Heterotopias of crisis: The 1980s debate of Central Europe of the political and cultural as a typical binary opposition concept

„The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible“, claimed Michel Foucault in 1967. Using his sketchy concept of heterotopias, the paper will focus on the 1980s debate of Central Europe, analysing the binaries of the politics (treated in the realm of “the real”) and the cultural tradition (treated as an imagined community of fellow travellers). The paper attempts to de-construct the image of Central European modernism, coined in the essays by Milan Kundera, as a heterogeneous concept whose outer homogeneity is constructed with the help of narrativity. Kundera’s concept of Central European legacy whose last embodiment is Milan Kundera thus makes sense when read as a story; as an analytic essay, it struggles with discrepancies that can be cured with the help of Foucault’s metaphor.