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AGAINST PROGRESS: UTOPIA, IDYLL, NOSTALGIA AND MELANCHOLY order of things and fundamentally transforming it. The existence of the Slovak National Revival, its key figures, initiatives and activities, aspiring to the transformation of an ethnic group into a modern nation with its own homogeneous culture, can indeed in this context be interpreted as an Event, not just in a historical but also a philosophical sense. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek characterizes this type of Event as “the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme." This event is the “signifier, which structures an entire field of meaning”, causing “radical politic ruptures” and representing “a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage with it”’. However, an essential element in the emergence of such an event is an awareness that it cannot be taken for granted, and amazement that such a thing could have happened at all and that in a place where nothing had existed before, there was suddenly something. Key figures of the nascent Slovak culture were confronted with the absence of historicity, direct cultural traditions and, last but not least, with the actual non-existence of a nation on whose behalf the entire process of the National Revival had been carried out. One of the responses to this non-existence was the creation or invention of a tradition, a mythopoeic narrative of national beginnings that may never have existed, as well as a reading of historical events that was meant to furnish evidence of traces of “Slovakness” in a past that was supposed to be fully realized in the future. Throughout this period, Slovak culture had to grapple not only with parallel and competing nationalisation processes (Hungarian and Czech, to mention only two) but also with the disruption and discontinuity that characterised this process. That is why the assertion of Slovak cultural and ethnic homogeneity also involved the exclusion and rejection of everything that might have been regarded as being at odds with it. The “whole” and “wholeness”, emphasizing the collective to the detriment of the individual, became key concepts in cultural manifestos that advocated the cultural and national project. This approach significantly affected and shaped the various emergent cultural and national activities, leading to the rejection of anything that did not conform or went counter to the imperative of unity and that might have jeopardized the achievement of the goals that had been set. In Slovak culture these tendencies were most clearly visible in its attitudes to cultural modernity. As a result of the dynamic evolution of modernist tendencies in Western Europe, which began during the Enlightenment and encompassed the entire nineteenth century, the holistic society of the West 5 Slavoj Zizek: Event, London, Penguin Random House UK, 2014, 6. 6 Ibid. 6. 7 Ibid. 10. * 431 +
