Abstract
The occasion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the conference ‘Philosophy and Social Science’ – after the Dubrovnik experience – brings me back to a part of my personal and intellectual biography. Attending the conference was for me a natural continuation of the work developed over time with friends and colleagues, who share a common interest in critical theory. Therefore, I would like to contribute to this special issue by adding further fragments about the Prague colloquium since its inception and from the viewpoint of an initial group of participants, who are, in this case, Italians by birth, but ‘Anglo-German’ by training. I am thus interested in going back to the genealogy of the conference held in Prague since 1993, in order to emphasize the intellectual strength, the significance of its continuity over time and its capacity for renewal.
I started working on Adorno and Habermas at the beginning of the 1980s, when in Italy the ‘Weak Thought’, the crisis of Marxism and the ontological feminism of sexual difference seemed to exhaust all ways of thinking and practising politics. The urgency to reflect on a critical theory of society led me to work with Habermas in Frankfurt from 1985 to 1987 as a DAAD Stipendiatin. In those years I also attended the seminars held at the Inter-University Centre (IUC) in Dubrovnik and met people from East Europe with whom I have since kept in contact. The IUC was a crucial experiment for a socialist tradition in profound crisis and almost divided between closure (e.g. the shutting down of Praxis) and openings (e.g. the free movement of intellectuals from socialist countries). The courses were led by directors from different countries, one of whom had to be Yugoslavian. The last Dubrovnik seminar that I attended was on ‘Rights and Politics’, held in April 1990, with Jean Cohen, Axel Honneth, Vjeran Katiunarić, Ivan Vejvoda and Albrecht Wellmer as directors. In the same year, Alessandro Ferrara, Stefano Petrucciani and myself founded in Italy the Seminario di Teoria Critica, which continues successfully and has expanded after 28 years of life.
Unfortunately, in 1991 the ethno-national wars tragically started in former Yugoslavia. In October 1991, the Yugoslav people’s (Serbian) Army began the siege of Dubrovnik by land and by sea. Buildings were destroyed, lives lost, and the IUC was set on fire. ‘We walk as ghosts of our past’, the director of IUC wrote me in a moving letter containing the remains of burned books, as a testimony of the material and symbolic destruction of a common culture. The human and material ruins seemed to testify to the brutal end of any hope for a liberal socialism, but not to the loss of the critical tradition. Thanks to the initiative of Alessandro Ferrara and myself (I was then a researcher at the European University Institute in Florence), funding was obtained from the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples. The conference was organized from 30 March to 10 April 1992 at the Biblioteca Antoniana, located on the beautiful volcanic island of Ischia, famous for its thermal baths. The meeting – titled ‘Identity and Civil Society’ – was made possible by the Naples Institute, the Inter-University Centre of Dubrovnik, the Department of Sociology of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and the Georges Sadoul circle.
Although that meeting was a success in terms of participation and the quality of the papers, nevertheless it was necessary to find another location in order to reactivate the original distinctive spirit of the conference.
The meeting restarted in 1993 in Prague, thanks to the hospitality offered by the Academy of Sciences. Since 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic had been an autonomous state: it split peacefully from Slovakia and it was in search of a complex balance in the post-socialist transition between the creation of a national identity and the perspective of the enlargement of the European Union towards the East. Prague proved to be a perfect location for pursuing our critical rethinking of global societies in change in the context of a new geo-political order. The first seminar, on ‘Rethinking Subjectivity: Modernity and the Self’, took place in May 1993. I participated with enthusiasm and interest, together with a large group of Italian colleagues (about 20 of us), including Lorella Cedroni, a close friend who tragically passed away a few years ago.
Subsequently, I had the opportunity to participate in some other Prague meetings, though not on a continuous basis. Yet the first Prague conference stands out in my memory because it seemed to capture the spirit of critical theory as such: never settling down in ourselves, tackling the new challenges of our age, sustaining dialogue with different cultures, building bridges, creating a friendly atmosphere, avoiding the danger of becoming a restricted self-referential group.
I think that the Prague conference has been invaluable in its continuity over the years, contributing to consolidate the so-called third generation of the Frankfurt School, to allow a fourth and now a fifth generation of scholars with international reputation to come about, younger critical theorists who do not pursue a mere scholastic continuation of what they have learned, but probe new ideas and influences coming from schools of thought that often pose challenges for the Frankfurt legacy and put forward new approaches.