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The Wording of Thoughts. Philosophy from the Standpoint of its Manuscripts and Archives

International Conference

Organizers: Benedetta Zaccarello (CNRS-CEFRES) and Thomas C. Mercier (CEFRES / FHS UK)
When & Where: 7-9 June 2018 at the French Institute of Prague, 5th Floor, Štěpánská 35, 110 00 Prague 1
Partners: FHS UK, The Jan Patočka Archive, FLÚ AV ČR, ITEM (CNRS-ENS), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Wittgenstein Archives at Bergen University, with the support of the French Institute in Prague and the program PARCECO of the MENESR

The conference will comprise four sections:

  1. Archive (Hi)stories: Thinking Theory through Authors’ Manuscripts.
  2. Archives in the digital age.
  3. What archives do to philosophy: methodologies in editing and interpreting.
  4. The Political Implications of Archives and their Conservation.

The afternoon session of the first day (7th June) will be dedicated to Jan Patočka and his archives.

See the program below
Abstract

The international conference “The Wording of Thoughts: Philosophy from the Standpoint of its Manuscripts and Archives” aims to establish a dialogue between experts of different archival corpuses coming from various countries and continents, so as to sketch methodological lines and to build a pioneer network focused on philosophical archives. Philosophy is written, practiced, lived through: it is the translation of the experience of a thinking subjectivity in a conceptual alphabet and a verbal fabric. The “making of a philosophical text”, including its cultural features and societal contingencies, challenges the representation of the discipline’s history as a series of abstract findings and innovative intuitions that constitute the landmarks of our paradigms. The philosopher who writes is the first inclined to erase the complex intricacies of the negotiations between existence and theory, between conceptual inventiveness and shared vocabulary inherited from a centuries-old tradition. Yet it is obvious that the dynamics of philosophy production and reception are a complex phenomenon whose writing nature is a crucial stake.

For all these reasons, the philosophical manuscript is an odd object that has only recently started to receive proper appraisal. In Europe, nevertheless, the creation of archive centres gathering major philosophical data has sustained the memory of philosophical writing and enabled such “arches” to cross time. It is beyond doubt that accessing these archives often enables to better understand the appearance, the method, the approach and even the sources, along with the polemical targets and the hints that published books tend to excise or dim. Moreover, in exploring the history of several philosophical archives and their rooting in specific social and cultural contexts, we aim to appreciate the role of such archival materials and their importance so as to develop new approaches to philosophical studies, including the history of philosophy and the exegesis of theoretical thought.

 

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May 68 Cycle Prague/Berlin – West Winds, East Winds

Venue & time: Marc Bloch Center (Germaine Tillion room, 7th floor, Friedrichstr. 191, Berlin), from 10 to 5:30 pm
Organizers: Catherine Gousseff (Marc Bloch Center – CMB), Sylvie Robic (Nanterre University), Clara Royer (CEFRES), Dominique Treilhou (French Institute in Berlin)
Partenaires : CMB, French Institute in Berlin, Paris-Nanterre University and CEFRES
Languages: French, German and English

This conference takes place within the May 68 Cycle taking place in Nanterre, Berlin and Prague, which centers around conferences, round tables, exhibitions and screenings dedicated to the year  1968.

From the Berlin February demonstration against US involvement in the Vietnam War, through the March student protests in Poland and the  student unrest in Italy, to Prague Spring or French May ’68, a insurgent spirit swept across the European continent in 1968. The chronicle of the events that shook in different ways European societies, suggests the existence of a rebellious impetus that ignored the Iron Curtain and defied the various political regimes in place. The 1968 new generation held a common ground as they dared asserting their aspirations, upsetting the established order. Still, the diversity of protest configurations, whether speaking of the actors engaged in them or of the political answers prompted by the events, calls for a confrontation of these historical moments which, caught between celebration and tragedy, have become engraved in collective memory.

On the 15th of May, witnesses of 1968 from various parts of Europe  will speak about the expectations they had then.
The next day, on the 16th of May, the conference will propose a reflection between East and West through the gathering of specialists on three major topics: violences in 1968, the emergence of women’s movements and the birth of alternative cultures.
What disparities, what common trends can be perceived in the rebellious spirit of 1968?
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The Rhetorics of Affective Life: Stirring, Understanding and Naming Emotions

The first international conference organized in the frame of the VOICE excellency research center by the Institute of Romance Studies and the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, in celebration of Charles University’s new membership within the Agence universitaire de la francophonie. The conference has received the patronage of Roland Galharague, Ambassador of France in the Czech Republic.

Date & Venue: 1-2 December, Faculty of Arts, room 300(náměstí Jana Palacha 2, Prague 1)
Language: French
Partners : FF UK, VOICE, CEFRES, French Institute in Prague, French Embassy in the Czech Republic, Agence universitaire de la francophonie, University of Cambridge, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, École Normale Supérieure in Lyon,  Paris-Sorbonne University, University of Paris X-Nanterre, Reims Champagne-Ardenne University, University of Clermont-Auvergne, University of Limoges, University of Picardie Jules Verne, Masaryk University (Brno).
See also the website of the conference.

Twenty-one scholars in philosophy, literary studies and art history will tackle the topic of “emotions”, their sources, expression, transmission and conceptualization. Papers will be grounded in French-written literature and philosophy from all around the world, from Renaissance to today.

Program

Friday 1 December

8:30-9 am Opening Remarks  (Faculty of Arts, room 300)

9-10:30 am
Panel I: Philosophy I
Discussant: Ondřej Švec

  • Denis KAMBOUCHNER (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): L’héritage cartésien dans les théories modernes des émotions
  • Pierre-François MOREAU (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon):
    Politique des affects

Coffee break

10:45-12:45 am
Panel II: Philosophy II
Discussant: Chiara Mangozzi

  • Ian JAMES (University of Cambridge): Affectivité, sens et affects : les émotions comme articulation de la vie biologique
  • Véronique Le RU (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne):
    Individuation et affects : les rythmes de l’empathie
  • Ondřej ŠVEC (Charles University): L’historicité radicale des émotions

1-2 pm
Lunch break

2:30-6 pm
Panel III: French literature of the 17th and 18th century
Discussant: Catherine Ébert-Zeminová

  • Záviš ŠUMAN (Charles University) : Catharsis : essai de légitimer la fiction théâtrale au XVIIe siècle en France
  • Camille Guyon-Lecoq (Université de Picardie Jules Verne) :
    Sensibilité à la douleur et compassion chez Robert Challe voyageur : de l’expérience de l’attendrissement à une réflexion sur la nature humaine
  • Céline BONHERT (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne):
    Émotion et décision dans les livrets de Philippe Quinault : la tragédie en musique et les passions du prince
  • prof. Jean-Louis HAQUETTE (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne): “Notre âme est un tableau mouvant”. Énergétique des émotions et puissance de l’image chez Diderot

Saturday 2 December

9-11 am
Panel IV: French literature of the 19th century
Discussant: Jovanka Šotolová

  • Pascale AURAIX-JONCHIÈRE (Université Clermont-Auvergne) :
    L’expression des émotions, un paradigme structurel dans les nouvelles de Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
  • Cécile GAUTHIER (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne) :
    Barbarie, émotion et altérité : les affects “excessifs” de la slavité fin-de-siècle
  • Eva VOLDŘICHOVÁ BERÁNKOVÁ (Charles University) :
    La valeur cognitive des passions dans “le système symboliste”

Coffee break

11:15-1:15 pm
Panel V: Literature of the 20th century – theoretic approaches
Discussant: Clara Royer

  • Alexandre GEFEN (Université paris IV-La Sorbonne): Le tournant affectif des études littéraires : bilan et perspectives
  • Anne-Élisabeth HALPERN (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne): “Cette émotion appelée poésie” (Reverdy)
  • Sylviane COYAULT (Université Clermont-Auvergne): Article 353 du code pénal de Tanguy Viel, ou la tenson entre la loi et les affects

1:30-2:30 pm
Lunch break

3-5 pm
Panel VI: Post-colonial and diaspora literature I
Discussant: Eva Voldřichová Beránková

  • Petr KYLOUŠEK (Masaryk University): Ariel et Caliban : double discours de la diaspora haïtienne de Montréal
  • Chiara MENGOZZI (CEFRES, Université Charles): Aux frontières de l’humanité: (in)efficacité de l’empathie et de l’expérience esthétique
  • Jean-Michel DEVÉSA (Université de Limoges) : L’Amère Souffrance des enfants de la (post)colonie

Coffee break

5:15-6:45 pm
Panel VII:  Post-colonial and diaspora literature II
Discussant: Milena Fučíková

  • Petr VURM (Masaryk University): 1984-2084. Faux-semblants révélés, émotions refoulées : les émotions à l’âge totalitaire chez George Orwell et Boualem Sansal
  • Vojtěch ŠARŠE (Charles University): La manifestation collective du sentiment de la tristesse dans l’Afrique romanesque

Acts of Justice, Public Events: World War II Criminals on Trial

This conference originates from the encounter of three projects: a Russian-French project on trials in the USSR (FMSH/RGNF), the micro-project of the Labex Création, Arts, Patrimoines ‘Images de la justice”, and the WW2CRIMESONTRIAL1943-1991 project supported by the French National Research Agency.

Find out more about the ANR project “Nazi War Crimes in Court” here

Partners: CEFRES, March Bloch Center, CERCEC, CEFR, GDR “CEM” and CERHEC
Time & Venue: 12-14 Octobre 2017, CEFRES, Prague
Language: English

Read the call for papers here

Program

Thursday 12 October 

9.00 Opening Remarks

Media narratives and their reception
9.30-11.30 
Panel I: Mediatization As a Turning Point: Attractive Features & Risks 
Discussant: Françoise Mayer

  • Ornella Rovetta: Judging War Criminals in the 1920s: A Pioneering Precedent in Making Post-War Justice Visible?
  • Radu Stancu: Capital Punishment for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in Romania after World War II
  • Enrico Heitzer: The “Norwegians”: a Nearly Forgotten Group of German and Austrian Nazi and War Criminals in Front of Soviet Courts 1946/47

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel II: Fixed Components of Media Narrative and Its Consequences 
Discussant: Dimitri Astashkin

  • Alexander Epifanov: Information Support to Trials over Hitler’s War Criminals and Accomplices in the USSR in 1941–1956
  • Elena Kokkoken: Pskov Regional Press: The Trials over Russian Collaborators
  • Marie-Bénedicte Vincent: Ernst Kaltenbrunner in the Trial of Nuremberg: Which Reception in the Press Under Military Control of Occupied West Germany?

Lunch Break

Social Mobilisation and Justice
3.00-5.00
Panel III: Sparking off social commitment
Discussant: Audrey Kichelewski

  • Agnieszka Smelkowska: Revenge and justice on display: rehabilitacja in post-war Poland
  • Gabriel Finder: Jews, Poles, and Justice in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
  • Nadège Ragaru: Differentiated Publicity: The Sandglass of the (In-) visibilization of the Trials for Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria (1944-1945)

Friday 13 October
Social Mobilization and Justice 

9.30-11.30
Panel IV: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (1)
Discussant: Vanessa Voisin

  • Natalia Aleksiun: Survivor Networks and the Polish Post-War Trials
  • Giovanni Focardi, Andrea Martini: Shadows and lights in Trials against Fascists: Transitional Justice in Italy (1943-1953)
  • Maxilimian Becker: Victims’ Unions’ Reception of Trials: The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965

Coffee Break

11.45-1.15
Panel V: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (2)
Discussant: Emilia Koustova

  • Máté Zombory: Arrow Cross atrocities on trial: the public trajectory of a key witness in Budapest (1945-1949)
  • Birte Klarzyk, Anne Klein: Dynamics and Multiperspectivity of Justice: The “FFDJF” and the “Lischka Trial” of Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn in Cologne, 1979/80

Lunch Break

1.50-2.30
Film projection: The Victims Accuse (Moscow/Minsk, 1963). Commented by Jasmin Söhner and Vanessa Voisin

2.40-4.40
Panel VI: The Limits of Social Mobilization
Discussant: Alain Blum

  • Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva: Soviet citizens write to the press and to the general prosecutor: the reception of the Kacherovski trial in Riga (1959)
  • Regina Kazyulina: The Contingency of Postwar Justice in the Crimean Countryside
  • Andrea Pető: Post WWII Trials and Perpetrators in Hungarian Cinema. The Missing Composure

Saturday 14 October
Transnational Justice in Postwar Europe

9.30-11.30
Panel VIII: Reception of Propaganda and Political Fallout
Discussant: Clara Royer

  • James Ryan: Ideology on Trial: Ideology on Trial: The Prosecution of Leftists and Pan-Turkists at the Dawn of the Cold War in Turkey, 1944-1947
  • Fabien Théofilakis: The Eichmann Trial (1961) on the Front Page”: How did the Western European Press deal with the Nazi Past?
  • Jasmin Söhner: Presenting unambiguous results: the case of Erwin Schüle

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel IX: Media Impact on Judicial Procedures
Discussant: Sylvie Lindeperg

  • Steven Remy: The Visual Politics of Infamy: The Malmedy Massacre Trial and its Aftermath
  • Kateřina Králová: In the Shade of Eichmann: Prosecution of Max Merten in Greece and Beyond
  • Vojtěch Kyncl: Judicial scandal in the “Malloth” process

1.45-2.45: Concluding Remarks

Tracing the Legacies of the Roma Genocide: Families as Transmitters of Experience and Memory

When: 20–21 September 2017
Where: Czech Academy of Sciences, Villa Lanna, Prague
Language: English

The conference is a joint event bringing together two recent academic initiatives focusing on the research on the history of the Roma and supporting new approaches in the field: the Prague Forum for Romani Histories and the Research network on ‘Legacies of the Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945’, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC, United Kingdom). Both initiatives aim at fostering a debate on the history of Roma as part of European history and contemporary European society.

Find the program of the conference here!

See the flyer and the program here.

More on the Prague Forum for Romani Histories

Conference: New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism

European Association of Jewish Studies Conference, Prague

Date & Place: from 23 to 25 May 2017, Villa Lanna, Prague
Language: English
Organizers: Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences), Kamil Kijek (Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław), Stephan Stach (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Program

23 May 2017 

20.00 –20.30 Oleg Zhidkov (Jerusalem): The Jewish Movement in the USSR: New Sources and Perspectives (Video Testimonies)

24 May 2017 

9.00 Welcome

9.15–11.00 Panel I – Jewish Life, Religious Practise and Folklore under Soviet Communism (I)

Chair: Ilana Miller (Chicago/Prague)

  • Valery Dymshits (St Petersburg), The Boundaries of Illegal: Religious Practices and Shadow Economy in Soviet Jewish Life
  • Victoria Gerasimova (Omsk), The Jewish Community of Omsk under the Soviets, from 1940 to the 1960s: Between Tradition and Survival
  • Diana Dumitru (Chişinău), ‘It is Better to Live in Romania Than in the Soviet Union’: How Bessarabian Jews Tried and Frequently Failed to Become Soviet Citizens during Late Stalinism

11.00–11.15 Coffee break

11.15–13.00 Panel II – Literature and Jewish Identity

Chair: Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Warsaw)

  • Daria Vakhrushova (Düsseldorf), The Utopia of Yiddish Literature after the Revolution
  • Magdalena Ruta (Krakow), Nusekh Poyln and the ‘New Jewish Man’: The Image of the Jewish Communist in Yiddish Literature of Post-war Poland
  • Gennady Estraikh (New York), Soviet Yiddish Cultural Diplomacy, from the 1950s to 1991

13.00–14.00 Lunch

14.00–15.45 Panel III – Paths of Integration/Disintegration into the Communist Political System and Society

Chair: Michal Kopeček (Prague)

  • Galina Zelenina (Moscow), ‘Po Kurskoi, Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge’: Jewish Private Life in the Moscow Oblast between Leisure, Underground Religion, and National Revival
  • Agata Maksimowska (Warsaw), Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan
  • Kateřina Čapková (Prague), Centre and Periphery: Jewish Experience in Communist Czechoslovakia

15.45–16.15 Coffee break

16.15–18.00 Round table: The Diversity of Jewish Experiences under Communism

Chair: Marcos Silber (Haifa)

  • Zvi Gitelman (Ann Arbor)
  • Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Warsaw)
  • Bożena Szaynok (Wrocław)
  • Andrea Pető (Budapest)
25 May 2017 

9.00–10.45 Panel IV – Jewish Identities and Ways of Life under Communism

Chair: Stephan Stach (Prague)

  • Anna Shternshis (Toronto), ‘I was not like everyone else’: Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot of 1953
  • Anna Koch (Southampton), ‘After Auschwitz you must take your origin seriously’: Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Emerging German Democratic Republic
  • Kata Bohus (Frankfurt am Main), The Opposition of the Opposition: New Jewish Identities in the Samizdat of Late Communist Hungary

10.45–11.15 Coffee break

11.15–13.00 Panel V – Jewish Religious Life and Folklore under Soviet Communism II

Chair: Raphael Utz (Jena)

  • Ella Stiniguță (Cluj-Napoca), Mountain Jews and the Challenges of Ritual Life in the Soviet Caucasus
  • Mikhail Mitsel (New York), Jewish Religious Communities in Ukraine, 1945–81
  • Karīna Barkane (Riga), Beyond Assimilation: Jewish Religious Communities in the Latvian SSR

13.00–14.30 Lunch

14.30–15.45 Panel VI Jewish Transnational Encounters

Chair: Katrin Steffen (Hamburg)

  • David Shneer (Boulder), East Germany’s Jews, Their Transnational Networks, and East German Anti-Fascism
  • Eliyana R. Adler (State College/Warsaw), Strange Bedfellows: The Soviet Red Cross, Polish Jewish Refugees, and the American Joint Distribution Committee

15.45–16.15 Coffee break

16.15–17.45 Concluding Round Table

Chair: Kamil Kijek (Wrocław/Prague)

  • Audrey Kichelewski (Strasbourg)
  • Elissa Bemporad (New York)
  • Arkadi Zeltser (Jerusalem)

The experience of the Jews under the Communist régimes of east-central and eastern Europe has been a hotly debated topic of historiography since the 1950s. Until the 1980s, Cold War propaganda exerted a powerful influence on most interpretations presented in articles and books published on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Moreover, most works focused both on the relationship between the régime and the Jews living under it and on the role of the Jews in the Communist/Socialist movements and the political events connected with the rise of antisemitism and emigration.

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