards the Left. However, in most contemporary literary studies, the categories that define politics, or talk about the foundation or disintegration of the social bond, are taken for granted. More specifically than Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, or Matei Calinescu, Linda Hutcheon’s work...

The philosophical interrogation of the political amounts to theoretical narratives that typically look at modern society through the lens of paradigmatic cases: democracy in Europe and America as forms of the post-metaphysical (i.e., properlyhistorical) society but also Soviet totalitarianism as a concerted political and ideological effort to solve the paradoxes of democracy. In the final chapter of his bookComplications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, Claude Lefort describes Soviet Communism as a phenomenon intricately related to political globalization; given the “sudden decomposition of the regime,”¹ and the post-Cold War expansion of both capitalism and the ideologies of the...

What is the significance of the Cold War antagonism between democracy and totalitarianism to the political modernity of the global present? An answer to this question, this book has argued, is formulated in post-1945 American and Eastern European interpretive novels. Being exemplary literary fictions about “writing at the pressure of the political,” these narratives work through traumatic events of contemporary history. In their fictional worlds, we witness the dissolution of Cold War universalisms and are confronted by the trials of the political in the age of the global picture. More specifically, novelists such as Pynchon, Kundera, Coover, Popescu, DeLillo, and...