No Salvation: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the Eventless World - Culture Talk by Dr. Ondřej Váša

The English Department

would like to invite you to the Public Lecture

No Salvation: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the Eventless World

Mgr. Ondřej Váša, Ph.D.
Vice-dean for Public Relations
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Assistant Professor
Department of Theory of Art and Atworks, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Building P, Room P200, 4.10 pm, October 24, 2024

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game franchise, itself a mutant born from the marriage of the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's movie adaptation, introduces a very strange world. Its uncanniness lies not so much in the fact that the mysterious Zone, in which the game is set, is teeming with monsters and littered with anomalies that defy the laws of nature; the strangest thing about the Zone is that it is as much a space of hope as it is a space in which the world has already happened. That is, it is whthout ceasing to exist, and so the NPCs, as well as the player, move through this world like souls through a cancelled limb. With some hyperbole (and with the help of contemporary event philosophy), the talk will focus on this very aspect: is it possible to think of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series as a case study of a world where everyone is doomed to persist without catharsis, completion or redemption?

Mgr. Ondřej Váša, Ph.D. has long focused on the interdisciplinary intertwining of philosophy, art and science, and he is particularly interested in modern utopian/dystopian visions of "man's place in the universe." He is the author of a number of scholarly studies and co-author of five books. In 2023, he edited a special issue of the Philosophical Journal, devoted to the ideas of a "world without people," and co-edited a special section of the American journal, Semiotica, dedicated to the phenomenon of inhumanity.