Archive Tranquility. How Archives Can Possibly Contribute to the Understanding of the Central East European Marxism

0582605 - FLÚ 2024 eng A3 - Přednáška/prezentace nepublikovaná
Landa, Ivan
Archive Tranquility. How Archives Can Possibly Contribute to the Understanding of the Central East European Marxism.
[Modernitas Lecture. Bruxelles, 11.10.2023-11.10.2023]
Způsob prezentace: Zvaná přednáška
Pořadatel akce: Université Libre, Bruxelles, Maison des Sciences Humaines, Modernitas
URL akce: https://msh.ulb.ac.be/en/agenda/lecture-archive-tranquility-how-archives-can-possibly-contribute-to-the-understanding-of-the-central-east-european-marxism-1 
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: Central East European Marxism * Soviet Marxism * archival studies * Karel Kosík
Obor OECD: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

It’s not long ago since the historiography of Central East European (and Soviet) Marxism used to be the domain of Sovietologists. Then, it gradually came under the scrutiny of historians of political ideas as well as intellectual historians. Only relatively recently it has become the object of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy, who focus on ideas and theories. Although philosophers and historians of philosophy mostly pay attention to published texts and work with critical editions, as they are interested in a final form of a thought, they are at the same time increasingly taking in account archival materials. There are various reasons for this: archives are considered to be an additional source of information, supplementing the published texts, containing unpublished texts and other material such as reading notes, sketches of ideas and arguments, diary entries, correspondence. All this material gives a better glimpse into the philosophical theories and enables to map the intellectual networks, etc. In my talk I will focus on how archives can deepen our understanding of what was happening in Central East European Marxism between 1948 and 1989 in a slightly different sense, keeping my eye on Czechoslovak case. I will show that archives do not solely provide an insight into the philosopher’s laboratory, and do not give an authoritative hermeneutical key to the philosophical theories in their final, i.e. published form. Jacques Derrida has rightly criticized this approach that is based on the oppositions “unpublished/published”, “unfinished/finished”, “private/public” etc. in his lectures Archive Fever (1995). Instead, I’ll argue that the archive confronts us with methodological questions, especially those concerning the emergence of philosophical problems and insights, the ways in which ideas are elaborated and arguments construed. They allow – as Dieter Henrich puts it in his book Werke im Werden: Über die Genesis philosophischer Einsichten (2011) – to understand the philosophical creativity and to reconstruct the logical space in which past thinkers were situated, being philosophically creative. I will address these issues by using the examples of the archive of Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík (and partly of Lubomír Sochor and Vítězslav Gardavský).
Trvalý link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0350805