Unbearable Heartbeat: Reading Ethics and Politics in Derrida, Levinas, and Kundera

Conversations about ethics and politics are of paramount importance to the present conjuncture. In this work, Ricky Varghese attempts a close reading of certain key literary texts by Franco- Czech novelist Milan Kundera wherein one might see the ways in which the novelist has attempted a discussion about how the subjects of self and other are founded on the possibility of/for ethics within an intimate cosmopolitical space. The work gestures toward a move from and beyond universal conversations about cosmopolitanism to a more nuanced reading of the cosmopolitical space as one being founded on ethics and intimate encounters between self and other. Bringing together psychoanalytic theory as it pertains to embodiment, literary criticism in his readings of Kundera's texts, and the ethical philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Ricky Varghese attempts to think about cosmopolitanism differently, as the locus point where intimacy, ethics, and justice can be initiated into the conversation between self and other, as subjects that are mutually constituted.