Abstract
Central to our inquiry into everyday life are socio-cultural aspects, rigorously connected with analyses of the concrete artistic or historic-artistic relations. Themes of everyday life and banality became topical in light of contemporary debates about religious, war, political or private conflicts.
The common denominators of the chapters in this book are the reflections on the paradox arising from the clash between the disparate manifestations of everyday life (banality, "everyday life" as the manifestation of the true course of life or conversely of the ideal vision, dream or desire about everyday life in an extraordinary, extreme situation) and their destruction/reconstruction/ fulfilment/displacement of impulses and realities arising from various conflict situations (e.g. of socio-political, artistic etc. character). It is the conflicting nature of the clashes of the everyday manifestations with an extreme form of the totalitarian principle (in the way of artistically expressed demands and positions as well as in the sphere of political and cultural practices) on which the direction of individual contributions is based.
We endeavoured to present the theme "everydayness" so that it would not appear as a non-historical and decontextualized study dealing with various forms and images of everyday life, tearing these relations from their specific historical context and viewing them in the spirit of benign apolitical (or conversely excessively politically motivated) "retrospective" which (often deliberately) displaces awareness of causes and consequences, and without which historical context cannot be fully perceived and comprehended.