Nobody and Nowhere: Notes of Absent Narration

The problem of a non-linear, empty or absent narrative has been present in art for a long time, but today, in the context of a time-consuming crisis, the disintegration of certain certainties (progress, liberal democratic globalization, relative peace, etc.), it is gaining new relevance and intensity. This publication presents four original contributions on how to not only think about the absent narrative, but how to understand it as a creative strategy and response to the complexity of the contemporary world. Felice Moramarco deals with the crisis of modern subjectivity. That is, the disintegrating ideas about man or humanity as a fundamentally rational and his-torically progressive or universal actor. Precisely this disintegration is the main historical-philosophical motif of non-linear or absent narrative. Milan Mazúr and Viktor Takáč then show their work with these disintegrating stories. In Milan’s contribution, we can observe a number of motives, plots or moments, among which the experience of migrants has the main place, the surrounding story and subjectivity is always in a certain (absent) in-between space. Viktor’s entry into the book represents a set of images from the game environment, which again, both generally as a medium or in the author’s specific design, is a collage of many seemingly unrelated objects, media, elements or views. The book is clased by Václav Janoščík’s text game reproducing human history as an interactive philosophical game of dynamics and concepts.