Abstract
I attended the Prague conference in May 2007 for the first time, after an invitation from Alessandro Ferrara, who was at that moment my PhD supervisor at LUISS University, Rome. I delivered a paper on the contemporary reception of the Kantian ‘democratic peace’ argument, a quite sensitive topic in the years of G. W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was on that occasion that Bill Scheuerman ‘tortured’ me with several challenging comments. Since then, I have maintained with him a constant exchange.
Coming originally from the field of linguistics, to me Prague was the place of the diaspora of Russian linguists of the caliber of Roman Jackobson and Nicolai Trubetzkoy, the founders of the Prague School of Phonology. I feared the pressure of this legacy.
Contrary to my expectations, when I arrived at Villa Lanna I was welcomed by senior participants with informal talks and genuine interest in my work. I felt I was becoming part of a truly open-minded community. I was not used to such care and attention; a sense of excitement started arising, one comparable with the discovery of a new world-dimension.
Yet, it did not take too long to realize that it was not just ‘one’ world-dimension but several, tied together under the aegis of ‘critical theory’. My initial reaction was to try to understand what it meant in such a context to be affiliated to a prominent, but perhaps timely and geographically constrained, intellectual experience as it was with the Frankfurt School. I could not easily grasp the sense of a collective self-perception of the Prague participants as members of such tradition.
Indeed, there seemed not to be any single ‘master’ as there was in the Athenian Peripatos or in the Stoa but a number of differently oriented sensibilities replicated somehow by the Prague ‘board of directors’. Yet, not much of a sense of flaunted faithfulness to the ‘pure origin’ of a founding moment emerged. It appeared, rather, as if different ways of arguing were in constant tension with one another, very often competing – not commonly striving – with profoundly diverse categories of investigation of the contemporary world.
Was this sensation signaling something perhaps structural to critical theory? Was the Prague conference comparable with a Hydra, the mythological water-serpent with 9 heads, the middle one of which was immortal? Was any attempt ‘to cut’ one of those prongs doomed to fail and, even worse, would it generate the growth of yet two more heads out of the beheading?
Finally, a question came to my mind, as the one recalling Horkheimer’s 1937 essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’: ‘What is “critical” in theory?’ 1
The year after, in 2008, while discussing this point with Nancy Fraser in one of the coffee breaks at the wonderful terrace of the villa, suddenly the German expression Befreiung came to my mind. That was the answer! Little by little I found my way through.
I thought, though, that the English translation ‘emancipation’ was unsatisfactory for the reason that it left aside a big part of the semantic spectrum of the German term and, crucially, the intellectual dimension of emancipation. I thought that perhaps a more literal translation, e.g. as ‘liberation’, would have helped in establishing a more clear line of continuity with Kant and particularly with his understanding of the role of Enlightenment in advancing emancipation through rationality. 2 On this intuition, in the following years in Prague I organized panels – in which Mattias Kumm, Peter Niesen, Daniel Augenstein and Brian Milstein among others actively participated – on the interconnection between legal and institutional practices and the progressive constitutionalization of international law. I thought this was a crucial aspect to investigate, one connecting social struggles to processes of intellectual liberation.
I realized only many years after my initial puzzlement that the Prague conference was similar not so much to a multi-headed Hydra but rather to a Proteus, an adapting mutable figure, one that could take the form of a lion, a serpent and even a tree, maintaining though always a sort of consistency in the assumptions motivating such transformations. I realized even more clearly than before that no emancipatory process can proceed in the absence of such a double process of self-reflective and outer-reflective liberation.
In other words, critical theory finally appeared to me as a ‘cognitively adaptive’ and ‘practically transformative’ movement with obviously multiple voices within a commonly shared assumption. If in the Prague conference there is something distinctive, that is the way in which a theory that is ‘critical’ considers reality and the perceiving subject both as socially embedded entities. And this is no small-time philosophical commitment.