CONTRADICTIONS A Journal for Critical Thought 2018 /2 CONTRADICTIONS volume 2 2018 number 2 Editorial collective Barbora Černušáková, Miloš Caňko, Joseph Grim Feinberg (editor-in-chief), Roman Kanda, Ľubica Kobová, Petr Kužel, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart, Dan Swain, Jiří Růžička, Pavel Siostrzonek, Šimon Svěrák International editorial board John Abromeit (Buff alo State University), Oliver Belcher (Durham University), Jana Beránková (Columbia University), Katarzyna Bielińska-Kowalewska (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), Wojciech Burszta (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw), Ľubomír Dunaj (University of Prešov), Elżbieta Durys (University of Lodz), Ingo Elbe (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg), Juraj Halas (Comenius University, Bratislava), Peter Hudis (Oakton Community College), Michael Löwy (Centre national de la recherche scientifi que, France), Moishe Postone (in memoriam), Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University), Peter Steiner (University of Pennsylvania), Richard Sťahel (University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra), Karolina Szymaniak (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw; University of Wrocław), G. M. Tamás (Central European University, Budapest; Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna), Francesco Tava (Catholic University of Leuven), Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York), Xinruo Zhang (Peking University) Czech copyediting and proofreading Pavla Toráčová Slovak copyediting and proofreading Silvia Ruppeldtová English copyediting and proofreading Greg Evans Citation editor Jiří Nedvěd Typesetting Jana Andrlová Graphic design © Markéta Jelenová Printed by Tiskárna Nakladatelství Karolinum, Ovocný trh 3, Prague 1 Web design Karel Klouda Published in Prague as the 505th title of © Filosofi a, publishing house of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic Th is volume appears with fi nancial support from the Publishing Commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the research program Strategie AV21, “Europe and the State.” ISSN 2570-7485 ISBN 978-80-7007-558-6 Contact +420 222 220 124, kontradikce@fl u.cas.cz Website kontradikce.fl u.cas.cz CONTENTS Editorial 5 Studies Dan Swain, Justice as Fetish: Marx, Pashukanis and the Form of Justice 13 Nicole Pepperell, Beyond Reifi cation: Reclaiming Marx’s Concept of the Fetish Character of the Commodity 33 Alex Forbes, Th e European Cave: Jan Patočka and Th eo Angelopoulos’s Film Ulysses’ Gaze 57 Essays Peter Steiner, Václav Havel and the Invasion of Iraq (with Constant Reference to the Soviet-Led Occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968) 81 Norbert Trenkle, Labour in the Era of Fictitious Capital 101 Interview Alain Badiou with Jana Beránková, Communism Is a New Idea 117 Translation Robert Kalivoda, Marx and Freud 135 Material Šimon Svěrák, On “Journey to the Center of the Poem” (Th e Genesis of the Polemical Value of Imaginative Expression in the Work of Vratislav Eff enberger) 159 Vratislav Eff enberger, Journey to the Center of the Poem 173 Reviews Vikash Singh and Sangeeta Parashar (Gareth Dále, ed., Karl Polanyi: Th e Hungarian Writings) 193 Nick Evans, Babylon to Brexit: Gareth Dale’s Polanyi (Gareth Dale, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi) 200 Katarzyna Bielińska-Kowalewska (Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, Th e Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment) 205 3 Dirk Mathias Dalberg (Ivan Sviták, Th e Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World) 209 Sergio Mas Díaz, Time for a New Way of Reading Patočka? (Francesco Tava, Th e Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology, and Politics in Jan Patočka) 214 Michaela Belejkaničová (James R. Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights) 219 Neda Genova, Th e End Post-communism? (Boris Buden, Zone des Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus) 225 Report Aleš Novák, On the Conference “Two Centuries of Karl Marx” 235 In memoriam Joseph Grim Feinberg, Moishe Postone’s Anticapitalism without Shortcuts 241 About the Authors 247 Contradictions A Journal for Critical Thought Volume 2 number 2 (2018) EDITORIAL A year has passed since the fi rst volume of Contradictions went to press. While that issue appeared on the centenary of the February and October revolutions in Russia, this year sees still other relevant anniversaries: Th e centenary of the end of the First World War is also the centenary of the post-war settlement, and Poland, the Czech Republic, and (with somewhat greater ambivalence) Slovakia therefore celebrate 100 years of statehood this year, inviting at least some refl ection on how diff erent these states were, geographically, ethnically, and in political outlook from their current forms (the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as separate states, celebrate a more modest 25 years of independence, a fact generally received with more enthusiasm among Slovak political elites than their Czech counterparts). Perhaps more signifi cantly, this year also sees the 50th anniversary of 1968 – a vital year in the self-image of dissidents of all stripes. While such occasions will be dominated by establishment mythmaking, they also off er opportunities for critical reappraisal of our contemporary societies and the forces that shaped them. Th e importance of such reappraisal has only grown in the year since our last pub- lication. Various developments have made the region once again an object of concern for Western observers. Elections in the Czech Republic have seen the continued rise of anti-political billionaire Andrej Babiš alongside new parties of the far right, as well as the re-election of President Milos Zeman in a campaign dominated by hostility to immigration. In Slovakia, protests have led to the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Fico, long a dominant fi gure in Slovak politics. Political space appears to be opening for the rise of new political forces, but it remains an open question whether those who step into the void will be preferable to the old guard. Th e most recent independence day celebrations in Poland saw some of the largest far-right demonstrations in recent Euro- pean history, while the Law and Justice government has sought to criminalize attempts to discuss Polish complicity in the holocaust. A renewed Cold War-style paranoia has sought to blame Russia for political convulsions from Trump to Brexit, and the leader of the British Labour Party has been accused of being a Czechoslovak spy by a media that could not quite remember whether the latter country still existed! Th e last of these is all too typical of this coverage, which may have raised interest in the region and its politics but has done little to raise the intellectual level of its dis- cussion. Two sets of ideas dominate this discussion: Th e fi rst invokes the language of “populism,” a concept with an important history and lineage, but which is too frequently used as a catch-all that obscures the specifi c ideological and social bases of diverse 5 Contradictions phenomena. Too often, this discourse betrays a disdain for “the people” and a longing for the opportunity to simply dissolve it and elect another. Th e second dominant set of ideas involves the essentializing of East and West, in which analysis is abandoned for geopolitics and any independent politics is displaced to a battle between Russophilia and Russophobia. At worst, these two sets of ideas merge in a patronizing vision of an unreconstructed Eastern-facing populace reasserting itself against a Western-facing elite. Because neither the East nor the West as it actually exists can save us from our current predicament, it is hard to see where this leads but to despair. It is thus clearer than ever that an adequate critique of our so-called post-commu- nist present must better understand what created this present, and Contradictions, we hope, has begun carving out a space where this can happen. We aim to examine the self-understanding of the movements and forces that produced these societies: the ideals and ideologies of post-communist liberal-conservatism; of dissent; of offi cial and unoffi cial communism; of the socialist movement that gave birth to offi cial Communist movements and parties but also to their most powerful critics – in other words, of the multiple processes that gave birth to a situation, before 1989–1991, in which the idea of communism would be associated with regimes that suppressed radical socialist thought and engagement, and to a situation after 1989–1991, in which the very possibility of moving nearer to any sort of communism at all would be declared defi nitively foreclosed. When we say, therefore, that we live in an age of post-communism, this does not mean that communism once really existed as an established social system and then ceased to exist. Th e reality to which “post-communism” refers is a reality in which communism was once imaginable and then, for most people, ceased to be imaginable. Th e terms “communism” and “post-communism” are relevant to us today not because they accurately characterize two successive confi gurations of society, but because they draw attention to shifting confi gurations of the desirable and shifting conceptions of the political horizon. Th e idea of communism has been mobilized as a claim by Communist parties, and the illegitimacy or impossibility of communism has been mobilized as a counter-claim by the parties that subsequently occupied the Communists’ erstwhile seats of power. Th e problem of post-communism is a