Karel Capek

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. As a theoretical model working from these traditions, it illuminates a new direction for formalist attention to literature by connecting it to embodiment, ecology, and material substances, and a novel path for feminist materialists by suggesting historical objects and situations where human and nonhuman agencies might be clearer. As I demonstrate in readings of Karel Čapek and Virginia Woolf, this model of reading also might help reinvigorate ways of approaching early-20th-century modernism in our time of ecological crisis, but without looking for signs of our concerns and epistemologies in the past.

This paper reads Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s critique of technology in The Human Condition. Arendt and Čapek share a suspicion that modernity’s attempts to overcome labor through the use of technology undermines the human condition of natality. Indeed, the revolt of Čapek’s Robots dramatizes Arendt’s warnings of the dangers of a “society of laborers without labor” and “world alienation.” Both thinkers suggest that the dilemmas posed by modern technology cannot be resolved through “practical” means, but require loving attentiveness to the fragile conditions in which genuine natality can emerge.

Looking at the themes of the world, memory and the ultimate fulfilment, the book seeks to recover the symbolic languages which can assist a dialogue and mutual learning on the boundaries between theology, politics and arts.
Contents:
Preface
Introduction: Culture as a Theological Theme
PART I: THE WORLD
Chapter One: Images of the World in Karel Čapek and Isaac Bashevis Singer
1. The Transcendent in the Ordinary
The World as a Factory
The World as a Garden
The World as an Open Horizon
2. A Vanished Past in the Mosaic of the Present
Roots that Were Moved
Shadows of Hope
Forces Playing in the Universe
3. Concluding Remarks
Chapter Two: Theologies of the World
1. What Lies beyond Secularisation?
2. The World as a Gift
All that is Seen and Unseen
Cosmic Nature and Humanity
The Image of God
The Fall and Renewal
3. The World as a Task
Divine – Human Cooperation
Utopia as a Symbolic Mediation of Hope
The Journey of Deification
4. Concluding Remarks
PART II: MEMORY
Chapter Three: Heritage of Totalitarian Cultures in Folk Music
1. Vladimir Vysotsky: Interplay of the Historical and the Archetypal
Losers’ Point of View
The Tragic Human Condition
Tell Me Where Is the Land Lit with Icon-Lamp Light
2. Jaromír Nohavica: Breaking and Healing in Retrospective
Memory as a Burden
God, Where Have You Been?
Glimpses of Redemption
3. Concluding Remarks
Chapter Four: Redemptive Memory in Theology
1. Victimhood as a Positive Identity
2. Remembering God
Christ as the One Who Remembers
Redemptive Re-Membering
God Siding with the Victim
Doctrine versus Experience?
3. Giving Back the Past
Liturgical Remembering
Historical Remembering
Two Eschatological Horizons
4. Concluding Remarks
Part III:  THE ULTIMATE FULFILMENT
Chapter Five: Figuring the Ultimate Fulfilment in Central European Cinema
1. Guiding Desires in extremis according to István Szabó and Vladimír Michálek
Mephisto
Forgotten Light
2. Kieślowski’s Journey towards What is Real
Liberty
Equality
Fraternity
3. Concluding Remarks
Chapter Six: Love as the Ultimate Fulfillment in Theology
1. Estrangement of Love or Ambiguity of Conversion?
2. The Spirit as the Giver of Love
Human Freedom without Love
Love outside and inside of the Body of Christ
Kenosis of the Spirit
Two Hands of the Father
3. The Spirit as the Giver of Conversion
Disordered Inclinations in the Light of Love
Discernments of the Spirits
Restored Communion
4. Concluding Remarks
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Inspired by the methodology Milan Kundera has described as the "density of unexpected encounters," this essay attempts "to reach out ... to ... distant realities and bring them together to create a spark" (André Breton).  The distant realities involved are three historical moments (Northern England during the industrial revolution; Czechoslovakia between the two world wars; and Britain and America in 2016) and associated literary texts (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's R.U.R., and journalistic narratives making "sense" of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election).  The aim is to use these apparently unconnected materials to shed light on the shifting and fragile boundaries of what societies consider human and the processes of exclusion through which these boundaries are sustained.

This is a companion piece to my paper "White Riot: Brexit, Trump, and post-factual politics" which is also available on academia.edu.  It is more literary and associative, less social-scientific, less rigorous but more speculative and wide-ranging.

At the beginning of the 20th century the collective imagination was fascinated and terrified by the discovery of radium. A scientific imagery sprang up around radioactivity and was disseminated by public lectures and newspaper articles discussing the ambiguous power of this strange substance. It was claimed that radium could be used to treat cholera, typhus and tuberculosis, but at the same time there were warnings that it could be used for military purposes. The media and the scientists themselves employed a rich vocabulary influenced by religion, alchemy and magic. The ambivalent power of radioactive elements exerted a great influence on science fiction novelists. This paper will examine some significant works published in Europe, America and Russia during the first decades of the 20th century and their role in the creation of the complex imagery of radioactivity that seized the public imagination long before the invention of the atomic bomb.

Contents
- Introduction: The Historical Context
- The Utopias of Emilio Salgari and H.G. Wells, Suspended between Progress and Catastrophe
- The Ambiguous Nature of Radioactivity and Anxieties Regarding Technology in Early 20th-Century Novels and Feuilletons
- Radioactivity and Nuclear Energy in Slavic Literature in the 1920s and 1930s
- Conclusions

This chapter analyses the robot in twentieth-century science fiction. In the first section, “unequal power relationships” are utilized to investigate the development of the robot. Three case studies illustrate the argument of the chapter, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Isaac Asimov’s “bi-centennial man” Robert Martin, and P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The second section of the chapter discusses fear, the “Frankenstein-complex,” and the robot. The last section analyzes the robots of desire and human subjectivity. Finally, the question of the robot is also expressly linked to issues of alienation, the commodity, and the monster.

Print/electronic version of chapter available here:

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003008354-32/power-dialectics-twentieth-century-science-fiction-christopher-loughlin

“Zrovna teď je chvíle, kdy by bylo na místě udělat prudký vír. Nástup mladé umělecké generace a hledání nového umění v české předválečné kultuře”, Almanach na rok 1914. Mezi modernou a avantgardou, a cura di Erik Gilk, Praha, Akropolis, 2016, pp. 11-25

Final version of this article in: Chiara Mengozzi (ed.), Outside the Anthropological Machine. Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. Routledge, 2020

By proposing a new interpretation of The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek, this chapter demonstrates that resisting the anthropological machine depends first and foremost on the practices of reading. My intent is to challenge previous readings of the novel, most of which remove the salamanders as a referent, recoding them through an allegorical key. However, before being an allegory of colonised people, the working class, Jews, and in the end, even Nazis, the Salamanders should be considered, in narrative terms, as concrete living beings that humans treat as if they were merely natural resources to be studied and exploited. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which traditional interpretations are reductionist and symptomatic of a failure and inability to think beyond humanity, insofar as they persist in placing humans at the centre of the plot, even when confronted by a radically anti-anthropocentric novel that stages the catastrophic consequences of the Anthropocene. I ground such an interpretation on the analysis of the intertextual references left unexplored in previous readings (Darwin and Kafka), and of two stylistic features neglected by other interpreters, to wit, the frequent inversion between the centre and the margins of the text, and the “surprise effect” created by the concatenation of the narrated events.

A quarta revolução digital, em especial por meio dos avanços na Inteligência Artificial, vem promovendo uma nova onda de automação, levando à substituição de humanos por máquinas em tarefas antes consideradas exclusivamente humanas, inclusive na educação. Tanto a automação quanto, mais especificamente, a IA, tornam urgente que repensemos nossas concepções sobre a formação humana, buscando entender que sentidos elas mobilizam e que sentidos podem ter os dois projetos associados à IA: a pretensão de recriar o humano artificialmente e a de sua substituição pela máquina. Este artigo pretende promover uma breve reflexão sobre estas questões. Para tanto, será dividido em três partes. Na primeira, tomaremos a "deixa" de declarações de Anthony Seldon para, partindo do termo "robô" e de suas origens na ficção científica, distinguir estes dois projetos distintos que o termo IA designa, bem como, a partir de considerações de Karl Marx sobre maquinaria, relacionar um destes projetos ao desenvolvimento do capitalismo. Na segunda parte relacionamos estes dois empreendimentos diferentes aos diferentes tipos de IA, questionando-nos acerca da pertinência desta distinção, tanto como da aglutinação destes tipos sob um mesmo termo geral. Por fim, na terceira, contrastamos as perspectivas de Catherine Malabou sobre os automatismos da inteligência e a distinção de Hannah Arendt entre ação e comportamento para apontar alguns caminhos possíveis no aprofundamento das reflexões sobre a automação da educação. Palavras-chave: automação, educação, inteligência artificial, Arendt, Malabou.

This article discusses the options that narrative and language have in their attempts to capture or describe traumatic experience and death. It concentrates on two prose
texts by Karel Čapek, Obyčejný život and Povětroň, and the first phase of Freudian psychoanalysis, pointing at generally distinguishable limits and distortions that arise when narrative and language come in contact with trauma and death. Contrary to the current trend within „trauma studies“, the article does not deal with autobiographical records of traumatic experience. It rather tries to point out that thinking consistently about the connection between memory, language and trauma tends to blur and question the  traditional distinction between fiction (understood as a work of imagination) and autobiography (taken as a description of real events). It also tries to show that psychoanalysis arrives, explicitly and implicitly, at a similar conclusion. The last part of the article poses the question what the resulting  relationship between the outside (narrated, written story) and the „inner“ experience is like, and to what
extent the structure of this dyad can also be questioned.