This review study is dedicated to the work of the German philosopher Wolfgang Harich. In the light of a new edition of his collected works, the author situates Harich’s work in the philosophical and historical contexts out of which it grew. The edition under discussion shows the admirable scope of Harich’s philosophical legacy – its range, erudition and originality. His uniqueness arises especially in regards to the persecutions to which he was subjected in the former GDR and from which it inter alia emerges that a great part of his work in the collected edition is being published for the first time. The study shows the main features of Harich’s thinking to be a significant contribution to the systematic development of Marxist philosophy in the 20th century and interprets them with regard to the newly made available sources, probably for the first time in the Czech environment. and Tato recenzní studie je věnována dílu německého filosofa Wolfganga Haricha. Ve světle nové edice jeho pozůstalosti zasazuje Harichovo dílo do filosofických i historických kontextů, z nichž vyrůstalo. Recenzovaná edice dokazuje obdivuhodný záběr Harichova filosofického odkazu, jeho rozsah, fundovanost i originalitu. Jeho mimořádnost vyvstává zejména vzhledem k perzekucím, jimž byl Harich vystavován v bývalé NDR a z nichž mj. vyplynulo, že větší část jeho díla v pozůstalostní edici vychází vůbec poprvé. Studie ukazuje hlavní rysy Harichova myšlení jako významný příspěvek k systematickému rozvinutí marxistické filosofie ve 20. století a vykládá je s ohledem na nově zpřístupněné prameny. V českém prostředí se tak děje pravděpodobně poprvé.
Th e paper explores a shared epistemological bias of Shklovsky’s poetics and Schmitt’s legal Dezisionismus: their privileging the singular over the ordinary. “Th e exception is more interesting than the rule,” Schmitt stated about the law in 1922. For, every legal judgment, he insisted, involves the indispensable moment of contingency insofar as it extends the same statute to diff erent and irreducibly unique situations. Shklovsky, quite similarly, endowed art with the capacity to defamiliarize our perception of reality made torpid by repetition: turning the usual into the unexpected. Both theoreticians rebelled against the Positivistic tradition in their respective fi elds. Schmitt against Kelsen’s “pure theory of law”—an autonomous science of deductively arranged norms, each deriving its validity from appropriate higher norms, down to the ultimate Grundgesetz underlying and sustaining them. “Th e basic law,” argued Schmitt pace Kelsen, is always already something supra-legal that becomes incorporated into jurisprudence only retroactively. For initially it is but the expression of an unpredictable will of a particular “sovereign” who decides to suspend an existing legal system and establishes a diff erent one. Such a coup d’état is not an act of legal nihilism but, on the contrary, a self-protecting measure intended to save the state from liquidation by its enemies. Shklovsky critiqued the validity of Spencer’s postulate, popularized in Russia by Veselovskii, that art strives to economize our mental energy. Defamiliarization, he insisted, is wasteful, but for a vital reason: to resuscitate our relationship with the surrounding world that, without this intervention, would succumb to a deadening entropy. “Only the creation of new artistic forms,” wrote Shklovsky in “Th e Resurrection of the Word,” “can return to humankind the experience of the world, resurrect things, and kill pessimism.” Like the Schmittian sovereign, then, poets destroy literature in order to preserve it. Th ey arbitrarily suspend worn-out artistic norms to inaugurate new ones capable of defamiliarizing reality afresh.
Th is text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás (Th e Košice Worker). By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper characterizes the movement’s contribution to discussions of the meaning of proletarian culture, which elaborated on the concept of social culture developed by Lukács in his radical period. An earlier version of this article, in the original Slovak and in parallel English translation, was published in Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-twenties = Košická moderna. Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia, ed. Zsófi a Kiss-Széman, (Košice: Východoslovenská galéria, 2013), pp. 84–94.