Volume III - 2019

Issue 1

Contents:

• Obálka, tiráž, obsah download (pdf)
• 5—10: Slovo úvodem, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

    doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.1

• 13—35: Nežít s bombou, ale s rozumem. Právní filosofie Reného Marcice a marxistický humanismus Ernsta Fischera jako konfrontace dvou perspektiv občanské společnosti na pozadí éry rakouského kancléře Josefa Klause (1964–1970), Ondřej Holub (University of Hradec Králové) download (pdf)

  “To Live Not by the Bomb, But by Reason”: Th e Legal Philosophy of René Marcic and the Marxist Humanism of Ernst Fischer as a Confrontation between Two Perspectives on Civil Society in the Era of Chancelor Josef Klaus (1964–1970)

  Abstract:

  My study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of two theorists in what were probably the most formative years of postwar Austrian history, the era of the conservative government of Josef Klaus. Specifically, I compare the conservative philosophy of right of Austrian philosopher of Croatian origin René Marcic and the Marxist humanism of Ernst Fischer. In doing so, it is my intention to describe the ideological foundations and intellectual horizons of Josef Klaus’s right-wing government and, at the same time, to discuss how this policy was confronted by Ernst Fischer from the left. A further purpose of my study is to inquire into the intellectual foundations that laid the ground for Austrian civil society, and to ask how these foundations were confronted by the Austrian Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Ernst Fischer.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.2

  Keywords: René Marcic, Ernst Fischer, civil society, Marxist humanism, Austrian Communist Party
• 37—61: Osvobození jako revoluční praxe. Opětovné promyšlení buddhistického materialismu, James Mark Shields (Bucknell University, USA) download (pdf)

  Liberation as Revolutionary Praxis: Rethinking Buddhist Materialism

  Abstract:

  In this article, first published in English in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013), pp. 461–99, James Mark Shields analyzes the possibilities and problems of a “Buddhist materialism” constructed along Marxian lines, by focusing in particular on Buddhist and Marxist conceptions of “liberation.” Although it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to reconsider and problematize Buddhist conceptions of “freedom” and “agency,” the thought traditions of Asian Buddhism have for many centuries struggled with questions related to the issue of “liberation” – along with its fundamental ontological, epistemological and ethical implications. With the development of Marxist thought in the mid- to late nineteenth century, a new paradigm for thinking about freedom in relation to history, identity, and social change found its way to Asia and confronted traditional religious interpretations of freedom as well as competing Western ones. In the past century, several attempts have been made in India, southeast Asia, China, and Japan – to bring together Marxist and Buddhist worldviews, with only moderate success (both at the level of theory and of practice). By utilizing the theoretical work of “radical Buddhist” Seno’o Girō, Shields argues that the root of the tension lies with conceptions of selfhood and agency – but that, contrary to expectations, a strong case can be made for convergence between Buddhist and Marxian perspectives on these issues, as both traditions ultimately seek a resolution of existential determination in response to alienation. Along the way, Shields discusses the work of Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Lukács, Sartre, and Rorty in relation to aspects of traditional (particularly East Asian Mahāyāna) Buddhist thought. The article has been translated into Czech by Max Ščur.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.3

  Keywords: Engaged Buddhism, Buddhist materialism, Marxism, Seno’o Girō
• 65—91: Občanské a proletářské, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  The Civic and the Proletarian

  Abstract:

  What is the notion of citizenship that reveals itself in such varied and successive appearances as “civic” participation, “civil” society, and “civil” rights? The law provides us with positive defi nitions, defi ning individuals’ relationship to given states, which grant rights to participate in civil society. But such defi nitions conceal as much as they reveal. The full meaning of citizenship comes out only in relation to other categories which citizenship excludes. This is true not only because all categories of meaning are defined
  against their opposites, but also because citizenship as a specifi c category is characterized fundamentally by the principle of exclusion. Citizenship, typically conceived as a bundle of rights, functions de facto as a bundle of privileges, that is to say, of rights that must be granted, rights which (in spite of universalist justifi cations) are always granted to some and not to others, and which are granted on the condition that right-holders renounce their claims on other rights. Th e non-citizen tends to become not only uncivil but also uncivilized, deprived not only of specifi c civil rights but also of human dignity. The citizen
  is civilized while the non-citizen is made barbaric. It becomes necessary therefore to develop the following thesis: that the essence of the citizen is the proletarian tramp. So argues Joseph Grim Feinberg in this Czech translation of an article published in English as “The Civic and the Proletarian,” in Socialism & Democracy 27 (2013), no. 3.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.4

  Keywords: Civil society, citizenship, civil rights, Marxism, the notion of the proletariat
• 95—101: Politika a fonocentrismus. Nad Rancièrovým textem "Politika fikce", Josef Fulka (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Politics and Phonocentrism: On Rancière’s “Politics of Fiction”

  Abstract:

  The present text is a reflection on Jacques Rancière’s lecture “The Politics of Fiction,” given in Prague February 7, 2018, the text of which appears in a Czech translation by Josef Fulka in this issue of Contradictions. Fulka briefly summarizes Rancière’s approach towards the literary text as a potential tool of emancipation and points out several questions to which Rancière’s conception of literature may give rise, e.g. whether emancipation, when characterized by a certain phonocentrism, is limited exclusively to human subjects, or whether it may surpass the realm of the human.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.5

  Keywords: Jacques Rancière, literary theory, phonocentrism
• 103—115: Politika fikce, Jacques Rancière (University of Paris VIII: Vincennes-Saint-Denis) download (pdf)

  The Politics of Fiction

  Abstract:

  Translation of a talk given by Jacques Rancière, entitled "The Politics of Fiction," in Prague, Feb. 7, 2018.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.6

  Keywords: Literary theory, fiction, realism, engagement
• 119—131: Revoluce není chaos, Interview with Vadim Damier, by Tereza Reichelová (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  Revolution Is Not Chaos

  Abstract:

  Vadim Damier is a contemporary Russian historian and anarchist activist. In his book Stalʹnoj vek: Socialʹnaâ istoriâ sovetskogo obŝestva (Age of steel: A social history of Soviet society), he lays out his interpretation of the Russian Revolution, which is also the central subject of this interview conducted and translated from Russian by Tereza Reichelová. The interview was conducted in Damier's Moscow apartment on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, in early November 2017.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.7

  Keywords: Russian Revolution, Bolshevism, anarchism, critique of Soviet-type society
• 133—156: Emancipace mezi národem a humanitou, Interview with Jan Svoboda, by Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Emancipation Between the Nation and Humanity

  Abstract:

  For this volume of Contradictions, in the wake of the widely celebrated but less deeply reflected upon hundredth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, Joseph Grim Feinberg sits down with Jan Svoboda from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences to discuss the work of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher and sociologist who became the first president and leading intellectual advocate of the Czechoslovak state. In 2017 Svoboda published a monograph on Masaryk’s thought, Masarykův realismus a filosofie pozitivismu (Masaryk’s realism and the philosophy of positivism; Prague, published by Filosofia), and in 2018 he co-edited (with Aleš Prázný) a volume of commentary on Masaryk’s reflections on the so-called “Czech question”: Česká otázka a dnešní doba (The Czech question and the contemporary age, published in Prague by Filosofia; an English edition of the book is currently in preparation). Masaryk is widely referenced in Czech political discourse. For some he is viewed as an idol of modern history; for others as an empty symbol that legitimates the current social order. For many non-Czech readers, meanwhile, this foundational figure in Czech intellectual history remains virtually unknown. In this interview, Svoboda explains the central tenets of Masaryk’s thought and presents a complex picture of a theorist who engaged in productive debates with the influential thinkers of his age, including Karl Marx. 

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.8

  Keywords: T. G. Masaryk, national liberation, humanism, Austrian philosophy, positivism, Marxism
• 159—168: Jak se stát politickým subjektem, Engin F. Isin (Queen Mary University of London) download (pdf)

  Becoming Political

  Abstract:

  Contradictions presents here a Czech translation of the concluding chapter of Engin F. Isin's book Being Political, where the author summarizes the conclusions of his "genealogy of citizenship." Engin's focus, however, is not on people who are positively defined as citizens; he emphasizes, rather, the ways in which political systems, in defining citizenship, also create non-citizens. These non-citizens, then, become politicized in confrontation with the definitions of citizenship that have excluded them. Isin traces those processes, from the origin of the concept of citizenship in the ancient Greek polis up to the present, by which categories of excluded non-citizens continually raise the demand to participate in the political sphere; in doing so, they change established distributions of power. The principle of citizenship thus appears not only as a principle of democratization and inclusion, but also as a principle of domination and exclusion. The chapter has been translated by Marta Martinová.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.9

  Keywords: Citizensehip, non-citizens, conceptual history
• 171—175: Lubomír Sochor a pragmatika stalinismu, Ivan Landa (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Lubomír Sochor and the Pragmatics of Stalinism

  Abstract:

  This text briefly presents the work and life of Czech Marxist philosopher and sociologist Lubomír Sochor. It tracks his intellectual development, which culminated in a book project on theories of Stalinism. Although the project remained unfinished, from the extant material one can conclude that Sochor was interested not only in the historical genesis of intellectual Stalinism (“Marxism-Leninism”), or in its ideal-typical reconstruction, but above all in the pragmatics of Stalinism.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.10

  Keywords: Real socialism, Stalinism, alienation, ritual
• 177—200: "Reálný socialismus", Lubomír Sochor download (pdf)

  "Real Socialism"

  Abstract:

  Here we reprint a previously inaccessible, and now revised, English translation of a 1983 article by Lubomír Sochor, in which Sochor explores the conservative features of “real socialism.” He defends the claim that the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which is allegedly becoming real, is progressively emptied and transformed into repressive ritual. This transformation, termed by Sochor as “liturgization,” is further described in detail and illustrated through examples. Finally, the question is raised whether people can or even do realize their conceptions of the good life through ritualized practices.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.11

  Keywords: Real socialism, liturgical Marxism-Leninism, ritualized practices
• 201—209: Pokus o socialistické řešení vztahů mezi občanem a státem, Zdeněk Mlynář, Miroslav Kusý; Jan Mervart (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences), eds. download (pdf)

  An Attempt at a Socialist Approach to the Relationship between Citizens and the State

  Abstract:

  In the historiography of Czechoslovakia under Communist Party rule, civil society is both present and absent. Authors claim either that there was no civil society at all, or that it existed only in inchoate form. In the first instance, then, the absence of civil society is taken as a definitional feature of the authoritarian or totalitarian regime; in the second instance, civil society appears as a result of struggles against the ruling regime, especially during the Prague Spring, which was characterized by a renewal of independent social organization and by the articulation of civic-political demands (for example, by the so-called Club of Engaged Non-Party Members). In both these cases, the notion of civil society is itself invoked uncritically by historians, employed in the term's liberal sense, alongside terms like "democracy" and "human rights," without consideration for how the term was understood in the context of the 1960s. But the notion of civil society was in fact intensively discussed at the time by Czech and Slovak writers, philosophers, and legal scholars. In addition to Miroslav Kusý and Zdeněk Mlynář, whose writings we reprint below, other important theoretical contributions were made by Michal Lakatoš and František Šamalík. All these authors reacted to the preceding, Stalinist period, but they did not seek to replace Stalinism with Western-style liberal democracy. Rather, within the framework of Marxism, they formulated models for a new, socialist democracy, in which citizens would be dominated neither by the state nor by the market, and the individual would not be strictly divided between a political and social self. The notions of civil society they developed were, accordingly radically distinct from the notions typically applied by historians looking back on 1960s Czechoslovakia.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.12

  Stát a občan 10.46957/con.2019.1.13

  Človek a inštitúcia 10.46957/con.2019.1.14

  Keywords: Civil society, citizenship, critique of the state, Marxism, Prague Spring
• 213—223: Dát řeč touze po solidaritě, Jakub Ort (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  Giving Speech the Desire for Solidarity

  Abstract:

  Review essay of Bini Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution. 1917, 1968 und kommende (Frankfurt
  am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.15

  Keywords: Gender, utopia, revolution, critique of Soviety-type society
• 225—235: Desať nových odpovedí na jeden starý problém, Miroslava Mišičková download (pdf)

  Ten New Responses to One Old Problem

  Abstract:

  Review essay of Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering
  Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.16

  Keywords: Social reproduction theory, dual systems theory, intersectionality
• 237—246: Číst kapitál dnes, Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Reading Capital Today

  Abstract:

  Review essay of Nick Nesbitt, ed., The Concept in Crisis. Reading Capital Today (Durham
  and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.17

  Keywords: Althusser, Marxism, Capital
• 249—253: Marxova politická ekonomie a ekologická krize, Anna Mikulenková (Masaryk University, Brno) download (pdf)

  Marx's Political Economy and the Ecological Crisis

  Abstract:

  Review of Kohei Saito, Marx’s Ecosocialism. Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique
  of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.18

• 254—258: Nově o třídě a národu, Stanislav Holubec (Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences, University of South Bohemia in Českých Budějovicích) download (pdf)

  Once Again on Class and Nation

  Abstract:

  Review of Jakub S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy
  in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.19

• 259—265: Angažovane o sociálnych dejinách Sovietskeho zväzu, Juraj Benko (Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

  An Engaged Look at the Social History of the Soviet Union

  Abstract:

  Review of Vadim Damier, Ocelové století: Sociální historie sovětské společnosti,
  prel. Dagmar Magincová (Praha: Nakladatelství Anarchistické federace 2018).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.20

• 266—274: Disidenti na levici. Sovětská zkušenost, Miroslav Tomek (Czech Radio)

  Disidents on the Left: The Soviet Experience

  Abstract:

  Review of Ilja Budrajtskis, Dissidenty sredi dissidentov (Moskva: Svobodnoje marksistskoje
  izdatělstvo, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.21

• 275—279: Bondyho třídní analýzy socialismu v duchu maoismu, Vojtěch Ondráček (Charles University, Prague)

  Bondy's Class Analysis of Socialism in the Spirit of Maoism

  Abstract:

  Review of Egon Bondy, Pracovní analýza a jiné texty, ed. Petr Kužel (Praha: Filosofi a, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.22

• 280—290: Nový socialistický člověk v místě bez paměti, Lenka Kužvartová (Czech Technical University in Prague) download (pdf)

  The New Socialist Person in the Place without Memory

  Abstract:

  Review of Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford
  & New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.23

• 291—293: Vymenili mesto za uhlie: zložitý vzťah ľudí a prírody v dobe modernej technokracie, Lívia Gažová (Masaryk University, Brno) download (pdf)

  They Replaced a City with Coal: The Complex Relationship between People and Nature in the Age of Modern Technocracy

  Abstract:

  Review of Matěj Spurný, Most do budoucnosti. Laboratoř socialistické modernity na severu
  Čech (Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Nakladatelství Karolinum, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.24

• 294—298: Ad fontes. K otázce vztahu formalismu a marxismu, Roman Kanda (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Ad fontes: On the Relationship between Formalism and Marxism

  Abstract:

  Review of Hana Kosáková (ed.), Formalismus v polemice s marxismem. Antologie textů. Studie
  (Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.25

• 299—306: Proti globálnímu kapitálu s Blahou?, Martin Šaffek (Socialistická solidarity and SOK: Association for Left Theory), Jan Májíček (Socialistická solidarity and SOK: Association for Left Theory) download (pdf)

  Against Global Capital with Blaha?

  Abstract:

  Review of Ľuboš Blaha, Antiglobalista (Bratislava: VEDA – Vydavateľstvo Slovenskej akadémie
  vied, 2018).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.26

• 307—319: Slovník pojmů: Občanská společnost, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  A Conceptual Dictionary: Civil Society

  Abstract:

  In the latest installment of our ongoing "conceptual dictionary," Joseph Grim Feinberg offers a brief history of how the notion of civil society transformed from a critical concept employed to grasp a contradictory feature of bourgeois society, to an affirmative ideological feature of post-Communist discourse.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.1.27

  Keywords: Civil society, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Ernest Gellner
• 321—324: O autorech a autorkách download (pdf)

Issue 2

Contents:

• Front matter download (pdf)
• 5—10: Editorial, Joe Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.1

• 13—28: Karel Kosík´s Critique of Herbert Marcuse´s Reason and Revolution, Russell Rockwell download (pdf) Abstract:

  In Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), Karel Kosík entered into a virtual dialogue with Herbert Marcuse on philosophy and social theory. Central to this discussion is the necessity and freedom dialectic. Kosík referred to several of Marcuse’s works, arguing that Marcuse aimed to abolish philosophy and replace it with social theory. I review two other of Marcuse’s significant works, which were written within this period and are relevant to Kosík’s argument. I conclude that there is great value in re-examining and going further into Marcuse’s extensive investigations of the necessity and freedom dialectic. Kosík’s assessments, based on Marx’s concept of labor in Theories of Surplus Value, and in Capital, vol. 3, on the potential of freedom in the realm of necessity, were ultimately truer than were Marcuse’s conclusions with respect to the development of the necessity and freedom dialectic from Hegel to Marx. But, unlike Marcuse’s approach, Kosík’s assessment of the philosophic dimension involved a conception of Schelling’s instead of Hegel’s ideas as the primary link to Marx’s concept of the dialectic of the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom – the transition from a capitalist to a post-capitalist society. Kosík’s approach obscured Hegel’s detailed examination and illumination of this issue, the brilliance of which involved a historical version of philosophy’s integration of social theory. The latter enabled Marx’s eventual consummation of his theory of the transition from a capitalist to a post-capitalist society, which remains, even to this day, the crucial issue underlying the on-going philosophy-social theory dialectic.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.2

  Keywords: Karel Kosík, Herbert Marcuse, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, philosophy and social theory, necessity and freedom dialectic
• 29—43: Peter, Paul, and Objectivity, Monika Woźniak (University of Warsaw) download (pdf) Abstract:

  The article aims to compare the models of human subjectivity developed by Marek Siemek (in his post-Marxist period) and Evald Ilyenkov. Both authors define human subjectivity as a self-reflective relation between the “I” and the self. This self-referentiality is possible only in relation to the other, mediated through a non-subjective element. Subjectivity, therefore, is something essentially intersubjective for both philosophers. But even though these two perspectives share the same basic scheme, they are developed in very different ways. As I argue, the main difference between them can be seen in the conceptualisation of the third, objective element. Whereas Ilyenkov describes this element as a thing involved in human activity (for example, a tool) and therefore meaningful (a view strongly connected with his theory of the ideal), Siemek emphasises the role of the civil society and its institutions. Exploring this difference is especially important as it reflects an inherent political dimension in Ilyenkov’s and Siemek’s thought. I evaluate this political dimension, pointing to the originality of Siemek’s defence of capitalism and the Schillerian traces in both concepts.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.3

  Keywords: Evald Ilyenkov, Marek Siemek, intersubjectivity, subjectivity, ideal, civil society
• 45—78: Buddhism, Marxism, and the Philosophy of Egon Bondy, Jiří Holba (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  This article discusses the thought of the Czech Marxist philosopher, writer, and poet Egon Bondy (1930–2007) and his dialectical interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, which strongly influenced Bondy’s “nonsubstantial ontology” with its teaching about the Emptiness (śūnyatā) of all entities, the central concept in the philosophy of the Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 AD). The second, shorter part of the article outlines recent developments in the field of philosophy inspired by Marxism and Buddhism.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.4

  Keywords: Egon Bondy, Buddhist Philosophy, Nonsubstantial Ontology, the Buddha, Buddhism, Nāgārjuna, Emptiness, Karman, Marxism, Critical Theory
• 79—107: Autonomist Marxism in Eastern Europe, Nikolay Karkov ( State University of New York at Cortland) download (pdf) Abstract:

  This text is a reflection on the production and reception of the first-of-its-kind anthology of autonomist Marxist texts in Bulgaria, published in 2013. After a brief examination of the anthology’s content, the text focuses on four major “problems of translation” that significantly overdetermined the book’s reception and circulation: what the author calls the problems of semantics, history, politics, and ontology. The article concludes that autonomist Marxism might have a unique role to play in radical conversations in the country and identifies the “work of translation” as a key ingredient in expanding the coalitional possibilities of the left in Eastern Europe. 

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.5

  Keywords: Autonomist Marxism, translation, semantics, post-socialism, anarchism, ontology
• 109—128: The Concept of Civil Society During Bulgaria´s Post-1989 “Transition”, Veronika Stoyanova (University of Kent in Canterbury) download (pdf) Abstract:

  The following is a slightly revised selection from chapter 4 of Veronika Stoyanova’s recent book Ideology and Social Protests in Eastern Europe: Beyond the Transition’s Liberal Consensus (London: Routledge, 2018). Stoyanova traces discursive developments during the final years of Communist Party rule in Bulgaria and the radical transformations that followed, when the concept of civil society played a central role in emerging justifications of democracy, market reforms, and a certain kind of anti-populist elitism.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.6

  Keywords: Civil society, liberalism, market reforms, post-Communism, Bulgaria
• 131—137: The Civil Society Effect Revisited, Jeremy F. Walton (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) download (pdf) Abstract:

  In this essay, I reconsider the politics of contemporary philanthropy by navigating between two dominant ideological perspectives on civil society: depoliticization and demonization. I do so with reference to the recent tribulations of three famous magnate-philanthropists, Osman Kavala, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and George Soros. By revisiting my concept of the “civil society effect” – the romanticizing of civil society as a domain free from instrumental political motivations – I aim to shed light on the broader political terrain of contemporary capitalism, in which private capital is too easily understood as a neutral medium for political transformations. At the same time, I focus on the histories and genealogies that the depoliticization of civil society silences, especially the imperial legacies that opponents of liberal philosophy – new authoritarians such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán – frequently invoke with pugnacity.
  
  

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.7

  Keywords: Civil society, Islam, liberalism, philanthropy, new authoritarianism
• 141—168: Emancipation Between the Nation and Humanity, Interview with Jan Svoboda, by Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences)) download (pdf) Abstract:

  For this volume of Contradictions, in the wake of the widely celebrated but less deeply reflected upon hundredth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, Joseph Grim Feinberg sits down with Jan Svoboda from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences to discuss the work of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher and sociologist who became the first president and leading intellectual advocate of the Czechoslovak state. In 2017 Svoboda published a monograph on Masaryk’s thought, Masarykův realismus a filosofie pozitivismu (Masaryk’s realism and the philosophy of positivism; Prague, published by Filosofia), and in 2018 he co-edited (with Aleš Prázný) a volume of commentary on Masaryk’s reflections on the so-called “Czech question”: Česká otázka a dnešní doba (The Czech question and the contemporary age, published in Prague by Filosofia; an English edition of the book is currently in preparation). Masaryk is widely referenced in Czech political discourse. For some he is viewed as an idol of modern history; for others as an empty symbol that legitimates the current social order. For many non-Czech readers, meanwhile, this foundational figure in Czech intellectual history remains virtually unknown. In this interview, Svoboda explains the central tenets of Masaryk’s thought and presents a complex picture of a theorist who engaged in productive debates with the influential thinkers of his age, including Karl Marx. 

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.8

  Keywords: T. G. Masaryk, national liberation, humanism, Austrian philosophy, positivism, Marxism
• 169—178: “Dissident" Is a Term to Be Used Universally or Not At All, Interview with Noam Chomsky, by Greg Evans download (pdf) Abstract:

  Greg Evans met with linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky on February 5, 2019 in his office at the University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona). They discussed Chomsky's visit to Prague in 2014 and his attempt to place the activity of East-Central European dissent in global perspective, without forgetting the many dissidents active under US-backed regimes elsewhere in the world. Also participating was Valéria Wasserman Chomsky.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.9

  Keywords: Noam Chomsky, dissent, intellectuals, Prague Linguistics Circle
• 181—208: Some of Our Considerations on the Bases of Socio-Political, Economic, and Cultural Development of the Turkic Peoples of Asia and Europe, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, translated and introduced by Örsan Şenalp and Asim Khairdean download (pdf) Abstract:

  Örsan Şenalp and Asim Khairdean present here an English translation of one of the key texts of the visionary militant Mirsaid Sultan Galiev, written between 1923 and 1925, entitled “Some of our Considerations on the Bases of the Socio-political, Economic, and Cultural Development of the Turkish People of Asia and Europe.” We believe that Sultan Galiev’s work and writings are highly relevant for today,  in relation to, among other things, important debates about identity politics and the Left, decolonisation, political Islam, Marxism, the Russian Revolution, Bolshevism, the re-emergence of the extreme right, and the new Eurasianism. The translated text is one of the key sources in which Sultan Galiev summarises the main tenets of his analysis of the world situation in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and in which he lays out an original and alternative strategy for world revolution. Alongside this we also include two supporting documents from the political trial against him, which began in 1923, was re-opened in 1928 and remained open until a final verdict was pronounced in 1939, sentencing Galiev to execution, which took place on 28 January 1940.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.10

  Keywords: Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, Colonialism, internationalism, Turkic peoples, Soviet nationality policy
• 211—215: Lubomír Sochor and the Pragmatics of Stalinism, Ivan Landa (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  This text briefly presents the work and life of Czech Marxist philosopher and sociologist Lubomír Sochor. It tracks his intellectual development, which culminated in a book project on theories of Stalinism. Although the project remained unfinished, from the extant material one can conclude that Sochor was interested not only in the historical genesis of intellectual Stalinism (“Marxism-Leninism”), or in its ideal-typical reconstruction, but above all in the pragmatics of Stalinism.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.11

  Keywords: Real socialism, Stalinism, alienation, ritual
• 217—242: “Real Socialism”, Lubomír Sochor download (pdf) Abstract:

  Here we reprint a previously inaccessible, and now revised, English translation of a 1983 article by Lubomír Sochor, in which Sochor explores the conservative features of “real socialism.” He defends the claim that the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which is allegedly becoming real, is progressively emptied and transformed into repressive ritual. This transformation, termed by Sochor as “liturgization,” is further described in detail and illustrated through examples. Finally, the question is raised whether people can or even do realize their conceptions of the good life through ritualized practices.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.12

  Keywords: Real socialism, liturgical Marxism-Leninism, ritualized practices
• 245—249: Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative, Nishat Awan (University of London) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.13

• 250—255: Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, Diana Young (English College in Prague) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.14

• 256—260: Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan, eds., Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc, Karolina Partyga (Columbia University) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan, eds., Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of
  Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.15

• 261—265: Joseph Grim Feinberg, The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia, James M. Robertson (University of California Irvine) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Joseph Grim Feinberg, The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance
  in Post-Communist Slovakia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.16

• 266—269: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain, Mark Bergfeld (UNI Global Union – Europa) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points: Logistics
  Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.17

• 270—276: Marking time, or Stalin and the Metronome, Dan Swain (Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Enzo Traverso, Left Wing Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) and Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central
  Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, translated by Hope Heaney, 2nd ed. (London:
  Verso, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2019.2.18

• 277—279: About the Authors download (pdf)

Volume II - 2018

Issue 1 download complete issue (pdf)

Contents:

• Obálka, tiráž, obsah download (pdf) Abstract:

  Front matter

• 5—10: Slovo úvodem download (pdf) Abstract:

  Editorial

  doi:10.46957/con.2018.1.1

• 13—40: K problému dialektiky přírody, Vít Bartoš (Technical University of Liberec) download (pdf)

  On the Problem of the Dialectics of Nature

  Abstract:

  The aim of this article is to update some of Engels’s ideas on the topic of the dialectics of nature and to bring those ideas into the context of contemporary developments in the natural sciences (especially biology). Firstly, we examine the question of the very possibility of dialectics (dialectical processes) in nature because, at least since Lukács, there has been a significant tradition denying the existence of dialectical processes in nature because nature has no acting, conscious subjects. We argue that dialectics is universally present not only in the actions of the subject, which is an old-fashioned relic of anthropomorphism, but in nature itself. Secondly, we identify some basic problems in Engels’s theory of nature as it is described in his Dialectics of Nature. We are especially interested in Engels’s employment of dialectics as a general method of investigating the nature of physical and biological reality. We find that some principles of dialectics (as Engels understands them) are not consistent with the fundamental principles of physics, such as the second law of thermodynamics. In addition, in the domain of biology it would seem quite difficult to make Engels’s Lamarckian concept of evolution consistent with his own concept of dialectics, not to mention with the paradigmatic Darwinian approach. Finally, we point out that there is a renaissance of dialectical thinking in modern biology that can be understood as a partial confirmation of Engels’s intuitions regarding dialectics. Especially in the works of Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen J. Gould we can see how dialectics was applied in their disputes with genetic and environmental determinists and adaptationists.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.2

  Keywords: Dialectics of nature, Friedrich Engels, biology, physics, adaptationism, humanism
• 41—51: Zrod proletárskej kultúry v Košiciach, Ivana Komanická (Technical University of Košice) download (pdf)

  The Birth of Proletarian Culture in Košice

  Abstract:

  This text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás [The Košice Worker]. By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper characterizes the movement’s contribution to discussions of the meaning of proletarian culture, which elaborated on the concept of social culture developed by Lukács in his radical period.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.3

  Keywords: Proletarian culture, Kassai Munkás, early Communism, Marxist aesthetics, György Lukács, János Mácza
• 55—75: Deleuze, Adorno a kompozice hudební multiplicity, Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University) download (pdf)

  Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity

  Abstract:

  This text, first published in Deleuze and Music, edited by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 54–74, Nick Nesbitt compares Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectical approach with Gilles Deleuze’s anti-dialectical approach to the question of multiplicity and differentiation within music. Nesbitt concludes with a consideration of the attempts made to address the problem in the work of important twentieth-century musicians, particularly that of John Coltrane. The Czech translation here is by Marta Martinová and Michal Jurza.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.4

  Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Theodor W. Adorno, philosophy of music, multiplicity, John Coltrane
• 77—98: Charta 77 a její dědictví, Matěj Metelec (A2 journal) download (pdf)

  Charter 77 and its Legacy

  Abstract:

  The essay follows a certain symmetry that is between the dissident organization Charter 77 (founded in Czechoslovakia in 1977) and the current Czech radical left. The essay works from the assumption that the definition of “systems” is more important than the nature of these “systems.” One way to understand the issue is to look at the relationship between Charter 77 and the Western radical left of its day, which provides the ideological antecedent of today’s Czech left. But in the contemporary political context, paradoxically, the position of the radical left is structurally moving away from that of the left that was a part of Charter 77 and is coming closer to that of the anti-communist constituents of Charter 77 and to the cultural underground that remained outside Charter 77. Evidence of the continuity between those tendencies can be seen in the police repression of recent years, which points to similarities in how the police view representatives of these different “antisystemic” movements. But perhaps the most striking point of comparison between the dissidents and today’s left can be seen in their separation from majority society and in their ambition to forge something like that society’s moral conscience. This leads to a situation known in the Czechoslovak dissent of the 1970s and 1980s as the “dissident ghetto.” The notion of the self as a holder of knowledge of the true nature of things, which enables the self to preserve its moral integrity in relation to the “system,” appears to be of no less significance to the present radical left than it was to Charter 77.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.5

  Keywords: Charter 77, radical left, antisystemic movements, dissent, dissident ghetto, underground in Czechoslovakia, political activism
• 101—114: Estetický rozměr (z knihy Erós a civilizace), Herbert Marcuse download (pdf)

  The Aesthetic Dimension (chapter 9 of Eros and Civilization)

  Abstract:

  We print here a Czech translation, made by Lubomír Sochor of this important chapter in Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, in which Marcuse lays out the bases of his theory of aesthetic autonomy and its relation to freedom and the Freudian notion of repression. The whole book, in Sochor's translation, was initially set to appear in 1970, but changing political circumstances caused the publication to be cancelled.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.6

  Keywords: Aesthetics, Kant, Schiller, psychoanalysis
• 117—127: K „Cestě do středu básně“ (Geneze polemické hodnoty imaginativního projevu u Vratislava Effenbergera), Šimon Svěrák (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  On “Journey to the Center of the Poem” (The Genesis of the Polemical Value of Imaginative Expression in the Work of Vratislav Effenberger)

  Abstract:

  In this introduction to Vratislav Effenberger's "Journey to the Center of the Poem," Šimon Svěrák places the text in the context of historic Czech debates regarding the relationship between aesthetics and society, and he interprets the text in light of Effenberger's broader system of thought.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.7

   

  Keywords: Vratislav Effenberger, surrealism, structuralism, avant-garde, art and society
• 129—145: Cesta do středu básně, Vratislav Effenberger download (pdf)

  Journey to the Center of the Poem

  Abstract:

  In his theoretical essay “Journey to the Center of the Poem,” Vratislav Effenberger engages with the semantic character and dynamic of the artistic work whose nature we could designate as irreal, irrational, or absurd. The text contains, in a nascent stage, many of the concepts that Effenberger was to develop into a more conceptually concrete and systematic form in his later theoretical works. In a relatively clear-cut manner, Effenberger outlines in the essay a perspective on the basis of which the author will later analyze psychological and psychosocial problematics, above all with regard to human imaginative activity (dreams, inspiration, artistic creation, and so on) and its functions.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.8

  Keywords: Surrealism, structuralism, poetry
• 149—172: Teorie a politika v myšlení Louise Althussera, Interview with Étienne Balibar, by Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Theory and Politics in the Thought of Louis Althusser

  Abstract:

  In this interview, Étienne Balibar discusses the thought of his teacher, Louis Althusser, one of the leading Marxist philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, whose concepts of overdetermination, symptomatic reading, epistemic break, ideology, and ideological state apparatuses made a major impact on Marxist as well as poststructuralist thought. Balibar was one of Althusser’s closest collaborators and friends and has analyzed his work in a number of texts. The interview was conducted in January 2013 by Petr Kužel, who also edited it and translated it into Czech.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.9

  Keywords: Althusser, ideology, science, theory of the subject, Hegel, Spinoza, Maoism, Machiavelli
• 175—189: Kacírske evanjelium svätého Tamása, Lukáš Makovický (University of Lapland) download (pdf)

  The Heretical Gospel of Saint Thomas

  Abstract:

  Review essay on G. M. Tamás, K filosofii socialismu, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg and Pavel Siostrzonek, trans. Pavel Siostrzonek (Prague: Filosofia, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.10

  Keywords: G. M. Tamás, socialism, post-Communism, Moishe Postone
• 191—200: K metodolgii kritické sociální vědy a její kategoriální výstavbě, Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Toward a Methodology of Critical Social Science and Its Categorial Structure

  Abstract:

  Review essay on Juraj Halas, Metodológia kritickej sociálnej vedy. Marxova kritika politickej ekonómie (Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 2013).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.11

  Keywords: Marx, critique of political economy, social science methodology
• 201—209: Lid, množství, společnost, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  People, Multitude, Society

  Abstract:

  Review essay on Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (eds.), Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People (Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2014). The essay appeared in English in Contradictions 2017, no. 2.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.12

  Keywords: Populism, hegemony, biopolitics, multitude, radical democracy, social movements
• 213—219: Dialóg po konci politiky a dejín, Miroslav Tížik (Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Dialogue after the End of Politics and History

  Abstract:

  Review of Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart, et al., Proměny marxisticko-křesťanského dialogu v Československu (Prague: Filosofia, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.13

• 220—224: Geografické kategórie a cestujúca teória, Erik Leško (University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra) download (pdf)

  Geographical Categories and Traveling Theory

  Abstract:

  Review of Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň, Tomáš Profant et al., Mimo Sever a Jih. Rozumět globálním nerovnostem a rozmanitosti (Prague: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 2015).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.14

• 225—229: Kontemplace o temnotě evropského kapitalismu, Martin Nový download (pdf)

  Contemplation on the Darkness of European Capitalism

  Abstract:

  Review of Werner Bonefeld, The Strong State and the Free Economy (London, New York: Rowman & Littlefi eld International, 2017).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.15

• 233—235: O konferenci „Dvě století Karla Marxe“, Aleš Novák (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  On the Conference “Two Centuries of Karl Marx”

  Abstract:

  A report on the conference “Two Centuries of Karl Marx,” held in the Prague Creative Center on May 4th and 5th, organized by Aleš Novák and was dedicated to the thinker’s philosophical influence and heritage.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.16

• 239—259: Slovník pojmů: Státní kapitalismus, Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  A Conceptual Dictionary: State Capitalism

  Abstract:

  In this continuation of Contradictions' ongoing "conceptual dictionary," Petr Kužel offers an intellectual history of the concept of state capitalism, as it was intimated by Marx and Engels, then proposed explicitly by Bucharin, and variously reinterpreted by other thinkers, such as Lenin, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Egon Bondy.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.17

  Keywords: State capitalism, the Soviet Union, Soviet-type society
• 263—265: Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018), Jiří Růžička (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  In this memorial to the legacy of Domenico Losurdo, who passed away on June 28, 2018, Jiří Růžička discusses Losurdo's critiques of liberalism and his role in drawing attention to the Hegelian contribution to emancipatory theory.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.1.18

  Keywords: Domenico Losurdo, Marxism, Hegelianism, liberalism
• 267—268: O autorech download (pdf)

Issue 2 download complete issue (pdf)

Contents:

• Front matter download (pdf)
• 5—10: Editorial download (pdf) Abstract:

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.1

• 13—31: Justice as Fetish: Marx, Pashukanis, and the Form of Justice, Dan Swain (University of Life Sciences, Prague) download (pdf) Abstract:

  This article considers the relevance of the ideas of Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis for debates about the relationship between Marxism and justice. In particular, it employs these ideas as a criticism of those who seek to supplement Marx’s critique of capitalism with liberal theories of justice, paradigmatically those of John Rawls. Pashukanis’s analysis of the legal form as a kind of fetish, arising on the basis of capitalist relations of production, opens up the possibility of a similar criticism of theories of justice. This involves more than just the familiar critique that such theories are ideological; Pashukanis suggests an approach that recognises the practical eff ectiveness of theories of justice while also recognising their limits from the perspective of radical critique. Th is new approach allows for a better understanding of how theories of justice might form part of radical theory and practice today.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.2

  Keywords: Marx, Pashukanis, Rawls, theories of justice, Soviet jurisprudence, ethics, commodity fetishism
• 33—55: Beyond Reification: Reclaiming Marx’s Concept of the Fetish Character of the Commodity, Nicole Pepperell (University of Waikato) download (pdf) Abstract:

  György Lukács’s influential interpretation of commodity fetishism as “reification” shapes many contemporary critiques of the apparently objective and impersonal form taken by capitalist social relations. Such critiques seek to debunk the false veil of objectivity that results from fetishism, revealing the real character of the social relations underneath. This line of criticism, however, often attributes totalising power to capitalism, which undermines its own critical standpoint. I argue that the solution to this dilemma lies in understanding the fetish not as an ideological veil that needs to be debunked, but instead as a novel form of social interdependence that is genuinely – not illusorily – impersonal. This impersonal form is generated by a diverse array of disparate social practices whose interaction yields this unanticipated and unintended result. Within this framework, the diversity of the underlying social practices offers a practical potential basis for constituting new forms of social interdependence that lack not only the semblance, but also the reality of capitalism’s oppressive objectivity.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.3

  Keywords: Marx, Lukács, Hegel, Capital, commodity fetishism, critical social theory, reification
• 57—78: The European Cave: Jan Patočka and Theo Angelopoulos’s Film Ulysses’ Gaze, Alex Forbes download (pdf) Abstract:

  The image of a dismantled statue of Lenin from Ukraine being transported up the Danube in Theo Angelopoulos’s 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze is the starting point for a discussion of the fi lm’s urgent resonance with the questioning of “Europe” in the present day. This image foreshadows the destruction of Lenin statues in Ukraine during the ongoing civil war and is more than a fortuitous indicator of the historical context of the present Ukrainian crisis in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Exploring the territory of seven post-Cold War Eastern European states and ending amid the rubble and destruction of the besieged city of Sarajevo, Ulysses’ Gaze offers a panoramic, yet highly subjective, depiction of a Europe undergoing a painful and as-yet-undecided transition. This article will show the strong connections between the understanding of Europe that emerges from the film and that elucidated in the work of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Both the film and Patočka’s thought seek the European on a utopian level that transcends particular temporal and territorial borders, recalls Classical polity and philosophy, and consists primarily in introspective thinking. The recurrence, in today’s Europe, of questions from the immediate post-Cold War era indicates that the work of definition undertaken after 1989 is not yet completed and suggests that films from that period may contain images that have the capacity to guide the process of understanding Europe in the present day.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.4

  Keywords: Patočka, Angelopoulos, Plato, Žižek, Iordanova, Ulysses’ Gaze, Balkans, European, Cinema, Lenin, Ukraine, post-Cold War
• 81—99: Václav Havel and the Invasion of Iraq (with Constant Reference to the Soviet-Led Occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968), Peter Steiner (University of Pennsylvania) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Since the late 9th century the genre of “the letter of invitation” has enjoyed an uncanny status in Czech political discourse. Great Moravia’s incorporation into Slavia orthodoxa ensued from Prince Rastislav’s request for Christian missionaries addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. Consonantly, the eastward political orientation of Czechoslovakia after WW2 was, in part, the result of František Palacký’s refusal to accept the “Committee of Fifty’s” invitation extended in its missive of April 6, 1848 (attributed by K. H. Borovský to Franz Schusselka) to represent his people at the German Parliament convening in Frankfurt. My paper juxtaposes the two most recent variations on the said epistolary genre: 1) the letter authored by Vasil Biľak together with four other top CPC functionaries in mid-1968 asking Leonid Brezhnev for “a brotherly assistance,” that is, a military intervention thwarting the imminent counterrevolution in their homeland; and 2) the letter “United We Stand” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 30, 2003) co-signed by Václav Havel and an assorted septet of European prime ministers urging its implied addressee, George W. Bush, to dispatch the military that would “rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” The compelling need to compare these two texts was highlighted by Havel himself in his speech of November 20, 2002 insisting that “it is necessary [...] to weigh again and again on the finest scales whether we are truly helping people against a criminal regime and defending humankind against its weapons, or whether perchance this is not another–understandably more sophisticated than the Soviet one of 1968–version of ‘the brotherly assistance.’” My analysis demonstrates that the latter is the case and that the US invasion of Iraq solicited by Havel’s letter was as unjustified and unsophisticated as the earlier Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that Biľak’s epistle legitimized.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.5

  Keywords: Václav Havel, 2002 invasion of Iraq, rhetoric
• 101—113: Labour in the Era of Fictitious Capital, Norbert Trenkle (Krisis journal) download (pdf) Abstract:

  This essay discusses the consequences of the changed relationship between capital and labour after the end of the Fordist post-war boom. As a result of these changes, capital accumulation is no longer predominantly based on the exploitation of labour in the production of commodities like cars, hamburgers, and smartphones but on the massive emission of property titles like shares, bonds, and financial derivatives that represent claims to future value. These changes irreversibly weakened labour power, giving capital a freer hand than ever before. But making large numbers of workers redundant also had consequences for capital. The Third Industrial Revolution thus marked the onset of a fundamental crisis. The production of value through the exploitation of labour has been replaced with the systematic anticipation of future value in the form of fictitious capital. However, this form of expansion is reaching its limits and is linked with significant costs to society. Albeit sobering and chilling, this analysis suggests removing the political response of the left from the retrospective romanticising of the Fordist era capitalism and pursue the abolition of labour as a form of social mediation. In other words: pursue liberation from labour and from its dependence on capital accumulation rather than the liberation of labour.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.6

  Keywords: Labor, fictitious capital, value theory
• 117—132: Communism Is a New Idea, Interview with Alain Badiou, by Jana Beránková (Columbia University) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Jana Beránková met with French philosopher Alain Badiou in Prague on April 13, 2018, on the occasion of the conference “Alain Badiou: Thinking the Infinite”, which focused on the position of mathematics in Badiou’s thought. The conference, organized by the Prague Axiomatic Circle, was held in the National Gallery in Prague on April 11th and 12th, 2018. They discussed the affirmative power of thought, communism, mathematics, and the forthcoming third volume of his magnum opus Being and Event, entitled The Immanence of Truths.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.7

  Keywords: Alain Badiou, philosophy and mathematics, dialectics, universalism, communism, art
• 135—156: Marx and Freud, Robert Kalivoda download (pdf) Abstract:

  We print below the first half of the essay “Marx and Freud,” which forms the second of three chapters of the 1968 book Modern Mental Reality and Marxism by Czech Marxist philosopher, historian, and aesthetic theorist Robert Kalivoda (1923–1989). The chapter is preceded in the book by an essay entitled “The Dialectics of Structuralism and the Dialectics of Aesthetics,” which offers a critique of the Hegelian basis of Marxist aesthetics and attempts to supplement Marxism with principles drawn from Kantianism and structuralism. The book’s third chapter, “Marxism and Libertinism,” presents a genealogy of the Marxian ideal of freedom and equality, the sources of which the author finds – perhaps surprisingly – in the cultural paradigm of Romanticism and in the ideology of libertinism. Throughout the book, Kalivoda pursues two primary goals: to philosophically investigate the meaning of (modern) reality, and to offer a systematic basis for a humanist Marxism. Kalivoda argues that Marxism overcomes the metaphysical conception of human existence and can be used as a robust methodological basis for a general dialectical theory of human existence. “Marx and Freud” appears here for the first time in English, in a translation by Ashley Davies.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.8

  Keywords: Marxism, Freud, psychoanalysis, human nature, materialism
• 159—171: On “Journey to the Center of the Poem” (The Genesis of the Polemical Value of Imaginative Expression in the Work of Vratislav Effenberger), Šimon Svěrák (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf) Abstract:

  In this introduction to Vratislav Effenberger's "Journey to the Center of the Poem," Šimon Svěrák places the text in the context of historic Czech debates regarding the relationship between aesthetics and society, and he interprets the text in light of Effenberger's broader system of thought.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.9

  Keywords: Vratislav Effenberger, surrealism, structuralism, avant-garde, art and society
• 173—189: Journey to the Center of the Poem, Vratislav Effenberger download (pdf) Abstract:

  In his theoretical essay “Journey to the Center of the Poem,” Vratislav Effenberger engages with the semantic character and dynamic of the artistic work whose nature we could designate as irreal, irrational, or absurd. The text contains, in a nascent stage, many of the concepts that Effenberger was to develop into a more conceptually concrete and systematic form in his later theoretical works. In a relatively clear-cut manner, Effenberger outlines in the essay a perspective on the basis of which the author will later analyze psychological and psychosocial problematics, above all with regard to human imaginative activity (dreams, inspiration, artistic creation, and so on) and its functions.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.10

  Keywords: Surrealism, structuralism, poetry
• 193—199: Karl Polanyi's Hungarian Writings, Vikash Singh (Montclair State Uiversity), Sangeeta Parashar (Montclair State Uiversity) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Karl Polanyi, Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings, ed. Gareth Dale, trans. Adam Fabry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.11

• 200—204: Babylon to Brexit: Gareth Dale’s Polanyi, Nick Evans, University of Cambridge download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Gareth Dale, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique (London: Pluto, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.12

• 205—208: The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Katarzyna Bielińska-Kowalewska (Centre of Postgraduate Medical Education, Warsaw) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.13

• 209—213: Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World, Dirk Mathias Dalberg (Comenius University, Bratislava) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Ivan Sviták, The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2014).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.14

• 214—218: Time for a New Way of Reading Patočka?, Sergio Mas Díaz (Grup Internacional de Recerca "Cultura, Història, Estat," Barcelona) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Francesco Tava, The Risk of Freedom, trans. Jane Ledlie (London and New York: Rowman &Littlefi eld, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.15

• 219—224: Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights, Michaela Belejkaničová (University College London) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of James R. Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Würzburg: Verlag Köningshausen & Neumann, 2016).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.16

• 225—232: The End Post-communism?, Neda Genova (Goldsmiths, University of London) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Boris Buden, Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.17

• 235—237: On the Conference “Two Centuries of Karl Marx”, Aleš Novák (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf) Abstract:

  A report on the conference “Two Centuries of Karl Marx,” held in the Prague Creative Center on May 4th and 5th, organized by Aleš Novák and was dedicated to the thinker’s philosophical influence and heritage.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.18

• 241—245: Moishe Postone’s Anticapitalism without Shortcuts, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  In this reflection on the legacy of Moishe Postone, who passed away March 19, 2018, Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out Postone's critique of "traditional Marxism" and of nationalist and anti-Semitic movements that uphold what Postone calls "foreshortened anticapitalism": they criticize only the abstract or universalist side of capitalism while seeking salvation in the concrete, particular, and national. But Feinberg also applies Postone's critical conception to movements that make the opposite move, seeking salvation in the universal while overlooking the particular. Instead of such shortcuts, Postone's legacy calls on critics to engage with our society as a whole and to seek emancipation as a whole that includes all its parts.

   

  Erratum: This article incorrectly states that in April 2016 Moishe Postone was a visiting scholar in Vienna at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM). In fact, he was at the Internationale Forschungsstelle Kulturwissenschaften (IFK). He was affiliated with the IWM only later.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.19

  Keywords: Moishe Postone, anti-Semitism, universalism
• 247—249: About the Authors download (pdf)

Volume 1 - 2017

Issue 1 download complete issue (pdf)

Contents:

• Obálka, tiráž, obsah download (pdf) Abstract:

  Front matter

• 5—8: Slovo úvodem download (pdf) Abstract:

  Editorial

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.1

• 11—17: Polistopadový konsensus a porozumění historii, Petr Andreas (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  The Post-Communist Consensus and Historical Understanding

  Abstract:

  As soon as the socialist regimes failed in East-Central Europe, there disappeared from the public sphere the positive, a priori understanding of the official, public discourse of the socialist era. What the author of this article calls “premisunderstanding” has become part of the new anti-communist consensus and ethos. This premisunderstanding is rooted not only in an ideological and moral antipathy toward the socialist regime but also in the fact that the regime’s discourse differs significantly from other types of discourse, including, not least, liberal discourse. When this kind of premisunderstading is applied to texts originating in the socialist era or to texts or statements that represent this era, the author calls this “reading in the spirit of the post-Velvet-Revolutionary consensus.” In the more extreme forms of this premisunderstanding, the interpreter presumes that the historical actor is lying, is dishonest, or is mistaken. Although this tendency toward premisunderstanding has become weaker in the face of revisionist conceptions in historiography, and in the face of increasing nostalgia throughout society, this ideological barrier to understanding the recent past survives to this day in various forms of anti-communist rhetoric.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.2

  Keywords: Post-Communism, historical understanding, ideology, Czechoslovakia
• 21—35: Podstatou kapitalismu je úrok, Adam Votruba download (pdf)

  The Basis of Capitalism Is Interest: On the Life and Work of Silvio Gesell

  Abstract:

  This article presents the intellectual legacy of German economist Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). Gesell is known above all as the originator of the notion of “stamped” currency that loses value when not circulated. With the mortgage crisis of 2008, Gesell’s thought took on new relevance, after central banks lowered interest rates almost to zero and were unable to stimulate the economy by lowering rates further. While certain aspects of Gesell’s theory may be outdated, it is noteworthy that Gesell was able to anticipate later developments in mainstream economics, such as the influence of interest rates on economic performance. Gesell’s theory also has significant consequences for our understanding of the capitalist economy as such. Gesell polemicized with Marx, for example, arguing that Marx did not grasp the essence of capitalism, which, according to Gesell, lies in a monetary system driven by interest, which in turn leads to social problems such as unemployment and economic crises. These ideas have been pursued further by a number of economists influenced by Gesell, such as Margrit Kennedy, Bernard Lietaer, and Dieter Suhr. Although the author of this article agrees with many of Gesell’s assertions, he notes that Gesell’s understanding of money as an exogenous factor in the economy (a widely shared understanding of money in Gesell’s day) can no longer be uncritically accepted. The author observes, moreover, that the development of alternative currencies leaves us with the challenge of comparing these currencies to one another and examining their relation to the economy as a whole.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.3

  Keywords: Economic theory, Silvio Gesell, interest and debt
• 39—48: György Lukács, otázka marxistické ortodoxie a český marxismus, Ivan Landa (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  György Lukács, the Question of Marxist Orthodoxy, and Czech Marxism

  Abstract:

  György Lukács's essay "What is Orthodox Marxism?" is counted among the most significant methodological statements of so-called Western Marxism. Here Ivan Landa introduces the essay's central themes and discusses the history of its reception and translation in Czech intellectual circles.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.4

  Keywords: György Lukács, Marxism, Czech intellectual history
• 49—68: Co je to ortodoxní marxismus?, György Lukács download (pdf)

  What Is Orthodox Marxism?

  Abstract:

  We present here for the first in Czech György Lukács's celebrated essay "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" in a translation by Lubomír Sochor. Lukács answers the question posed in his title by arguing that the orthodoxy of Marxism is not contained in the specific content of its theses, which one must blindly accept, but rather in the dialectical method, which can be applied to changing reality.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.5

  Keywords: Marxism, methodology, dialectics
• 71—80: Že jsou to občané, kdo zakládá svobodný svět, Interview with Karel Kosík, by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt and Martin Traine download (pdf)

  A Free World Depends on Its Citizens

  Abstract:

  This interview with Czech philosophy Karel Kosík was conduced by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt and Martin Traine on February 13, 1993 in Prague. First published in German as "Dass die Bürger es sind, die eine freie Welt gründen", in the journal Concordia. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44 (1993), pp. 13–23, we now print it in a Czech translation by Adam Balcar.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.6

  Keywords: Karel Kosík, Heidegger, Marx
• 83—91: Úvod do Marxovho myslenia, Juraj Halas (Comenius University, Bratislava) download (pdf)

  Introduction to Marx's Thought

  Abstract:

  Review essay on Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Michael Heinrich, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2005) [12th ed.].

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.7

  Keywords: Michael Heinrich, Marx, critique of political economy
• 95—98: Manifest za filosofii, Martin Vrba (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  Manifesto for Philosophy

  Abstract:

  Review of Alain Badiou, Manifest za filosofii a jiné texty, ed. and trans. by Ondřej Krochmalný (Prague: Herrmann & synové, SOK – Sdružení pro levicovou teorii, 2014).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.8

• 99—102: Bonefeldova fundamentální kritika vyšinutého světa kapitálu, Martin Nový download (pdf)

  Bonefeld's Fundamental Critique of the Deranged World of Capitalism

  Abstract:

  Review of Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (New Delhi, London, Los Angeles, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.9

• 103—106: Texty v oběhu, Miloš Caňko download (pdf)

  Texts in Circulation

  Abstract:

  Review of Richard Müller, Josef Šebek (eds.), Texty v oběhu. Antologie z kulturně materialistického myšlení o literatuře (Prague: Academia, 2015).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.10

• 107—109: Petrusek o Marxovi, Stanislav Holubec (Institute of State and Law, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf)

  Petrusek on Marx

  Abstract:

  Review of Miroslav Petrusek, Texty z pozůstalosti 1. Marx, marxismus a sociologie (Prague: Sociologické nakladatelství – SLON, 2014).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.11

• 113—130: Slovník pojmů: Ideologie, Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences), Šimon Svěrák (Charles University, Prague), Roman Rakowski (University of Ostrava), Michael Hauser (Charles University, Prague) download (pdf)

  A Conceptual Dictionary: Ideology

  Abstract:

  In this first entry in Contradictions' "conceptual dictionary," the authors present an intellectual history of the notion of ideology, following it from its emergence in the writings of baron Destutt de Tracy, through the classical reformulations of Marx and Engels and the term's influential reinterpretation by Lenin, to recent attempts to understand the significance of ideology in contemporary society, by theorists like Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.1.12

  Keywords: Ideology, Destutt de Tracy, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Althusser, Jameson, Žižek
• 131—132: O autorech download (pdf) Abstract:

  About the authors

Issue 2 download complete issue (pdf)

Contents:

• Front matter download (pdf)
• 5—9: Editorial download (pdf) Abstract:

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.1

• 13—22: On the Contradictions of Marxism, Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Freie Universität Berlin) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Since the beginnings of Marxism there has been a persistent demand to understand this theory, as well its practical and organizational development, according to the principles of Marxism itself. By “Marxism” I mean here historical materialism: not mechanical determinism but the interaction of transformational praxis with continually changing reality. This interaction may be confrontational and, as the poet-philosopher Bertolt Brecht said, “like everything that pertains to confl ict, collision, and struggle, it cannot be treated without the materialist dialectic.” (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 23 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993], p. 376.) In the following article I want to show that Brecht’s thesis is also valid for
  the history of Marxism and its forms of motion.

  Erratum: On pp. 15–16, the text incorrectly reads "At her trial, Rosa Luxemburg stated that an individual counts as being convicted when he gets trapped in contradictions." It should read: "In a trial, says Rosa luxemburg, an individual counts as being convicted whe he gets trapped in contradictions."

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.2

  Keywords: Marxism, left history, contradiction, Marxism, left history, contradiction, practical dialectics
• 23—40: Marx after Marxism: Value, Critique, Crisis, Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University) download (pdf) Abstract:

  The article distinguishes between two fundamental dynamics in Marx’s critique of capitalism: the humanist, cyclical, perpetually-renewed struggle between capitalists and wage labor over profits, wages, and the distribution of social wealth more generally and what I term a “posthuman” dialectic between humans and machines, unfolding as the unilinear historical dynamic of automation and the corresponding decreases it brings to the capacity of living labor to produce surplus value. The consequence of this posthuman dialectic is both the growing superfl uity of living labor relegated to a planet of slums and the actual and coming collapse of valorization as a global process (as opposed to its operation in any single unit of capital). If the former, humanist dialectic remained predominant in what Moishe Postone has termed “traditional” Leninist Marxism, the contemporary context of the “Second Machine-Age” and the expanding automation of virtually all production and services points to a collapse of valorization that philosophers such as Michel Henry and Robert Kurz identified in Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism
  as “the moving contradiction.”

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.3

  Keywords: Value theory, automation, economic crisis
• 41—59: The Ontological Prison: The Dead End of New Materialisms, Daniel Keil (University of Applied Sciences Frankfurt) download (pdf) Abstract:

  The emergence of the New Materialisms from a critique of the cultural or linguistic turn in social theory and its inability to adequately deal with questions of matter seems to be quite similar to the starting point of historical Materialism. But, in its reformulation of such crucial concepts and relations as subject-object- or nature-culture divisions (or, in that case, non-divisions), as well as its emphasis on the concept of contingent assemblages as an ontology of the emergence of matter and things, it is no longer human praxis which is being highlighted but the event (Ereignis) of materialization of non-human/human assemblages. Thus, it is only the contingency of matter which is leading to changes. Hence, the ontology of New Materialisms is deeply problematic.

  Therefore, the paper aims to provide a critique of the main concepts of the New Materialisms by means of Marxian approaches. The theses are, first, that the New Materialisms de-socialize things through de-socializing categories and concepts; second, that they can be assumed to represent more of an “ontological turn” than a “material turn,” which has serious epistemological consequences; and, third, they are mirroring in their negation of the subject the methodological individualism of neoliberal theory because both approaches define a non-society of super-individual processes, a kind of spontaneous order which cannot be controlled by humans. In order to substantiate these assumptions the paper fi rst traces back the main categories of New Materialisms, then takes a deeper look at the subject-object and the nature-culture relation before relating it to neoliberal society. Finally, the ontology of open-endedness and contingency will be criticized as an ontological apologia for what is.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.4

  Keywords: New Materialisms, the ontological turn, Marxism, critical theory
• 63—91: Materialist Regressions and a Return to Idealism, Djordje Popović (University of Minnesota) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Over the last decade or two, judging by the frequency and jubilance of its sundry invocations, “materialism” seems to have finally returned from discursive exile, having barely survived and only with aid from the most unlikely ally. Th at this new materialism is barely recognizable matters little, for the stories of conceptual adventure and the promise of a world beyond our wildest conceptual grasp are so captivating that most fail to notice that the human never appears in them. That is precisely the point. Under the guise of materialism, a redemptive nihilism has taken the place of the revolutionary hubris that once struck fear in ruling classes and ideas alike. How did it come to this? The stodgy old materialism
  did not so much lose to the imposter in some marketplace of ideas as it was systematically appropriated, its concepts expropriated, aspirations falsifi ed and entire traditions effaced. A sustained philosophical and political eff ort to weaken the Left Hegelian tradition – the concept of alienation in particular – preceded today’s ontological restoration, enabling new “materialists” to maintain what is entirely an absurdity (materialism that resides solely and immanently in the object) and an obscenity (radical politics built on arch-conservative principles). This essay will identify a few points of ontological infi ltration and argue that critical social theory, for the sake of materialism and not against it, must recuperate the prohibitively idealist conceptual framework – one that is by no means foreign to it and that once went by the name of Reason in History.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.5

  Keywords: Materialism, idealism, Left Hegelianism
• 93—115: Living Distinctions over Atrophied Oppositions: Hegel as Critic of Reification, Eric-John Russell (Kingston University London) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Georg Lukács, writing in History and Class Consciousness, describes modern philosophy, culminating in the work of Hegel, as providing “a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois society.” By closely considering this remark, the following essay will explore the manner in which Hegel’s philosophy stands as a register for the reification constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. After first outlining the fundamental characteristics of Lukács’s theory of reified consciousness, an investigation into culled sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit will demonstrate the conceptual affinity between reified consciousness and the consciousness of Hegel’s own protagonist. The Phenomenology follows the path of a consciousness successively failing to give an adequate account of both itself and the world. Here, the immediate and sequestered otherness of its object obscures the truth that consciousness is the substance of its own process. By analyzing the sections “Sense-Certainty” and “The Spiritual Realm of Animals and Deception,” I aim to demonstrate the extent to which Hegel’s Phenomenology can be grasped as a critique of reified consciousness grounded in both an immediacy prohibited from comprehending its own mediated composition of itself and its object, and in the reduction of social activity to an aggregate of competitive self-interests. As a result, Hegelian philosophy stands as a prescient and indispensable critical resource for grasping the requisite intellectual dispositions of the capitalist mode of production.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.6

  Keywords: Marxism, Hegel, Lukács
• 119—141: Poetic Justice: Viktor Shklovsky and Carl Schmitt, Peter Steiner (University of Pennsylvania) download (pdf) Abstract:

  The paper explores a shared epistemological bias of Shklovsky’s poetics and Schmitt’s legal Dezisionismus: their privileging the singular over the ordinary. “The exception is more interesting than the rule,” Schmitt stated about the law in 1922. For, every legal judgment, he insisted, involves the indispensable moment of contingency insofar as it extends the same statute to diff erent and irreducibly unique situations. Shklovsky, quite similarly, endowed art with the capacity to defamiliarize our perception of reality made torpid by repetition: turning the usual into the unexpected.

  Both theoreticians rebelled against the Positivistic tradition in their respective fields. Schmitt against Kelsen’s “pure theory of law”—an autonomous science of deductively arranged norms, each deriving its validity from appropriate higher norms, down to the ultimate Grundgesetz underlying and sustaining them. “The basic law,” argued Schmitt pace Kelsen, is always already something supra-legal that becomes incorporated into jurisprudence only retroactively. For initially it is but the expression of an unpredictable will of a particular “sovereign” who decides to suspend an existing legal system and establishes a different one. Such a coup d’état is not an act of legal nihilism but, on the contrary, a self-protecting measure intended to save the state from liquidation by its enemies.

  Shklovsky critiqued the validity of Spencer’s postulate, popularized in Russia by Veselovskii, that art strives to economize our mental energy. Defamiliarization, he insisted, is wasteful, but for a vital reason: to resuscitate our relationship with the surrounding world that, without this intervention, would succumb to a deadening entropy. “Only the creation of new artistic forms,” wrote Shklovsky in “The Resurrection of the Word,” “can return to humankind the experience of the world, resurrect things, and kill pessimism.” Like the Schmittian sovereign, then, poets destroy literature in order to preserve it. They arbitrarily suspend worn-out artistic norms to inaugurate new ones capable of defamil-iarizing reality afresh.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.7

  Keywords: Viktor Shklovsky, Carl Schmitt, György Lukács
• 145—165: Post-Fascism Is No Longer a Danger. It Is a Reality, Interview with G. M. Tamás, by Lukáš Matoška (Charles University) download (pdf) Abstract:

  G. M. Tamás, once known as a left-libertarian dissident and later as a liberal member of the Hungarian parliament, has become one of post-Communist Europe’s most important Marxist intellectuals. In his writing on the history of the socialist movement, the character of Communist-led states, and the nature of the “transition” from state capitalism to free-market capitalism, he highlights the deep historical and structural roots of the current morass in which Central Europe, and much of the rest of the world, finds itself. In this interview he explains and further develops his diagnosis of the present, setting out from his well-known notion of "post-fascism." In this interview conducted by Lukáš Matoška, Tamás discusses the state of "post-fascism" today.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.8

  Keywords: G. M. Tamás, post-fascism, citizenship, nationalism
• 169—184: Social Self-Government Is a Dream I Haven’t Given Up On, Interview with Petr Uhl, by Petr Kužel (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Petr Uhl (born Oct. 8 1941), Czech journalist, longtime prisoner of conscience and former member of the 4th International. Since the 1960s he has been one of the foremost representatives of the radical left in Czechoslovakia. One of the central ideas promoted in his writing is the principle of social self-governmentas an alternative to parliamentary government. He formulated his ideas most extensively in his book Socialism Imprisoned: A Socialist Alternative to Normalisation (Le socialisme emprisonné: une alternative socialiste à la normalisation [Paris: Stock, 1980]). The book was published in Czech two years later by the exile publisher Index. His 1969 article “Czechoslovakia and Socialism” was also included in this volume. He further elaborated his political views in two later books, Justice and Injustice as Seen by Petr Uhl (Právo a nespravedlnost očima Petra Uhla [Prague: C. H. Beck, 1998]) and his recently published memoirs I Did What I Thought was Right (Dělal jsem, co jsem považoval za správné [Prague, Torst 2014]). In this interview with Petr Kužel, Uhl discusses his history of activism and his visions for the future, which he maintains despite the unfavorable conditions of the present.

  doi: 10.46957/con.201.2.9

  Keywords: Petr Uhl, left dissent, Charter 77, self-governing socialism
• 187—204: Classes and the Real Structure of Society, Karel Kosík download (pdf) Abstract:

  This study was originally published in the Prague-based Filosofický časopis (Philosophical journal) as “Třídy a reálná struktura společnosti,” in autumn 1958 (Filosofický časopis 6 [1958], no. 5, pp. 721–733). The text immediately attracted the attention of Party ideologues, and its author was subjected to harsh criticism as part of the so-called “anti-revisionist” campaign that was going on at the time. The article is, however, of more than merely historical-political significance, representing a departure from official Marxist-Leninist positions. It also presents an important side of Kosík’s thought. The text was written several years before publication of Kosík’s best-known work, Dialectics of the Concrete (which first appeared in Czech in 1963), and in several respects “Classes and the Real Structure of Society” can be read as a preparatory study for the later book. As in Dialectics of the Concrete, Kosík approaches Marxism as an analytical method for eff ectively grasping reality in its totality. Criticizing the methodological limitations of modern sociology (as represented by Max Weber, Kurt Mayer, and C. Wright Mills), Kosík introduces here his conception of concrete totality. In contrast to the one-dimensional analysis of society taking into account only a single aspect, whether it be economic, political, spiritual or ethical, the materialist theory of class is presented here as a method for approaching society in its dialectically conditioned complexity. We present this article here for the first time in English, in a translation by Ashley Davies. Missing bibliographic information and Engish translations of cited texts have been filled in by Pavel Siostrzonek.

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.10

  Keywords: Class theory, sociology, materialism, dialectics
• 207—215: People, Multitude, Society, Joseph Grim Feinberg (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review essay on Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (eds.), Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People (Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2014).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.11

  Keywords: Populism, hegemony, biopolitics, multitude, radical democracy, social movements
• 219—223: Macht und Widerstand, Mark Bergfeld (Queen Mary University of London) download (pdf) Abstract:

  Review of Ilja Trojanow, Macht und Widerstand (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2015).

  doi: 10.46957/con.2017.2.12

• 225—226: About the Authors download (pdf)