Abstract
My first participation in the Prague meetings in 2006 (during the doctoral years) was unlikely, but it was part of a decisive shift in my stance and thinking about politics. Its unlikeliness resulted from my background and initial trajectory: I spent a good part of my childhood in the 1980s, the worst years of Romanian communism under Ceausescu – a period of deep injustices and deprivations. I was coming from a family that had suffered from the harassment of the Romanian Secret Service [Securitate]; I vividly remember my mother’s tormented and helpless crying every time a woman from Securitate with rotten teeth and excessive make-up was paying visits to our place. The visceral hostility to communism or anything that had to do with Marx was part of my most elemental moral reflexes.
After the Romanian revolution in 1989, my education at the University of Bucharest and the shape of post-communist politics strengthened this stance. Marxism and critical theory were non-existent at the university. The actual thought of Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas was unknown to us; even Hegel was under suspicion for having influenced Marx. Our reference points were Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism and Human Action and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The little we knew about the more recent left thinking was filtered through Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. It is a biased and intolerant book; but I still remember how enthralled I was by its condemnation of the so-called neo-Nietzschean and postmodern left. In addition, after the fall of communism, Ceausescu’s second guard confiscated the discourse of the left: up to nowadays the leftist ideology in Romania has been a cover of the most corrupt and conservative political party. Thus, the new post-communist Romanian intelligentsia seemed condemned to neo-liberalism; with a notable exception – the small but active ‘Critic Attack’ group. This intelligentsia still regards politics in a Manichean way: the good (capitalism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism) and the bad (socialism, multiculturalism, feminism and – most recently – Islam and the refugees).
The shift in my attitude grew slowly, and matured during the doctoral years at the European University Institute in Florence where I wrote a thesis on Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida under the supervision of Peter Wagner and Axel Honneth. Events, books and encounters were part of this shift that led me to join and contribute to the Prague seminar in different years. The soil that nurtured this change was a sensitivity to social injustice and suffering inherited from my mother, in addition to a growing distrust in post-communist capitalism as a magic key to socio-political problems. I became convinced that the eastern European intelligentsia was reproducing the same form of thinking it pretended to reject: communist dogma was replaced by the blind faith in the invisible hand. In Florence I began avidly to read critical theorists, exploring alternative ways to Habermas – i.e. Derrida, Foucault and Agamben. Encounters also deeply mattered: at the European University Institute I was part of Il Collettivo – a group of left-wing doctoral students and friends meeting and debating on politics in an otherwise de-politicized institute. Chiara Bottici, Benoit Challand, Jean Terrier and Irene Becci were among them; some of them actually became active participants in the Prague meetings.
The first invitation to visit Prague came from Maeve Cooke whom I had come to know at a 2006 workshop in Florence dedicated to Habermas. It was the beginning of a solid friendship. In Prague I put to test my intuitions about the (mis)encounters between Habermas and Derrida. At the same time, in Prague I had the wonderful privilege to listen to established thinkers (Alessandro Ferrara, Seyla Benhabib, William Scheuerman, Harmut Rosa, Marίa Pίa Lara, Jean Cohen) and to a new generation of philosophers (Banu Bargu, Chiara Bottici, Lea Ypi). Some of them became dear friends and collaborators. The Prague meetings have influenced my thinking and shaped my teaching in my newly found home at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Nowadays, the Prague meetings are as necessary as they have ever been. They are necessary for rearticulating critical thinking in times of crisis and a global rise of religious and nationalist majoritarianism from the USA and France to Israel and India. With their mixture of vivid debate and friendship, the Prague meetings are a counterweight to the troubling bureaucratization of the university, and to the marginalization of humanities and critical thought.