Event Date: 23 -25 May 2013
Christopher Ingold Lecture Theatre,
Christopher Ingold Chemistry Building,
20 Gordon Street,
University College London,
London WC1H 0AJ
The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies presents:
THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE: CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY AND DISSENT FROM HAVEL TO THE PRESENT
‘This, then, is Havel’s tragedy: his authentic ethical stance has become a moralising idiom cynically appropriated by the knaves of capitalism. His heroic insistence on doing the impossible has ended up serving those who ‘realistically’ argue that any real change in today’s world is impossible.’ Slavoj Žižek
On 23 December 2011, the funeral mass of Václav Havel was celebrated with a degree of ceremony that not only commemorated his personal achievement but also signalled the end of an era. Havel’s death apparently confirmed the transformation of one of the most astonishing events in post-war Europe—the collapse of Communism—from living memory into complete historical narrative. Yet, the dramatic story of 1970s and 80s dissidents and the path to 1989—this story of private individuals helping to bring about what seemed impossible—has assumed ever greater relevance to the present.
Today, the structures that appeared to have triumphed in 1989, and in what followed, are now themselves the subjects of contestation in, inter alia, the Arab Spring, China’s Charter 08, Greek anti-austerity protests, Wikileaks and pirate parties, and the Occupy Movement. Thus, a triumphalist narrative, with its implied ‘they all lived happily ever after’, cannot provide the end to the story. Rather than a closed chapter, ‘East European dissidence’ and its conception of politics as the art of the impossible appear an open book.
This conference seeks to identify the political, cultural, and philosophical questions that underlie ‘East European dissidence’ and to consider their implications for dissent today.
Programme:
Thursday 23 May
Welcome by Tim Beasley-Murray (UCL).
Opening remarks by HE Michal Žantovský, Czech Ambassador to the United Kingdom
Dissent & the Moral Life: Legacies of Havel
Jacques Rupnik (Sciences Po) – Václav Havel and the Legacies of Dissent Revisited
Aviezer Tucker (UT Austin) – Living in Truth: Moral Authenticity as Dissent
Delia Popescu (Le Moyne) – Lived Responsibility: Václav Havel’s Practical Approach to Private and Public Responsibility
HE Martin Palouš (Knihovna Václava Havla) – The Parallel Polis Thirty Years Later: Protecting Václav Havel’s Legacy for the 21st Century
Friday 24 May
Thick Histories
Peter Bugge (Aarhus) – Zooming In: Discovering and Defining Dissent in Svědectví before 1977
Veronika Tuckerová (UT Austin) – Thoroughly Possible: Ivan Martin Jirous’s “Merry Ghetto” and its Legacy
Charles Sabatos (Yeditepe University, Istanbul) – The Erotics of Dissidence: Foreign Writers and Women in the Czech Underground
Mikołaj Rakusa-Suszczewski (Warsaw) – The NO LOGO Message: Polish Youth Against ACTA
Padraic Kenney (Indiana) – Who Controls the Square? Occupied Spaces & Democratic Transformation
Saturday 25 May
Aesthetics and Politics
Kieran Williams (Drake) – Havel’s Subversive Ohnisko
Peter Zusi (UCL) – Dissent at Rest: The Aesthetic Impulse to the Active Life
Tom Rowley (Cambridge) – Samizdat as Literary and Political Device: Evgenii Fedorov’s Deep Opposition
Tim Beasley-Murray (UCL) – Politics and Impossibility
Klara Kemp-Welch (Courtauld) – Reticence as Dissidence? An Anthology of Experimental Art in 1970s Czechoslovakia
Svetlana Boym (Harvard) – Arts of Dissent: From Sinyavsky to Pussy Riot
Closing remarks by Tim Beasley-Murray (UCL)
