The irreplaceable presence of Prague in my life

2023

Philosophy, it has been said, lives on through the ongoing disputes between individual philosophers. This paper brings the stakes of one such debate into view. It falls into two parts: the rst examines Jürgen Habermas's critique of the Budapest School and its contribution to the paradigm of production within a contemporary version of the philosophy of praxis. The second analyses György Márkus's critique of Habermas's criticism of the work of the Budapest School. He argues that at its core Habermas's work remains 1. Stubbornly ahistorical and 2. At odds with a contemporary modern scienti c approach. The more radical historicist Márkus appeals to a combination of empiricism and anthropological optimism as a practical and critical "gamble" on the future in the true spirit of the Enlightenment. This paper argues that Márkus's critique of Habermas provides the model of a contemporary critical theory that marries cutting edge modern social science with a practical engagement with the key problems of modernisation like climate change, pandemics or on going modernising post-secular societies. In a tradition as richly crowded as that of the history of Western philosophy, it is almost impossible to produce novel insights or new discoveries. Deeply steeped in the historical philosophical tradition, it is not surprising that Habermas locates and evaluates philosophical ideas as mere variations on already well contested and recontested ways of thinking about ourselves in the world. When Habermas critically engages with the Budapest School's version of Western Marxism, he does so in recognition of the importance of a conversation to be had that might further our comprehension of major questions for our times.

Artl@s Bulletin, 2014

Focusing on the period 1890-1939, this paper explores exchanges between three generations of Prague artists and international—especially Parisian—avant-gardes. Documenting the extraordinary receptiveness of Prague to modernism, particularly in the applied arts, it argues for a thorough rethink of the conceptual geographies of art history.

The article explores how Father Sergii Bulgakov and Sister Joanna Reitlinger reacted to the new space of Prague, as geographical setting and imaginary space. With the help of Gaston Bachelard it looks at their images of a native house and motherland and then analyzes the philosophical category of daydreaming. Then the article looks at the connection between intimate immensity, the discontinuity of time and Holy Wisdom. It concludes by looking at the way the play between the geographical and imaginary opens up space for the other both on the horizontal and vertical level.

Room One Thousand, 2014

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language, 2024

The paper focuses on Prague's urban space, architecture, and monuments, and on the meanings and functions that Kafka saw in them, explicitly rejected, or significantly ignored in his literary texts and personal writings, including his diaries and letters.

Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts: Studies in Language and Literature, 2016

Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s “organic” language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka “read” his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and non-fictional texts.

Modern Fiction Studies, 2019

Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2013

METU Studies in Development, 1995

One of my earliest attempts to formulate the argument developed in my books The Coasts of Bohemia and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century was in a keynote lecture I wrote for the conference New Directions in Writing European History at the Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, on October 25-6, 1994. I was one of three keynote speakers, along with Paul Langford and John Hall. My lecture was titled “Prague as a Vantage Point on Modern European History. ” The conference proceedings were published in English in METU Studies in Development, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995. I reproduce my paper together with Fuat Keyman's comments and the transcript of the discussion here. My lecture, along with those of John Hall and Paul Langford, has now appeared in Turkish translation in Huri Islamoglu (ed.), Neden Avrupa Tarihi (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayincilik, 2014).