In 1963 Karel Kosík, a Czech neomarixt philosopher, published his trailblazing book, Dialectics of the Concrete. Both Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers were impacted in Czechoslovakia and throughout the world. The Institute of Philosophy hosted an international conference to explore Kosik’s seminal work in breadth and depth. In his book, Kosík strove to re-think the basic concepts of the Marxist philosophical tradition and to employ them in analyzing social reality. The wide array of issues he explored are still relevant today. Included are mystification of the "pseudo-concrete"; the social role of art; the conception of reality as a concrete totality; the conception of the human being as an onto-formative being (i.e., one that forms human and extra-human reality in its totality); the systematic connection between labor and temporality; the relationship between praxis and labour and the explanatory power of the dialectical method. This conference took place July 4-6, 2014 at Villa Lanna. and Jan Mervart.
The essay attempts to rethink the relationships between styles, publics, and politics, as well as the position of intellectuals in it. Any writing, even in the most private form of a diary, as an example from the George Orwell’s novel 1984 shows, is addressed to a public. Paradoxically, the public only exists, as Warner asserts, by virtue of its own address. In this sense, style does perform a political function. However, the critics of the opaque writing of some leftist academics overlook that the public can have a temporal span into the future when they view it only horizontally in terms of its size and deduce the political efficacy of writing on that account. The confusion of the public with citizens in general leads to the undermining of politics by the headline temporality of journalistic publics. Aspirations of some academics for the role of public intellectuals are faced with the fact that for the most part there are currently no conditions for public circulation between these spheres. As a possible counterweight, Warner recalls the approach of Michel Foucault, not merely as a reminder of how it relocated the limits of the political, but also in order to suggest how the path between intellectual work and politics could be bridged by the method of “problematization”: the development of a domain of acts and practices on the scene of a tentative counterpublic., Michael Warner, z angličtiny přeložil Radim Hladík., Tento překlad je kapitolou vybranou z díla Publics nad Counterpublics (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2002, str. 125-158, and Obsahuje bibliografii