Abstract
I first heard of the conference in the late 1980s. Drucilla Cornell was presenting a version of her ‘Recollective Imagination’ paper at a faculty workshop at my law school. In the informal discussion afterwards, she raved about the intellectual atmosphere of the conference in Dubrovnik that she had recently attended. ‘This’, I said to myself, ‘is something I want to participate in someday.’ A dozen years later, Frank Michelman invited me to Prague. I was grateful and excited for many reasons, but not least because of the changes that had occurred in legal academia in the interim. In the mid-1980s, one could open any of the top law journals and find some thoughtful piece on Hegel, deconstruction, or literary theory. By the late 1990s, the journals were again dominated by atavistic doctrinalism. (Infamously, one of Drucilla’s senior colleagues justified his vote against her on the ground that he ‘wouldn’t give Hegel tenure either’.) At the elite law schools, law and economics largely held sway. Arriving in Prague in May of 2000 was like emerging from an intellectual wasteland into a warm, sunny spring. Queried by friends back home about the conference, I said: ‘It is as close to the ideal speech situation as you are going to get on this mortal coil.’
I have attended every year since, in part because the intellectual community is unlike any other. When I presented in 2002, Hartmut Rosa introduced me as ‘a long-time member of the conference’. Thanking him, I observed that ‘this is the only group I know where one can participate three times and already be considered a long-term member’. The ethos of the conference is particularly on view in the gentle, avuncular comments offered to the graduate students on their papers. Perhaps the most striking example occurred at an unfortunate plenary in the early 2000s. The speaker had squandered his entire time on preliminaries – notably mentioning each time he had communicated with a certain famous philosopher. Anywhere else, it would have been a squirm-inducing performance. I surveyed the room carefully; there was not an eye-roll, smirk, or fidgeting body in the house. When the speaker’s time had run out, hand after hand went up – each person straining to ask a substantive question about a paper that none of us had heard. On the way out, I turned to Frank Michelman: ‘This has to be the most polite group of humans on the planet.’ Looking momentarily perplexed, he asked: ‘Are you referring to what just happened?’ – as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.
The substantive rigor of the conference is unmatched. Among the presentations that stand out for me are: Rahel Jaeggi’s and Robin Celikates’ on the dialectical structure of immanent critique; Axel Honneth’s on object relations theory and recognition; Martin Saar’s on genealogy as critique; Fred Neuhouser’s on Marx’s critique of liberalism as an historical (rather than analytic) account; María Pía Lara’s on the strategies of different societies recovering from radical evil; the graduate-student-organized panel on Hardt and Negri’s Empire; and the memorial panel for our dear colleague Ed Baker. The conference has also been the most demanding testing ground for my own thinking as I have worked through a conception of democracy that eschews the standard individualist and rationalist presuppositions and takes seriously the implications of late-20th-century understandings of embodiedness and social construction. The resulting dialogue has been sometimes hesitant, even anxious. By far the conference’s most fractious exchanges have revolved around what I call the ‘Foucault question’ – that is, any argument that interrogates the manifest content of reason or discourse as socially constructed. (I once posed a version to Axel who responded, commendably: ‘Well, if that’s true, my whole theory is wrong.’) At their best, these exchanges have proven constructive as scholars working within different paradigms struggle to entertain each other’s premises in a genuine attempt at understanding.
The conference’s iconic quality is revealed in the lore that has grown up around it. Depending on whom one speaks with, the history of the conference variously starts with the meetings organized by Habermas and Bernstein in the mid-1970s or with those of the Praxis group in the early 1960s. One of my favorite moments came back when the program still contained an afternoon for sight-seeing. A group including Frank Michelman, Ian Shapiro and me collected in the hallway on the second floor. Frank brought out a bottle of single malt, and we sat and drank as Ian told stories about the origins of the conference in Marcuse’s relationship with the Yugoslav scholars in the initial Praxis days. I have heard apocryphal stories identifying both Habermas and Václav Havel as instrumental in bringing the conference to Prague. The Rorschach-like quality of these origin stories reflects the different values and commitments – relatively more liberal or left – that participants project onto the conference. Which makes an interesting, twofold point about interpretation and the demands of dialogue. On one hand, it provides an object lesson in the fragilities of memory, reason and discourse. On the other, it affirms the critical importance of a dedicated space for open intellectual exchange like the Prague conference.