Phenomenology of Being and the Abject in Milan Kundera's Immortality

One of the significant concepts that Kundera, a Czech-French novelist, criticizes in the novel is the concept of Kitch. Kitch is all that is outward and flashy, based on the form and the image, and refers to non-thought ideas and non-genuine thoughts but prevalent. According to its general character about imagology (dominance of the demonstrative, propagandistic, and suggestive), Kitch rejects any strange, alien, and unknown phenomena. The novel's mission is to resist and defend something that Kitsh denies as an unknown and the abject, according to Julia Kristeva's thought. In the present article, it has been shown through the phenomenology method that the abject closely overlaps with Heidegger's Being, and the novel Immortality revolves around the heterogeneous subject of Agnes and her ontological strangeness in the world based on kitsch. Agnes is an isolated subject and does not belong to the world around her. Her reflections are explained in three axes: criticism of kitsch society, criticism of imagology, looking for the way of Being, and transgression of symbolic matters. As a result, the novel Immortality ironically prevents forgetting and rejecting Being due to the characteristic of representing Being and the abject.