Abstract
When Christoph Menke first mentioned the Prague Conference on Philosophy and Social Sciences to me at the very beginning of the 2000s I was still a graduate student, preparing for a year abroad at the New School for Social Research and trying to come up with an idea for my MA thesis. Although, after having gone through a mostly analytic training in my first semesters of study, I had developed an interest in critical theory and the tradition of the Frankfurt School, most of the names and topics on the program did not mean much to me at the time. In the years to come every May I would make my way to Prague – by train from Berlin, through the lovely and troubled landscape along the Elbe/Labe – for what in retrospect amounts to an alternative education.
In Prague one could meet the authors we discussed in seminars, from Axel Honneth and Iris Young to Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, as well as witness the emergence of new debates in social and political theory that would later dominate journals and workshops. Roundtables dissected the newest magnum opus or analysed the most recent crisis. The experimental spirit of the conference allowed for presenting fresh ideas for the first time that would later become articles or book chapters, shaped by discussions in the Q&A, the coffee breaks or over a few beers at night. From my first talk at Prague in 2005 on ideology critique (subsequently published, to my great surprise, in Constellations), via an unexpected plenary in 2009 on tyranny (never published but still on my mind), to an inspiring panel discussion with Maeve Cooke and Bill Scheuerman on civil disobedience in 2015 (subsequently published in Philosophy & Social Criticism), conversations in Prague have become entangled with how I think and write.
But Prague also proved to be an educational environment in the more holistic sense, as it allowed a form of sociality and communal exchange to develop from which not only academic contacts but friendships emerged. For this, among many other achievements, one has to congratulate the directors, but it is also due to the unique combination of participants over the years and to the genius loci of the Villa Lanna and its gardens, by now barely able to contain the numbers of those in attendance.
Going through the old programs, several things strike me: the many talks I would like to hear (again), because I have missed (or forgotten) them, and now wonder how their questions and answers would be formulated and discussed today; all those participants whom I remember meeting, but who disappeared, either from the Prague conferences or from the academic world altogether, and whose reasons for disappearing are unknown, to me at least. There are also sometimes awkward memories of how challenging it was, and is, to continue to honor the aspiration inherited from Dubrovnik to bring academics and intellectuals from ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ in conversation with each other. Too often, the attempt ended in frustration, in half-empty rooms, with speakers from the periphery at the periphery. Of course, Prague also was, and continues to be, a place where well-known pathologies of the academic world are on display, from inflated self-esteem via indifference to the presence of an audience to subtle as well as conspicuous displays of power. This is not surprising, from a realistic point of view. But then the aspiration of Prague is to be different from academia at large, and given its self-positioning in the tradition of critical theory (in the broad sense), supposedly realistic adaptations to problematic patterns of behavior should not be an option – and will put off younger scholars as well as members of under-represented groups.
I know the directors take both of these challenges seriously and try hard, and in many ways successfully, to create a genuinely open, pluralistic and inclusive atmosphere. My prime wish for the next 25 years is that they – all of us – continue to do so. My other wish is that participants take the name of the conference – ‘Philosophy AND Social Sciences’ – seriously, avoid engaging in ‘armchair critical theory’ or the uncanny recurrence of the same reshuffling of theoretical positions, and continue to connect their theorizing to the crises, struggles and challenges of our social and political present. Again, looking over the programs of the past will provide many paradigmatic examples of how inspiring this connection can be. This seems the best way to honor the organizational and genuinely philosophical achievement that the history of the Prague conference – and its prehistory in Dubrovnik – represents.