A lecture by Peter Hallama (EHESS, Paris) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).
Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1 When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm Language: English
Abstract
This lecture will reconsider the growing interest in Jewish culture, religion, and history in the last decade of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia. It will focus on three aspects: generational conflicts within the Jewish community and the younger generation’s questioning of their families’ pasts and religiousness; the dissident appropriations of Jewish history and culture; and the beginning of nostalgia for “Mitteleuropa”, as opposed to the homogenizing tendencies of the Communist régime to an ideal of cultural, national, and religious heterogeneity. This lecture will therefore discuss some of the principal ways that Czech Jews and non-Jews re-defined Jewishness, and will seek to avoid a normative assessment of “virtual” Jewish identity as opposed to “authentic.”
A lecture by Karolina Szymaniak (Wrocław University) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).
Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1 When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm Language: English
Abstract
When in 1988 poet Marcin Świetlicki formulated in the now famous poem his sharp criticism of the rhetorics of cultural opposition and its possession by history, he wrote: „Instead of saying: I have a toothache, I’m/ hungry, I’m lonely (…)/ they say quietly: Wanda/ Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid,/ Józef Piłsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania/ Thomas Mann, the Bible, and at the end a little something/ in Yiddish” (trans. W. Martin). As Eugenia Prokop-Janiec has shown, in the 1980s Yiddish came to be treated as a part of the code of independent culture, and investment with it became a form of resistance. But what was this undefined „little something” and what tradition was underlying its presence in the Polish discourse? What meaning and content was it endowed with? How does this tradition bear on contemporary representations of the Jewish Polish past and the way we write the history of culture in Poland?
The talk is a discussion of existing and possible approaches to the study of Yiddish Polish cultural contacts in the 20th century, their limits, and ramifications. It is a working presentation of an on-going project. By turning to the history of Yiddish Polish cultural relations and their discourse, and interpreting them through a different lens of cultural studies, the study also seeks to think other ways of conceptualizing history of culture in Poland. An approach that includes the minority perspectives and respects their independence, and create a space where the „little something” turns into a complex polyphonic phenomenon in its own rights.
An intern seminar of CEFRES as the center welcomes its new members, post-doctoral researchers Aníbal Arregui, Thomas Mercier (CEFRES & Charles University) and Marianna Szczygielska (Czech Academy of Sciences) Venue: conference room, Na Florenci, building A, 3rd floor Language: English
2:15-3:30 Archives and Interculturality
Benedetta Zaccarello (CEFRES/CNRS), PI: an introduction of the research project and a footnote on a mission in an Indian philosopher’s archives
Thomas Mercier (CEFRES-UK): Studying the philosophical text from the standpoint of its archive: Derrida’s readings of Marxist texts in unpublished materials
Discussion
3:45-5:15 Bewildering Boar Project
Ludĕk Brož (Institute of Ethnology AV ČR & CEFRES) and Virginie Vaté (CNRS), PIs: an introduction of the TANDEM research project
Aníbal Arregui: Animating the Wild Pig: Bows and Arrows in European Ecopolitics
Marianna Szczygielska: Wild Pigs and Proud Elephants: Engendering Wildlife in Central Eastern Europe
A lecture by Enrico Lucca (Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).
Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1 When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm Language: English
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Hugo Bergman (1883-1975) have been classmates and very close friends until their first years of university. Yet, Bergman started to write on Kafka only very late in his life, dedicating to him a number of essays–both in Hebrew and in German–scattered in small journals and published in the last years of his life. By analyzing both the story and the vicissitudes of their friendship as well as Bergman’s later insights into Kafka’s work, the talk will try to get a sense of the meaning of Kafka and his figure in Bergman’s intellectual biography.
A session of the École normale supérieure European seminar Critical News (see below), in partnership with CEFRES and Charles University, with the support of Paris French Institute.
Venue: French Institute of Prague, 5th floor Time: 5:30-7:30 PM Organizers: Clara Royer, Ondřej Švec (FF UK) and Frédéric Worms (ENS Ulm) Language: English Open to public—in duplex with ENS Ulm
A debate on humanities in the post-fact era
In duplex with the ENS seminar: the presentations will be followed by debates between Paris and Prague
Speakers
Jakub Jirsa, current director of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of FF UK, and a specialist in political philosophy, the editor of the collective volume Idea university (Prague, 2015). See the thesis of his contribution.
Václav Štětka, sociologist from FSV UK and Loughborough University, director of the research group on political communication (PolCoRe), and the author of “The Rise of Oligarchs as Media Owners”, in Media and Politics in New Democracies. Europe in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford 2015); “The Powers That Tweet: Social Media as News Sources in the Czech Republic” (with R. Hladík, Journalism Studies, 2015). See the thesis of his contribution.
Ondřej Švec, philosopher from FF UK, author of the research project on Rationality and Argumentation Practices in Public Space and the editor, with J. Čapek, of the monography Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology (Routledge, 2017). See the thesis of his contribution.
Frédéric Worms, philosopher from École Normale Supérieure (Paris) where he acts as vice-director, the current director of the International Study Center of Contemporary Philosophy, is among many other books the author of 100 mots de la République (“The Republic in 100 Words”, PUF, 2017) See here the thesis of his contribution.
Argument
At a time when a large part of the population has replaced traditional media such as TV, radio and newspapers with internet forums and social networks as their first channel of information, public debates are increasingly plagued with conflicting exchanges, all the more as many political representatives now use immoderate and “excluding” speeches which do not aim at consensus but at humiliating so-called adversaries or foes. Increasing verbal and physical violences, abstention and citizens’ widespread suspicion toward political representation bear witness to the subsequent deterioration of public debates.
Such trend poses a significant challenge to the academic world as it reflects upon both new discursive analytical tools and new forms of intervention within the public space to tackle information falsehoods. The debate will focus as much on the available means to better scrutinize and understand the specific dangers of the so-called alternative truth and of simplistic arguments as on the responsibility weighing on researchers in social and human sciences as they are confronted to the dissemination of such nexus of fake news. What is the part sociologists, political scientists, historians and philosophers should play in the so-called post-fact era?
Who can deny that news have become critical and should be criticized? However, critical news raise dangerous, if not lethal issues: crisis manipulation, perverted criticism, permanent state of emergency, constant suspicion, concurrent enforcement of “breaking news” and “fake news”. This is why we need to defend a new Critique and adress the fact of critical news today:
A critique that distinguishes what is critical, and what is not;
A critique that articulates facts to their interpretation by appealing to historical, interdisciplinary and/or transnational points of view.
Critique can suffer from a national bias, but no issue can ever be analyzed as an universal, abstract situation. This is why it is not only possible, but necessary to promote an European and interdisciplinary approach to critical news.
The European Critical News Project (Actualité critique européenne) originates from the seminar “Actualité critique” seminar of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris: it gathers students and researchers and focuses on various critical topics, from politics to science to economy, society and art. The European project aims this seminar to an European level, with a special emphasis on European issues.
The European Critical News Project is supported by the Institut Francais network. It will be launched in 2018 and will be hosted in Prague, Warsaw and Rome successively, in duplex with the ENS seminar in Paris. During this first semester the “University” will not only provide a critical frame, but also act as a critical question, in more than one way: academic freedom, academic fees, student status in Europe, European university…
The Ecole normale supérieure and the Institut Francais welcome European Universities to join this network and address together, and today, the vital challenge of critical news.
Illustration:
“I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.”
Annette Wieviorka is probably one of the famous French historians on the Holocaust and a specialist of the history of Jews in France. A distinguished researcher of French National Research Center (CNRS), she just published 1945, la découverte (Le Seuil, 2017), dealing with the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps in April and May 1945 by the Allies through the testimonies of two war reporters. Among her books translated into English, one will read her groundbreaking The Era of the Witness (Cornell, 2006), along with Auschwitz Explained to My Child (Marlowe & Co, 2002). She talks about her personal trajectory in a series of interviews conducted by Séverine Nikel published in French under the title L’heure d’exactitude (2011). Annette Wieviorka will give her insight on the figure of the witness at the time of WWII during her lecture in Prague.
Venue: Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, Nám. J. Palacha, room 200 Horaires : 5:30-7:30 Organizers: Kateřina Čapková, Clara Royer and Milan Žonca Partners: CEFRES, Prague Center for Jewish Studies (FF UK) and the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. With the support of the French Institute of Prague Language: French with simultaneous translation in Czech
