My Prague

The first time I attended the Prague conference was in May 2008. This was also my first visit to Prague. The rainy city appeared melancholic yet beautiful. When I arrived at the doorsteps of Villa Lanna, a thick shroud of early morning mist surrounded this charming building. I had to pierce through this secretive mist to enter through the villa’s overbearing doors, without knowing what to expect. What I encountered inside was a vibrant and agonistic community of scholars, debating ideas with great passion, asking incisive questions and carrying out extended discussions, deeply engaged with each other. The familiarity and friendship built over decades of convening together with the same purpose at the same place imbued their conversations. The liveliness of their engagement clearly revealed a layered and complex set of connections, debates and contentions. I was a stranger to the conference and yet I immediately felt drawn in by the intensity of the discussion.

Was this the Frankfurt School? My own intellectual genealogy had been a parallel but separate one. Educated at Cornell with the inspiring example of Susan Buck-Morss, my work had come into its own studying the legacy of critical theorists such as Benjamin and Adorno but also Neumann, Pollock and Marcuse, crossing them over (sacrilegiously, perhaps) with Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault and Poulantzas, all of which were read through the prism of a non-western inflection that complicated my sites of enunciation and optics. This genealogy, though it arose from the same milieu that is broadly called ‘critical theory’, had developed into different research programmes that retained only elbow contact with Prague. As a result, I did not know much about the conference, except the oral history I had encountered in the wonderful storytelling of Dick Bernstein.

I had been invited to apply to the conference by Nancy Fraser, my colleague at the New School for Social Research where I had just completed my first year as assistant professor of politics. I was honored to learn that I had been assigned a plenary session. I understood the significance of this initiation rite, without being able to imagine how the subsequent encounter would turn out. When I sat at the head of the long and heavy table in the large conference room, I barely recognized any of the faces sitting around it. As soon as I finished my presentation, I remember some 20 hands going up simultaneously to get into the question queue. What followed was an incredibly rigorous, spirited and engaging discussion, at the end of which the room felt much more familiar. Those questions and the many discussions sprinkling the next few days sparked the beginning of new interlocutions and friendships. At the end of the conference, I had met many of the scholars in attendance and had shared either a coffee or a meal with most of them. It must be said that this conviviality, which surrounded the conversations, nourished the spirit of engagement and presented a unique contrast with most other academic occasions I had experienced until then.

I have been back to Prague many times over the years and have learned immensely from the discussions. I presented – indeed, experimented with – new ideas and research trajectories and received rich feedback each time. I met scholars whom I follow with great interest and indeed consider some of the most important interlocutors of my own work. But I also began to develop a more nuanced understanding of the contours and direction of various intersecting but different conversations that make up the tissue of Prague. I became aware that there is also a significant generational difference that often exacerbates these thematic, methodological and political differences.

It has been interesting to note a growing disjuncture between the need to reorient critical theory toward the world, toward an extended study of the burning problems of the historical present, and the continued prevalence of themes within the conference that speak to long-standing debates between towering figures of critique. This became evident with the financial crisis but also in a particularly strong way with the political transformations in North Africa and the Middle East since 2011. I know that I am expressing a sentiment shared by many scholars of my generation when I point to the strong desire to broaden critical theory toward post-colonial, queer, green, post-structuralist, post-humanist and new materialist currents, and the perspectives of disability studies, critical race and indigenous studies, and critical area studies. It is important to cultivate and nourish a diversity of conversations beyond the predominantly European problematics within which they have found sophisticated and vivid expression. I am confident that the continuity of the venerable tradition of critical theory is intimately tied up with its ability to renew and regenerate its internal pluralism and vivacity, with its strong commitment to originality and heterodox perspectives and with its versatility in drawing upon multiple and diverse sources, methodologies and techniques. To be able to open itself further while holding onto its conceptual rigor, spirit of engagement and common lexicon, all of which act as a centripetal force that remains the marker of its tradition, will be the challenge in the years ahead – the challenge of new thinkers and scholars working in the critical tradition to make Prague their own.