Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Kundera develops this formulation in his novel *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* (first published in 1984), where he reflects on “kitsch” not merely as a style of cheap sentimentality but as a moral-political attitude. Writing as a Czech émigré shaped by the experience of Communist rule and its public rituals, Kundera links kitsch to the demand for a unanimously shared, comforting image of life. In the novel’s essayistic passages, he connects kitsch to the suppression of whatever disturbs the approved picture—especially bodily functions, suffering, and moral ambiguity—showing how such exclusions can serve both private self-deception and collective ideological control.

The sentence defines kitsch as an act of exclusion: it filters reality so that only what is emotionally agreeable and socially “presentable” remains. For Kundera, kitsch is dangerous because it denies the full truth of human existence—pain, contradiction, shame, death, and the messy physicality of bodies—and replaces it with a consoling façade. The significance is ethical as much as aesthetic: when a culture insists on this sanitized image, it pressures individuals to conform and discourages honest confrontation with suffering or complexity. Kitsch thus becomes a mechanism of denial that can slide easily into propaganda, since it rewards unanimity and punishes dissenting or “unacceptable” realities.