The author seeks here to link Havel’s well-known dramatic output with his visual poetry, which is far less known. The notion of the double bind, the author argues, is a predominant trope of Havel’s oeuvre. By applying Grelling’s paradox to Havel’s visual texts, the author illustrates the techniques Havel uses to produce logograms whose visual representation contradicts the verbal message conveyed by them.
Th e paper explores a shared epistemological bias of Shklovsky’s poetics and Schmitt’s legal Dezisionismus: their privileging the singular over the ordinary. “Th e exception is more interesting than the rule,” Schmitt stated about the law in 1922. For, every legal judgment, he insisted, involves the indispensable moment of contingency insofar as it extends the same statute to diff erent and irreducibly unique situations. Shklovsky, quite similarly, endowed art with the capacity to defamiliarize our perception of reality made torpid by repetition: turning the usual into the unexpected. Both theoreticians rebelled against the Positivistic tradition in their respective fi elds. Schmitt against Kelsen’s “pure theory of law”—an autonomous science of deductively arranged norms, each deriving its validity from appropriate higher norms, down to the ultimate Grundgesetz underlying and sustaining them. “Th e basic law,” argued Schmitt pace Kelsen, is always already something supra-legal that becomes incorporated into jurisprudence only retroactively. For initially it is but the expression of an unpredictable will of a particular “sovereign” who decides to suspend an existing legal system and establishes a diff erent one. Such a coup d’état is not an act of legal nihilism but, on the contrary, a self-protecting measure intended to save the state from liquidation by its enemies. Shklovsky critiqued the validity of Spencer’s postulate, popularized in Russia by Veselovskii, that art strives to economize our mental energy. Defamiliarization, he insisted, is wasteful, but for a vital reason: to resuscitate our relationship with the surrounding world that, without this intervention, would succumb to a deadening entropy. “Only the creation of new artistic forms,” wrote Shklovsky in “Th e Resurrection of the Word,” “can return to humankind the experience of the world, resurrect things, and kill pessimism.” Like the Schmittian sovereign, then, poets destroy literature in order to preserve it. Th ey arbitrarily suspend worn-out artistic norms to inaugurate new ones capable of defamiliarizing reality afresh.
Since the late 9th century the genre of “the letter of invitation” has enjoyed an uncanny status in Czech political discourse. Great Moravia’s incorporation into Slavia orthodoxa ensued from Prince Rastislav’s request for Christian missionaries addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. Consonantly, the eastward political orientation of Czechoslovakia after WW2 was, in part, the result of František Palacký’s refusal to accept the “Committee of Fifty’s” invitation extended in its missive of April 6, 1848 (attributed by K. H. Borovský to Franz Schusselka) to represent his people at the German Parliament convening in Frankfurt. My paper juxtaposes the two most recent variations on the said epistolary genre: 1) the letter authored by Vasil Biľak together with four other top CPC functionaries in mid- 1968 asking Leonid Brezhnev for “a brotherly assistance,” that is, a military intervention thwarting the imminent counterrevolution in their homeland; and 2) the letter “United We Stand” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 30, 2003) co-signed by Václav Havel and an assorted septet of European prime ministers urging its implied addressee, George W. Bush, to dispatch the military that would “rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Th e compelling need to compare these two texts was highlighted by Havel himself in his speech of November 20, 2002 insisting that “it is necessary […] to weigh again and again on the fi nest scales whether we are truly helping people against a criminal regime and defending humankind against its weapons, or whether perchance this is not another– understandably more sophisticated than the Soviet one of 1968–version of ‘the brotherly assistance.’” My analysis demonstrates that the latter is the case and that the US invasion of Iraq solicited by Havel’s letter was as unjustifi ed and unsophisticated as the earlier Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that Biľak’s epistle legitimized.