Several Paul Ricœur’s texts of the 1970s and 1980s mention so-called “founding events”, “events-signs”, “events of deliverance”, “acts of liberation” or “great events of salvation”. As examples of such events, Ricœur mentions two episodes from the Holy Scriptures, the Exodus and the Resurrection. However, their religious specificity is not essential. Their meaning concerns the philosopher inasmuch as they are received by posterity, through a secular process of active hermeneutics, of interpretation by acts. The founding events generate sense by two ways, (...) as narratives and as symbols. As narratives, they consist of intentional acts produced by human or divine persons; as symbols they form essential totalities which belong to nobody and are subjected to incessant interpretation. They imply a rupture with the past and the beginning of a new epoch. In modern political history, their role is played by revolutions, endowed with a greater “interpretability” than other founding events and may be compared only to some military victories. Two forms of subjectivity correspond to these two ways of sense-making: a narrative subjectivity, which is temporal and retrospective and a symbolic subjectivity, tending either to the timelessness of abstract concepts or to the immersion into the immediate actuality of lived experience. (shrink)

If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political model as an analytical framework (...) and by taking a visual route, focusing on classical iconographic representations in which equality was present in the images’ subtexts. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of good government is one iconic exposition of equality as a positive condition of civil peace. Already there, however, the positive value of equality is counterposed to the figure of violent retributive justice. Similarly, in the Christian narrative, equality is endorsed as the original condition of creatures under God, but is also associated with violent death. This signals one pre-modern root behind the ambivalence towards equality, particularly when the latter is understood dynamically, as levelling. Such a reversal of value finds an apotheosis, I suggest, in the revolutionary icon of the guillotine, a dramatic representation of equalisation that had a strong influence on modern political thinking. In J. E. Millais’ first painting, of Jesus in the House of his Parents, I find a more positive legacy of Christian equality in modern political thinking. (shrink)

This essay examines the status of events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia from an Arendtian perspective, focusing on whether they qualify as a revolution or even, precisely speaking, a modern event. For Arendt, revolutions are decidedly modern in that they expand freedom to all equally, an expansion conceivable because history can be thought of as rectilinear and because new ideas can be introduced into the secular world. Leaving aside the importance of violence as a criterion, we find that 1989 in Czechoslovakia (...) does not live up to her other criteria, nor does it make sense to call it either modern or postmodern. We thus claim that it is an ‘immodern’, non-revolutionary event. In concluding, we nd that its immodernity is why it failed to be a revolution. (shrink)

In the opinion of many Western observers (e.g. Timothy Garton Ash) as well as Polish authors (e.g., Zdzisław Kransnodębski), the political thought of Solidarność was a mixture of ideas taken from different ideological traditions (right and left). What, in the aforementioned authors opinion, was a reason for pride was an object of criticism by Leszek Nowak, the eminent Polish philosopher, engaged in the movement. One of his most important charges against the political thought of this movement was its intellectual provincialism (...) and its inability to propose something new and fresh. The purpose of this paper is to present Nowak's reflection on the political thought of Solidarność in years 1980-1981. I show that he presses three general kinds of objections. According to Nowak, the political thought of the movement had formal-internal deficiencies (it provided no clear theoretical vision), cognitive deficiencies (it was incapable of offering an adequate diagnosis of the situation) and policy deficiencies (it was incapable of indicating the appropriate course of action). (shrink)

The text analyzes the discourse on sovereignty in the Czech politics in the light of current processes of the transformation of sovereignty caused by the globalization and Europeanization. The author discusses the dispute between liberal-conservative critics of the European integration and cosmopolitan critics of the sovereign statehood and points to the limits of both positions. It is argued that the conservatives who warn against the loss of sovereignty in the ongoing process of Europeanization and who call for the protection of (...) the Czech statehood cling to an obsolete and invalid concept of sovereignty that is no longer adequate to changing social and geopolitical conditions. Similarly, it is pointed out that the defenders of cosmopolitan Europe who take sovereignty to be an old and useless category hindering the process of democratization are unable to off er an alternative capable of responding to growing concerns regarding the democratic defi cit and the loss of political autonomy. The text tries to show that both positions misconstrue the challenges of globalization and Europeanization for the state and democracy. (shrink)

The key issue of social life is the problem of solidarity. This problem, as the recent events show, will grow more acute in the near future, both in Russia and around the world, which is especially evident in the crisis. The paper will consider the question of solidarity in the context of the theory of sociology. As the outcome of this investigation the increase both in the knowledge of social life and in the theoretical resources for its study is expected (...) to be. Thus, the research is considered to become, first of all, the contribution to the theory of sociology, but not formal sociology — rather pithy one, oriented towards the current issues’ resolving. (shrink)

How should we evaluate the global protests against the financial crisis from 2011 and onwards? Do demonstrations on central squares such as Syntagma, Puerta de Sol and Zucotti Park point towards alternative democratic models beyond representative democracy? This article identifies a schism between the protests as events and the protests as self-organisation. Whereas the protests as events remains the dominant interpretation of the protests – delivered with negative connotations by Ivan Krastev and with positive consequences by Slavoj Žizek and Alain (...) Badiou – this article will investigate the protests as self-organisation by emphasizing some of the many examples of autonomous political institution-building and creation of permanent structures of political participation, which have appeared as natural continuations of the protests. I argue that the protests as self-organisation can be seen as re-actualisations of the practices and ideals of council democracy as interpreted by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis. By interpreting the protests through the prism of council democracy, I argue that the manifold political and societal initiatives that have appeared in the wake of these protests attempt to realise a specific notion of democratic autonomy and political freedom. (shrink)