Deadline: March 15, 2024
International Conference
23-25 May 2024, University of Fribourg
Organised by SNF-Project “Communities of Dialogue: Russian and Ukrainian Émigrés in Modernist Prague”
Official Website: https://comdial.sdvigpress.org/event-100737
The relatively obscure term of “titanism” is at the heart of a complex debate involving prominent Russian and Czech intellectuals of the first third of the twentieth century. Used initially by Nikolaj Berdjaev in his Origins of Russian communism (1937, written in 1933) and by Tomáš Masaryk in his philosophical interpretations of Goethe’s Faust (Masaryk 2000 [1934]), it was taken up by literary scholar František Xaver Šalda and his student Václav Černý (1934), and again by the philosopher Jan Patočka in his critical engagement with the work of these masters (Patočka 1936). Where Masaryk saw in Goethe’s character the definitive symbolic representation of the modern “Superman” and his “egoism”, Černý objected to this identification of Faust with the Titanic Superman and insisted on the latter’s creative potential. Moreover, titanism is not limited to this specific filiation from Masaryk to Šalda, Černý, and Patočka. Rather, “The use of the word titanism in Czech is rooted in a specific Central-European aesthetic and philosophical tradition, largely based on the appropriation of German romanticism and its philosophical, social and political implications.” (James 2021, 4-5).
Continue reading “CFP: Titanism: Figures of Social and Political Subjectivity between Superman and Nation-Builder”