Abstract
Twenty-five years means that many of us have spent our entire professional lives with Prague as a sort of fixed star in a shifting constellation of critical theory in European and American universities and colleges. Like many of my other contemporaries, I was still a junior professor when I participated for the first time in the 1990s. It had been 10 years since my last visit to Prague as a tourist in the mid-1980s, when as a graduate student in Frankfurt I had spent a week there during the waning years of old Czechoslovakia. By contrast the new-old Prague I encountered in the 1990s, when I started attending the conference, was in many ways unrecognizable, as if the whole solid, grimy old city had melted into air and been remade overnight, as if Prague had been swapped out for Prague™ It was only in later years, trailing along behind people who actually knew the city, that I began to learn something about its complexity, which survives its capitalist transmogrification as it has survived so much else.
Continuity through change was the theme for the conference as well – over my own 20 years of attendance I have watched as a whole range of junior colleagues from Europe and the Americas have, like my own Zeitgenossen, emerged with their own distinctive projects and voices, reflecting deeper themes and problems of critical theory even as they took issue with their own teachers. That sense of theme and variation, of the same set of problems and topics approached from different angles but with strong continuities, can certainly run the risk of stagnation. But for a host of reasons I have always had the sense that the Prague conference avoided that risk: through its iterations it somehow manages to remain new.
Generational change, observed first-hand, is part of the reason for this quality. But another and surely more important virtue is the institutionalized culture of openness. The conference has dramatically opened itself up to scholars from beyond Prague’s traditional Germany–United States ‘special relationship’, and one of the persistent pleasures of trips to Prague is learning about how critical theory fares globally in conversation with younger academics from eastern Europe, East and South Asia, and South America.
But openness can get internalized too, and for me the thing that stands out as I think back over my own decades of coming to Prague and talking to colleagues about my work is the support I found among colleagues and friends no matter how precipitously I found myself chasing new ideas. As other philosophers can attest, philosophy is a deeply conservative discipline, and ‘wide-ranging interests’ is often a thin euphemism for ‘lack of seriousness’. Unlike so many other conferences, I never had to explain to my Prague colleagues why I had abruptly acquired an interest in Ugandan domestic policy, the agrarian policies of the young Turgot, or the comparative study of constitutional preambles. They tended not to require justifications for why disparate projects were to count as part of the same collective effort. The difference support like that has made is as hard to characterize as it is to over-estimate. I still think of Prague as the place to try out new things. While I have no one special Prague memory to share (though quite late spring evenings with old friends demolishing a bottle of good Scotch will have to rate very high), I do have a sort of paradigmatic Prague experience, repeated over the years, in which a discussion of old ideas suddenly gets a new twist or spark from someone I do not know, with an accent I cannot place.