Havel's Liberal Agonism

chapter 7 Havel’s Liberal Agonism

Václav Havel never formally set out a cohesive political philosophy; however, this book is presenting Havel’s thought as constituting a coherent, cohesive, and unique kind of liberalism, which builds on the philosophy of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan Patočka, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger – a liberalism that I have termed liberal agonism. This chapter will spell out liberal agonism as a political philosophy and test it against what I see as the main strand of agonism, that of Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe is a good counterpoint to this discussion because she is highly critical of liberalism, and the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. I mention Habermas because my reading of Havel has him advocating a politics created through discourse, hence Habermas implicitly looms large over the discussion. I agree with many of the criticisms of Haber- mas made by Mouffe, and think that Havel would as well. However I see Havel as remaining faithful to the principles of individual liberty. Hence the kind of liberalism espoused by Havel is interesting; it focuses specifically on a critical re-evaluation of one’s positions. Therefore the agonistic element is a self agonism, which makes a very different political agonism then that of Mouffe, which revels in an agonistic display of hegemonic ideological creations of identity. Making this distinction between Havel and Mouffe will be a key busi- ness of this chapter. In my reading, Havel’s position is something more than a standard liberal view on re-evaluation and deliberative process because at no point does he contend that a consensus can actually be reached. With attention directed to evaluation, rather than the results of evaluation and without abandoning a liberal position, I see Havel’s liberalism as fundamentally agonistic. Living in truth is therefore a self agonism which requires a liberal state with certain flourishing social institutions. Liberal agonism does not share the drive for consensus which is key to the deliberative democracy of Habermas, nor does it share Mouffe’s concern with revealing the hegemonic struggles that create identity, insofar as for Havel, the point is to resist these forces.

What is Liberal Agonism?

I am well aware that I am using Havel’s thoughts here rather than simply relay- ing them. I do find a cohesive liberal argument throughout Havel’s work that

Havel’s Liberal Agonism 151 shows that I am using Havel’s thoughts in a way that is true to his writing. Were Havel to have sat down and worked out a systematic expression of his political philosophy, I believe it would have looked like the liberal agonism I am going to spell out. A key insight of Havel’s political thought implicit in his writings is that agonism without self-interrogation is problematic. Hence the central locus of any agonism is the self. For Havel, the best kind of state for allowing and encourag- ing individual’s to self-interrogate is a liberal state. Therefore liberal agonism is a state that allows, celebrates and encourages individual liberty to investigate what existential identities should be expressed and acted upon by individuals through a process of self-interrogation. Havel has an interesting understanding of the self which I have pointed out in previous chapters. Building on Patočka’ asubjective phenomenology, Havel’s self is revealed in the search for it. The self is not the transcendental subject of phenomenology, the self is the asubjective self which exists as an always his- torical being, but also as a part of Being. Agonism is the process that reveals the self to the self, even if only partly or temporarily. In other words, the subject is known in the search for it – not as the result of a transcendental deduction, but in revealing it in its interactions in the world, through its actions in the public sphere. In other words, the self is process based. I want to consider a passage from To the Castle and Back as a primer to a discussion of liberal agonism. It sets the tone of self-critique and existential honesty as necessary conditions for progress.

The beauty of language is that it can never capture precisely what it wants. Language is disconnected, hard, digital as it were, and for that reason, but not only for that reason, it can never completely capture something as connected as reality, experience or our souls. This opens the door to the magnificent battle for expression and self-expression that has accompanied man down through history. It is a battle without end, and thanks to it, everything that is human is continually being elucidated, each time somewhat differently. Moreover, it is in this battle that man in fact becomes himself. As an individual and as a species. He simply tries to capture the world and himself more and more exactly through words, im- ages, or actions, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself, nor any part of the world. But that drives him to keep trying, again and again and thus he continues to define himself more and more exactly. It’s a Sisyphean fate.1

1 Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007), 347.