Společnost nevolnosti

The book is a collection of essays by a renowned author who presents his thoughts on the problems of modern society using various literary forms (interviews, newspaper essays, reflective essays). Through observations of contemporary tendencies and trends in society, he identifies the underlying problems, the most significant one being the tendency to exclude ourselves from the world as a common shared space and the efforts to become encapsulated into our private sub-worlds. The individual essays show how the inclination to separate oneself from others manifests itself in all aspects of human life.

In the period from 1997 to 2007, most of the essays appeared in abridged versions in Salon, the Thursday literary supplement to Právo (daily newspaper). The interview with Jiří Rulf was published in Reflex (weekly magazine) and the interview with Barbora Osvaldová appeared in Xantypa (monthly magazine). The essay entitled “Pohlaví rozumu” (The Sex of Reason) was published as part of the anthology Nové čtení světa I. (A New Reading of the World I.), edited by Marie Chřibková. The present book features the essays in a revised and more complete form than they appeared in Salon, where they had to be abridged or edited for technical reasons. Each subsequent edition was accompanied by the author’s new “Substitute for Introduction” chapter, making it possible for the reader to follow the author’s reflections from the first edition in 2007 to the latest one.