Intersecting with PB

My dwindling memory no longer being what it once was, I had to scramble to reconstruct my first encounter with Peter Beilharz. Luckily, the dusty binders of correspondence saved from the pre-email 20th century came to my rescue. There in the ‘B’ section of the 1984 volume – nestled among others from the likes of Seyla Benhabib, Susan Buck-Morss, Paul Breines, Dick Bernstein and Russell Berman – was one of those blue, folding aerogrammes that were light enough to cross the oceans without paying excessive postage. After marveling at the coincidence that so many colleagues in the community of Critical Theorists began their names with ‘B’, I set out to decipher the handwriting in the unfolded missive dated 17 May from the exotic locale, at least to me, of Bundoora, Australia. After an informal salutation using only my first name, it began ‘I’m writing just to say hi, “legally”, for the first time, and to thank you for having been such a reasonable and positive examiner.’ Aha, I realized, I must have served as an outside reader of his dissertation, and sent some comments he found not too obnoxious. Although he quickly responded to one of them, which had expressed qualms about an argument he made about metaphor, Peter promised a more thorough response at a later date, explaining ‘at present I’m at the beach, attempting to recover some of the other dimensions of my humanity…I also need to begin working on my private sphere!’

True to his word, a longer missive followed in late June, which began ‘I was pleased to receive your letter, and look forward to a long and happy correspondence with you.’ It was filled with thoughtful, non-defensive and engaging responses to various comments I had made about the dissertation, and finished by returning the fond regards I had conveyed to the remarkable trio he referred to as ‘the Hungarians’. Published three years later with Croom Helm as Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism (Beilharz, 1987), it was the first of a lengthy list of publications that established Peter’s international reputation as a respected authority on the theory and practice of the global left over its long history, and much, much more.

I will leave it to others to reflect on the full range of Peter’s accomplishments, which would of course include the role he played in founding Thesis Eleven and collaborating in academic projects around the world. I want only to draw a few inferences from the epistolary launching of our decades-long friendship. What immediately struck me in revisiting those early letters was their wonderfully affable, unpretentious, self-deflating and intimate tone. At the same time as they contained rigorous discussions of weighty intellectual issues, their author managed to avoid giving the impression of taking himself too seriously. Instead, he conveyed a strong sense that there was an engaging, likeable person behind the ideas, someone who could look forward to a correspondence that would not only be long, but also happy. To use a word he later adopted to characterize Zygmunt Bauman’s approach to intellectual interaction, he immediately revealed that he would be a ‘conversational’ rather than monologic interlocutor, anxious to listen as well as talk. When we finally met in the flesh, which if memory serves, happened when I first came to Melbourne for a conference organized by Thesis Eleven on ‘Rethinking Imagination’ in 1991, ¹ my initial impression was amply confirmed.

I recall at the time also thinking there was something unmistakably Australian about that impression, even while knowing how treacherous it is to ascribe typical national characteristics to individuals from different cultures. But a letter sent from Bundoora, which I discovered was an Aboriginal word meaning ‘the plain where kangaroos live’, was bound to raise suspicions. Peter was, truth be told, the first Australian intellectual I had had a chance to get to know well. All right, I had spent considerable time with the irrepressible, ebulliently cerebral Wayne Hudson 10 years earlier while both of us were at Oxford, but Wayne was too sui generis to be typical of anything. Peter more explicitly conveyed the ‘matey’ distaste for hierarchy, playfulness and cheeky informality that Northern Hemisphereans tend to prize, even envy, in our Australian counterparts. Translated into a style of thinking, this suggests a nimble rather than ponderous engagement with ideas and historical narratives, fueled by curiosity about what had happened and was happening well beyond the shores of home.

As the reference to our mutual friends ‘the Hungarians’ suggests, Peter was already avidly benefitting from the deprovincialization wrought by exiles from abroad, an effect Americans of my generation had already known well from the intellectual migration from Nazi Germany. The effect of the sojourn in Australia of the Budapest School legends, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér and Gyorgy Markus, has been widely acknowledged, and Peter was among the first to benefit from their presence. Not only were they living links with the Western Marxist tradition, whose origins are often traced to the work of their mentor Georg Lukács, but they were also struggling to respond to the challenges of a post-Marxist, indeed post-modernist world without losing their investment in building a humane future. As I know from my own interactions with them over many years, they were invaluable interlocutors, who conveyed to those of us lucky enough to have been spared the personal traumas they suffered how high the stakes might be in the work we were doing.

Peter, it is safe to say, also took from them, along with Cornelius Castoriadis and Zygmunt Bauman, the example of moving beyond conventional Marxism, in particular when it took a Jacobin, vanguardist turn, without spurning it in a simplistically God-that-failed way. Instead, he continued, to borrow the metaphor of his recent collection, to orbit in circles around it, sometimes at greater distances than at others, constantly moving without finding a final resting place. Or if another spatial metaphor is preferred, he transformed that stereotypical Australian identity I inferred from our initial correspondence into a more dynamic ‘antipodean’ one, which he had discerned in the career of one of his heroes, the art historian Bernard Smith. That is, an identity that was relational rather than static, more like what Smith called migratory birds than territorial land animals. Whether ‘imagining’, ‘thinking’ or having ‘perspectives’ that were antipodean – all of these were variations in the titles of his books – Peter managed to unsettle hierarchies between center and periphery, insider and outsider, original and copy. Not only did he help introduce European and American ideas to Australian audiences, he also spread the word about the achievements of Australian thinkers and artists abroad.

And more recently, as if to disrupt traditional migratory patterns, Peter has found himself moving across the Australian continent to Perth and north to Chengdu, China. Our paths cross less frequently than they once did, but we’ve kept in sporadic touch. In 2018, we exchanged a flurry of messages following his marriage to Sian Supski. I was especially struck by the pictures of the two of them resplendent in matching scarlet velvet suits in the backseat of a 1957 Chevy, which induced me to confess that I still had in my closet the black velvet suit with wide lapels I had proudly sported in the 1980s. The comparison may have inadvertently implied, with apologies to Vaclav Havel, that we’ve only been velvet revolutionaries, supporters of non-violence alone as the way to realize the imperative in that famous final Thesis on Feuerbach. It is easy to confirm that in myself. And while I can’t be as certain of Peter, could it really have ever been otherwise with that young scholar, exhausted from recounting the frustrations of countless Trotskyists to ignite violent revolutions, who retreated to the beach to ‘recover some of the other dimensions of [his] humanity’?

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Peter in Emeritus ceremony, La Trobe University, 2015