Author: Alicia Mora de Rueda

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

The eternal return is Nietzsche’s most theatrical idea, and also the one that most people, encountering it for  the first time, tend to dismiss as too dramatic to take seriously. The demon appears, announces that your life  will recur exactly as it has happened, infinitely, and asks you how you feel about that. The straightforward  response is to say ‘yes, fine’, or to say ‘no, awful’. But Nietzsche’s real interest is in what the thought does to you – if it functions as a kind of moral pressure, an imperative to live as if every Tuesday were worth  repeating forever.   

The Czech-French author Milan Kundera opens his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by taking this concept seriously enough to argue against it. What he argues, however, is much stranger than simple and outright rejection.  

The eternal return is impossible. We know this, and the impossibility is the problem. We live once, our  choices cannot be tested against their alternatives, and nothing we decide will ever be confirmed or refuted  by repetition. In this sense, every choice floats free of the gravity that recurrence would have given it. This seems to be what Kundera means by the ‘lightness of being’ – the vertiginous condition of existing in a life that carries no weight because it can only ever happen in one direction.  

The four characters he builds the novel around are studies in what this lightness really costs. Tomas, the Prague  surgeon, has arranged his emotional life around a principle he calls ‘erotic friendship’, which entails the  separation of physical intimacy from anything that might require him to stay. He has lovers without allowing any relationship to become fully binding, thus preserving his freedom and foreclosing almost everything else. Sabina, who appears most often in his life, takes this further and turns it into a philosophy. She leaves everyone before they can define her, betrays every fixed identity available to her (country, artistic tradition, the men who think they understand her…), and reads her own serial disappearances as a form of integrity and a ‘self’ that exists precisely because it refuses to be fixed.  

Against them, Kundera places Teresa, who arrives in Tomas’s life carrying a heavy suitcase, a detail he  lingers on, and who loves in the way that weight demands: fully, without this separation of body and soul that Tomas has built his whole life around. And then there’s Franz, the fourth main character, who cannot encounter anything without making it meaningful, who projects onto Sabina an idea of her so complete that she has almost no room to exist inside it.  

What Kundera refuses to do is cast judgements on these positions, which is partly why the novel has endured so profoundly. He doesn’t suggest that Teresa’s suffering ennobles her, or that Sabina’s freedom is something to aspire to. Instead, he seems more interested in what each of them pays to live by their philosophy, and, importantly, exactly when the bill arrives.  

Sabina ends the novel in America. She has exited every relationship and country that might have formed her,  making paintings in a city where nobody knows what she escaped from or why. The freedom is therefore  genuine, total, and also (this is what the novel won’t let you ignore) completely without echo. This same  freedom has left her without any ground beneath her, so that every act of departure that felt like self-preservation has accumulated into a life in which nothing was allowed to accumulate. The eternal return, if it were real, would have given her choices weight, each decision meaning something proportional to its  infinite repetition. Without it, she is exactly as free as she intended to be, and that freedom feels, by the end,  like it belongs to a life that never quite solidified.

Tomas and Teresa end the novel in a small village, having given up Prague and surgery and most of what  their previous lives contained. Their circumstances look, from the outside, like a kind of defeat that has narrowed, creating a life that is reduced rather than built. The happiness they have is modest and specific and hard to explain in terms that would make sense on paper. Nothing about their trajectory redeems the difficulty of it (Kundera is too honest a writer to suggest that it does). Rather, he simply shows that something has survived; what remains is a life built from weight rather than around the avoidance of it, which is not necessarily the  same thing as a life that went well.  

The problem the novel circles is not really about philosophy in the abstract, since it is lived before it is  theorised. It is more about how one chooses what to hold on to when holding on to anything feels like a  foreclosure. Kundera never quite resolves the tension between lightness and weight, because it is not the kind of tension that resolves at all. What he does show, though, is that Sabina’s costs are invisible precisely  because they look like freedom from the outside, and there is no repetition, no demon, no recurrence to make  them legible – not to us, and not to her.

Featured Image: Elisa Cabot

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

War exposes the foundations of any society, both in its manifestation of power and its propensity for cruelty. Perhaps the most striking sign of this is the historical pattern of women in conflict: they are consistently the first to be attacked in specific, targeted ways and the last to be included in peace calculations.

This observation is not an attempt to diminish the experience of men, who bear the primary weight of frontline combat. Any conflict driven by the realities of the trenches, be this conscription, physical harm, or the general sacrifice of the male body when serving, is an absolute and central tragedy of the state. But recognising this does not mean the specific nature of violence aimed elsewhere should be overlooked. While male casualties are largely the result of kinetic engagements between armed forces, violence against women (particularly that of sexual and psychological nature) often functions as a purposeful, non-kinetic weapon. It is a tool used to accomplish a very specific military goal: the destruction of the internal cohesion and functionality of a community.

Rather than being a byproduct of chaos, it is a calculated instrument of force. We see this in the systematic recruitment of “comfort women” during the 1940s, or the use of mass rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda, these being just a few examples. They are a part of the long lineage of conflicts where the harm visited upon women was not a side effect of combat; it was the combat. By turning the body into a battleground, an aggressor effectively shifts the frontline from the geographical boundary to the domestic centre. It targets the primary caregivers and the links of social life, ensuring that the war’s devastation is generational rather than just infrastructure-deep, and effectively poisons the social foundation upon which any future stability must be built. The efficiency of this strategy lies in its long-term impact; even if the governmental occupation ends, the society faces a fundamental challenge in reorganising itself at its most basic level, because the “victory” was achieved by breaking the social unit from the inside out.

But this tactical utility is followed by a predictable political pivot once the kinetic phase of conflict concludes. Diplomacy, by its very nature, requires a narrowing of focus and a prioritisation of the immediate cessation of hostilities over the resolution of deeper social trauma to function.

Thus, in this context, being “the last to be considered” is typically a result of the technical limitations of the peace process, where the urgency of reaching a consensus forces negotiators to discard any variables that cannot be easily measured or traded. For those tasked with designing a new order, the specific abuses that are inflicted upon women represent “messy” data, or in other words realities that complicate the straightforward math of territory and disarmament because they cannot be settled with a signature. In this calculus, peace is treated as a technical binary (the absence of gunfire) while the restoration of the community is categorised differently. This move recontextualises the focus from the political agenda to a charitable one and allows the formal peace process to remain streamlined, even if it remains incomplete. By shifting these issues into the realm of “humanitarian” concerns, the state effectively removes them from the political table, treating them as secondary casualties of war instead of primary peace objectives. Admittedly, there have been genuine advancements in how these issues are recognised. The inclusion of gendered crimes in international legal structures and the presence of women in peace delegations represent a significant shift toward a more comprehensive record and a growing admission that a stable state cannot be constructed on top of unaddressed atrocities.

These developments are often able to provide a legal and ethical vocabulary for violations that were once entirely ignored, and are coming to signal a slow but real evolution in global standards, as well as a transition from total impunity to at least a baseline of accountability. Yet, even with these tools, the transition to stability remains a multidimensional issue. It is often simpler for an administration to focus on the visible markers of statehood (borders, banks, and the formal structures of a regime) under the assumption that once the formal structures are in place, the rest of society will naturally be able to follow suit. The official conclusion of a war is rarely a full resolution. More often, it is just a bureaucratic milestone. By treating the specific targeting of women as a secondary issue, diplomacy settles for only a very narrow and fragile definition of stability. It treats peace as a political deadline that can be met by drawing a line under the measurable aspects of war, and leaves the unmeasurable human consequences to fade into the background of both the private home and the female body. The result is a landscape that is technically at rest, where the maps are once again redrawn and records are closed, yet the fundamental work of social reconstruction continues, largely unacknowledged, in the margins.

Featured Image: Ibrahim Al-Aorfali