The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World

Philosopher and critic Ivan Sviták was among the leading Czech intellectuals during the lead-up to the "Prague Spring" of 1968, when tentative reforms by Communist Party leaders in Czechoslovakia sparked a mass movement for democratic socialism. By the time a Soviet-led invasion put an end to this movement and forced Sviták into exile, Sviták had influenced a generation of politicized youth with his works of Marxist humanist philosophy, social commentary, cultural critique, unconventional poetry, and satirical prose. Taking up Sviták's largely-unrealized proposals for publication, editor Joseph Grim Feinberg has collected Sviták's most provocative writing on aesthetic theory, interspersing it with a selection of Sviták's poetry and creative prose. In the resulting volume, Sviták explores the possibility of a world in which art will be "made by all," and he defends humanity's quixotic right to fight against old illusions so that new illusions might be born.