Abstract
There are many mysteries surrounding the annual Prague conference on critical theory. For example, how do you get on the list of invitees? I remember very well how it started for me. Everyone was invited back in 1993, except me. I had just joined Axel Honneth’s group as a young doctoral student and suffered gravely from the omission. It was a completely inadvertent neglect, of course, and I mention it only in order to apologize to all those who, just as inadvertently, fell from our lists or did not get on them in the first place, for I am sure there are quite a few of them. Prague is, and has always been, organized in a very off-handed way, so we make many mistakes, but its spirit is that of genuine openness, and the idea is to provide a welcoming atmosphere to everyone interested in critical theory – now more than ever!
Anyway, in the end I got to the conference in 1994, and I was even allowed to give a paper. In fact, it was the very first paper I ever gave outside the classroom, and I was incredibly nervous, because all those famous people I had only read about, like Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen, Nancy Fraser, etc., were right there at the conference! I got a slot in the very last session (if I remember correctly), so not too many people were left. But to my great surprise and genuine shock, those who were took me seriously, they engaged in the discussion like I was a real philosopher, and this perhaps was the most important step on my way to actually becoming one. I tried to prove that Charles Taylor should call himself a cultural relativist rather than a realist – and Peter Dews, who was chairing the session, liked the paper so much he recruited it for Radical Philosophy: my first international publication!
From then on, I returned to Prague year after year until the present day, except for 2002, when I was at the New School in New York, and 2015, when I was in China. Every time, it feels like coming home again. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that Prague provides the best imaginable testing ground for any idea or theory you might have in the world of social philosophy. I believe I can sincerely say that I never developed a substantive theoretical idea or concept which I did not test with the Prague crowd first, be it my conception of acceleration, my take on alienation, the four levels of self-interpretation, or, lately, the concept of resonance. If you can make it in Prague, you can make it anywhere! But if you are getting it wrong, people will immediately find out and tell you – not in order to let you down, but always in the spirit of improving your argument and getting it right. This is the second thing about Prague: its atmosphere of genuine friendship and togetherness. Sure, there are a lot of little power struggles going on in the background and, of course, many subtle and not so subtle games of distinction are played – most notably when it comes to the question of who joins whom for lunch or who takes whom to dinner. In this respect, I guess, the lobby of the Villa Lanna has a lot in common with a high-school playground – it’s just human nature. But then again, there is also this other thing: the genuine desire to do away with distinctions, to overcome the spirit of competition and to treat everyone the same. It is one of those rare places where the occasional undergraduate student, who is burning for critical theory, and the distinctive professor can engage in a substantive debate for hours without any concern for diplomas or positions. And in the end, after dinner, we would all end up in the same place, the most infamous disco, Lavka, right underneath the Charles Bridge and on the river. I spent some of the most remarkable nights of my life there, on the water, with the yellow and orange lights of Prague overhead, the gently rocking, tied-up boats at our feet, the music of the 1970s and 1980s in our ears, and the famous professors dancing in the background until the early morning light. In this way, Prague has turned into a place where you can make friends for life. At least half of my academic friends I met there for the first time. But it is not just the spirit of friendship and kinship that makes Prague unique – it is also the shared conviction and determination to try at least to make the world a better place, to struggle for a society less riven by injustice, alienation and violence – and to join forces from philosophical, sociological, anthropological and political, from post-structural, post-colonial, communitarian, liberal, Marxian and Foucaldian perspectives towards this end. It is because of this that I will never forget those lights of Prague.