Abstract
What first comes to my mind when trying to recollect the events and discussions, which led to the relocation of the Philosophy and Social Sciences course from Dubrovnik to Prague, are the vivid reservations Jürgen Habermas had to all such plans from the very beginning. Already in the mid-1980s, when he and Dick Bernstein had decided to step down from the directorship of the course running each spring in Dubrovnik, he was fully convinced that one should not try to keep something alive which like all traditions had to pass away after a while; these reservations – a remnant of his once (and probably still) vigorous Hegelianism – had heavily grown when it came after the beginning of the Balkan wars in 1991 to the question whether and, if yes, where to continue the course. Even when not being any longer in charge of the course, Habermas could not fail to warn colleagues and friends against continuing something that had had its own time and place. However, we, the younger ones, who had during the late 1980s become directors of the course, Jean Cohen, Alessandro Ferrara, Ivan Vejvoda and myself, had fallen so deeply in love with its spirit and atmosphere that we thought the moment had come to rebel against the advice of our father-figures; being unable to forget the inspirations we had got in Dubrovnik we decided to rescue the program despite the awful direction events took in the Balkans and despite all of Habermas’ warnings.
The experiences at our first station of relocation, the wonderful island of Ischia where we had found in 1992 a host institution with the help of our Italian co-director Alessandro Ferrara, were rather depressing. Not only that one evening I was there taken hostage in a restaurant because the waiters believed we had not paid the adequate amount – it took, when I remember correctly, Maeve Cook and David Rasmussen one whole hour of complicated negotiations to rescue me from that very unpleasant situation. But of much higher importance for all of us, a group of around 40 people, was the alienating experience of discussing the failures of capitalist modernity in a strikingly nice place filled with tourists seemingly all quite happy with the social conditions of our times. It was this painfully perceived discrepancy that led us directors to take up further reflections where to move with our beloved course. For the second time it was Alessandro Ferrara – obviously also a very talented strategist – who came up with the salvaging idea; on the advice of Hana Havelkova, a participant from Czechoslovakia, he contacted the Czech Academy of Sciences to find out whether they would be interested in hosting us. Surprisingly they agreed, and so we went to Prague in 1993.
From the first day on I was certain that we had made the right decision. Not that Prague at that time lacked its own social pathologies; it all looked like what Marx had famously described as ‘original accumulation’ where a poor population was overrun by investors from all over the world searching for new chances of profit-making; where you could expect at each corner to be asked for some money or to be robbed by desperate losers of the all-too-quick transformations. But at least it was real reality, not that fictitious holiday camp where we had been the year before; here we had in front of us the social conditions we wanted to talk about in our attempts to continue the heritage of critical theory. It took us not long to build up trusting relationships with our colleagues from the Czech academy, so that the operations went smoothly and the atmosphere became more and more friendly. Already in our second year at Villa Lana, our conference center Prague had become a very fine replacement for Dubrovnik, certainly not exactly at the Mediterranean Sea, not offering unforgettable spring nights on an exhilarating Venice-like corso, but instead a vibrant city with a centuries-old tradition of intellectual life composed of Jewish writers and vanguard aesthetics. It is not an overstatement to say that we had soon forgotten Dubrovnik and felt we had found an intellectual home in Prague.
But what was even more important was the liberating experience to be able to stand theoretically on our own feet. Whereas the course at the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik mirrored very much the spirit and mood of the Habermas generation of critical theory, in Prague it became very soon our own endeavor, reflecting new life-forms and intellectual developments – the doors became wide open for deconstructivism; for a certain period psychoanalysis played a much bigger role than before; and not rarely we ended the day in one of the many discothèques at the wonderful river to which Smetana had dedicated his most famous piece of music. Like all separations, also this one was accompanied by the gnawing feeling of a great loss; suddenly none of our former heroes – be it Cornelius Castoriadis, Jürgen Habermas, or many others – did show up, we were no longer in the exciting situation to learn, but had to develop with some uncertainty and fear our own small contributions to an overwhelmingly powerful tradition. A little bit like the city which had started to host us, we were torn between a great past and an open future still to be determined – and the success story, which Prague undoubtedly became for the course on Philosophy and Social Sciences in the years to follow with more and more directors and participants, should not invite us to the illusion that we have been already able to fill the painful gap.