SUPERSTRUCTURE AND HEGEMONY IN MILAN KUNDERA’S “THE JOKE” AND POST-POSTMODERN CULTURAL TEXTS

INTRODUCTION In the novel “The Joke” (“Žert”, 1967), Milan Kundera demonstrates the mechanism of functioning of the superstructure. Under this concept, which was first developed by Louis Althusser, I mean a set of factors that influence society, forming certain hegemony and defining the system of power relations. From the very beginning, the novel’s character Ludvik Jahn is reluctant to return to his hometown, the center of which he roamed in childhood and adolescence. In the end, the character confesses that it is not just reluctance, but a hatred that causes this psychological discomfort associated with the perception of the past. The motif of superstructure corresponds to the motif of cultural transgression and transculturalism discourse in general in contemporary literature and cinema texts of the post-postmodern period. The scholars admit that The Hegelian contradiction is never overdetermined. Therein lies the difference between Hegel and Marx and between economism and Althusser’s reading of Marx. The contradiction between forces and relations of productions cannot explain historical change on its own. It only acquires ruptural force through its overdetermination by contradictions arising in different levels of the social formation. Instead of a direct causal link between base and superstructure, which conceives of politics and ideology as epiphenomena or by-products of the economy, the superstructures acquire their own specificity and effectiveness in the historical process, to the extent that changes in the base do not automatically modify the superstructures (Althusser, 1969, pp. 111, 115). The latter are part of the conditions of existence of the economic level, if only because labour legislation intervenes to organise the process of production (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, p. 178). The superstructures always already contaminate the base 1 .