History on Speed: Media and the Politics of Forgetting 634 f MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 52 number 3, Fall 2006. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. history on speed: media and the politics of forgetting in milan kundera's slowness natasa kovacevic No politics is possible at the speed of light. Politics depends upon having time for refection. Today, we no longer have time to refect, the things that we see have already hap- pened. And it is necessary to react immediately. Is a real-time democracy possible? An authoritarian politics, yes. But what defnes democracy is the sharing of power. When there is not time to share, what will be shared? —Paul Virilio, Emotions In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera describes the aftermath of World War I as a critical moment when "the terminal paradoxes of the Modern Era" become formulated in so-called Central European novels. Faced with the "impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable" monster of "History," Kafka, Musil, Broch and others examine how the very existential categories, such as "freedom," "future," or "crime" change their meaning (12). In a parallel gesture, this essay suggests that the downfall of communist regimes in so-called Eastern Europe triggers another age of "terminal paradoxes" that affect Kundera's own writing: faced with the equally impersonal and uncontrollable Western media and its reductive historicism, his texts move toward