Tamara Cărăuş

The project “Democracy and Dissent: From Czech Dissidence to Radical Democracy” examines the political philosophy of a Czech philosopher and dissident, Jan Patočka, founder and spokesperson of Charta 77. The assumption of this research project is that Patočka’s political thought, as captured in concepts like “breaking-through” and “permanent questioning”, provides a philosophical account on the conditions of disagreement, dissent, contestability, comparable to those elaborated by contemporary theorists of radical democracy (especially E. Laclau, Ch. Mouffe, J. Ranciere, W. Connolly, B. Honig).
The project analyzes the elements from Patočka’s philosophy outlining a post-foundational and post-metaphysical political philosophy: “negative Platonism”, “the birth of the political”, “breaking-through”, “problematicity”, «polemos» and others. The comparison of Patočka’s political thought and theories of radical / agonistic democracy shows that the political philosophy of the Czech philosopher contains the main aspects of agonistic democracy: the difference between politics and the political, the primacy of the political, the emergence of political subjectivity and the rethinking of politics starting from the irreducibility of conflict. At the same time, Patočka’s political philosophy differs from theories of agonistic democracy, given its combination of apparently incompatible perspectives of a radical non-foundational politics and a classical ethics of the “care for the soul”. Therefore, the main purpose of the project is to elaborate, from the perspective of theories of radical democracy, an adequate framework for interpretation and analysis of the interplay between Patočka’s radical politics and classical ethics. This interplay reveals several new aspects of Patočka’s political philosophy: the emergence of democratic subjectivity in the experience of «breaking-through», the democratic identification (with a community) in the experience of permanent questioning, and a non-teleological democratic perfectionism in the “care for the soul” and “breaking-through”. Finally, Patočka’s «Two Charta 77 texts» will be analyzed in the light of the new interpretation of Patočka’s political theory as an instance of democracy and dissent.