PENSER LE CORPS DANS L’ŒUVRE ROMANESQUE DE MILAN KUNDERA
Thinking the Body in Milan Kundera's Novels

Summary/Abstract: In Milan Kundera’s fictional thinking, the body is the place of questioning and the object of a profound work of thought through a panoply of key concepts that put the characters in the situation: “these experimental egos”. Kundera, by grasping the character in their corporality, tries to think about the relationship to oneself, to others, to the world, and the body as a horizon of thought is thus questioned in its relation to the gaze, the soul, love, eroticism and identity. It becomes a reference to find a place in a world that is difficult to live in, to understand and to share with other individuals who are lost as well. In this article, we pose the problem of the body in the work of Milan Kundera and especially of the place it occupies in his “fictional thinking” and in his art of the novel. How does thinking about the body in Kundera’s work participate in thinking about the human condition of modern man in the modernity crisis era? This is the central issue to which we will try to bring elements of answers by posing the problem of the body in Kundera’s fictional work from four standpoints: first, we intend to investigate the body as a theme of fictional thinking; secondly, we will examine the fictional concept of “erotic friendship” and its relation to the topic of the body; thirdly, we will try to raise the question of inhabiting one’s body in relation to the possibility or impossibility of inhabiting the world; and finally we will see the body as a defective machine, hence the impossibility of inhabiting both the body and the world.

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