Abstract
It was in the autumn of 1988 that I made up my mind to get to the fabled critical theory gatherings – I was then a first year student at Sofia University in Bulgaria, still under the ‘old regime’. Some of my professors had spoken about the Frankfurt School and the meetings in Dubrovnik in a way that conjured the seductive danger of rejecting both doctrinal communism and capitalism. Now, that was the Promised Land of intellectual freedom! I should clarify that in the final years of the regime, posturing as a fan of Hayek and Friedman among your fellow students went hand in hand with declaring your allegiance to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ on your membership application to the Communist Party. To Dubrovnik I must get somehow! Yet departure was postponed to the uncertainly bright future, as lack of funds combined with my plunging into dissident activities, which consisted largely of reading with friends illicit copies of Vaclav Havel’s essays on his ‘politics of authenticity’ and Andrew Arato’s writings on praxis theory (the ideas of civil society mobilization he and Jean Cohen were advancing were particularly threatening to the party leadership), and planning accordingly the radical reconstitution of communism from below, while also experimenting with student strikes and attending meetings of purportedly dissident clubs the regime tolerated and likely nurtured.
Even as the Iron Curtain was formally lifted, lack of funds and connections (one needed an invitation) continued to block the road westwards. Yet in 1990, a competition was announced at Sofia University for attending a summer school in Cortona (Italy) organized by the New School and the Vienna-based Institut der Wissenschaft vom Menschen. The involvement of the New School made this, in my eyes, an offshoot of the Dubrovnik gatherings. I was selected to go, together with my older colleague Ivan Krastev. Cortona was no Dubrovnik, but I got a taste of the life I had heard about – mind-opening rigorous papers (a lot on crisis back then) and heart-opening vigorous debates ‘after hours’. Being immersed in the fiery atmosphere Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato created in discussions was a revelation: academia need not be a Glass Bead Game in a Castalia, one could go ‘all in’ – with one’s personality and convictions, take risks. This style of intellectual engagement I rediscovered later at the Prague colloquia.
But let me get back to my storyline, as I am trying to reconstruct the winding road to ‘Prague’ for one taking off from the tentatively post-communist East. Thus emboldened by the atmosphere in Cortona, I did not give the politely clever paper on Hannah Arendt that had secured me a place in the summer school. Instead, I presented an essay I had written drawing directly on my experiences as a dissident, entitled ‘Dictatorships of Freedom’, in which I argued that the emergent democracies in eastern Europe reincarnated the old dictatorships under the guise of anti-communism. This is how I think I entered the Dubrovnik/Prague group even before I arrived there. Not that my paper was well received, far from it. It went straight against the spirit, against the hopes of the time. However, Andrew Arato declared that as much as he thought I was wrong, it was important to publish this paper for its singular voice, and had it published in one of the last issues of Praxis International – the predecessor of Constellations. This inimitable spirit of complicity-in-ardent-disagreement I found at the Prague gatherings when I finally joined in 2007, on an invitation from Nancy Fraser who had supervised my doctoral thesis at the New School. I was then finalizing my book on judgement, and exposing to the scrutiny of my peers my plans for turning Kant’s doubts about the political reliability of practical reason (i.e. ‘the scandal of reason’) into a project for critical political judgement was a defining moment in the life of the book. Equally defining was a long lunch with Alessandro Ferrara during which he helped me shed my enthusiastically confused infatuation with his notion of exemplary judgement and steered me into my own formula of praxis-based political judgement.
In 2008, the organizers invited me to give a plenary lecture on a new path of research I had undertaken. I was investigating the way globalization was rapidly transforming capitalism, generating new forms of social injustice; my concern was that the left was being unresponsive to the valid anxieties of globalization’s losers, who were turning instead to the far right. In that talk, I also reproached critical theorists of Frankfurt School descent (my audience) for having abandoned the Marxian critique of the political economy of capitalism exactly when we needed it most. I received galvanic reactions: from Nancy Fraser’s and Claus Offe’s urging me to persist with bringing the critique of political economy back into critical theory, to Seyla Benhabib’s illuminating remark: ‘You know, Albena, your worries that we critical theorists have strayed from the right path are misguided, we cannot all be doing the same thing – it is a matter of division of labor.’ To me Prague is that place where the division of otherwise isolated labor among us, scattered all over the globe, keeps converging into the fresh symbiosis of a shared project.