Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 80-92, March 2022.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 80-92, March 2022.

In the article, Thomas More’s vision of citizen education is a starting point for the analysis of the role of East European dissident thought and practice in addressing the present crisis of social agency posed by the legacy of postmodern philosophy and the surge of post-truth politics. The article argues that engaging with the experience of Eastern Europe in the last decades of the twentieth century offers a useful way of approaching the question of political action in relation to social (...) dreaming and an important context to address the postmodern deconstruction of the subject. The way the thought and practice of East European dissidence both resonates with and questions the main principles of postmodern theory makes it particularly relevant for the current historical and political momentum and can be seen as an important contribution to the debates belonging to the ethico-political turn. (shrink)

This paper deals with the political philosophy of Václav Havel, mainly its relation to ethics and what Michel Foucault called governmentality. Besides using his analytical framework, Foucault’s politics are engaged with to highlight similar trajectories of two intellectuals dealing with related dilemmas of ethics and politics. As a dissident of communist Czechoslovakia Havel, developed a profound critique of modernity, but also discovered technologies of the self, exclusive to dissidents, which empowered them in their moral struggle against the regime. The Velvet (...) Revolution in 1989 ascended Havel to the presidency of the republic, a position from which he quickly embraced and disseminated neoliberal governmentality. The final section deals with Havel’s use of human rights in the later years of his presidency, being a justification for military interventions and comparing them to Foucault’s conceptualisation of rights. Human rights discourse is the culmination of Havel’s lifelong quest for the ethical foundation of politics and it is the source of most difficulties and potentialities associated with this project. (shrink)