Michael Hauser (born 30 March 1972) is a Czech philosopher, educator, poet, and translator. He founded the educational association Socialist Circle, of which he was chairman until 2014 and has been a member of the leadership since 2020. He is a member of the Prague Axiomatic Circle. He is a member of the committee of the European Philosophy Festival. He focuses on transdisciplinary connections among social and political philosophy, ontology, cultural theory, and radical theology as a path to a comprehensive understanding of the present world and its possible directions. He also deals with the principles of a new socialist movement that will respond to the phenomenon of oligarchization and social and environmental crises. He draws primarily on the work of Theodor Adorno and other representatives of the Frankfurt School, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and the Czech critical philosophers Karel Kosík, Milan Machovec and others. He is the head of the Department of Civic Education and Philosophy at the Faculty of Education of Charles University. He researches at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy. He was a member of the Czech Television Council in 2014-2020.
Life
Influenced by his grandparents, CČSH pastors Naděžda Brázdilová and Jaroslav Brázdil, Hauser originally considered a spiritual path, first in the CČSH and, after his conversion to Catholicism, in the form of religious life. After high school, he entered the novitiate of the Jesuit order in 1990, but left after nine months and briefly studied at the Hussite Theological Faculty. He studied philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and defended his doctoral thesis in 2004 (Modernity and Negativity: Adorno's Concept). In 2017, he habilitated at the Faculty of Education of Charles University.
He focuses on Critical Theory, Post-Marxism, and Czech critical thinking in relation to the crisis moments of contemporary civilization and nature, and seeks new solutions. He translated Slavoj Žižek's book The Ticklish Subject, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's book Dialectic of Enlightenment and other books. He publishes in Critical Horizons, Modern Theology, Distinktion, Filosofický časopis, Filozofie, and popularizes his research through numerous public appearances and in magazines such as Open Democracy, LeftEast, and Czech journals and webs Salon (literary supplement of Právo), A2, Alarm, Deník Referendum, Argument, and Kapitál.
In 2001, he founded the educational association Socialist Circle (SOK), which seeks to develop left-wing thinking and culture through contact between philosophers, historians, sociologists, economists, and artists. The association has organized dozens of workshops and conferences and has published many books by prominent left-wing philosophers and social scientists that were not published before or after November 1989 in the Czech Republic. On its website, the association has made available a large number of texts on various topics in the fields of philosophy, political theory, sociology, economics, and cultural studies. Many of Hauser's texts are available here, including excerpts from his books.
In 2007, on the anniversary of Charter 77, he initiated the appeal We Are Citizens!,
Key concepts
The subject and death People perceive various stimuli and experience their inner states. Most of the time, they are in the space of their immediate perceptions and ideas. According to Hauser, we can reach another space in which we look at ourselves from the perspective of the experience of death as a possible negation of our being or the beings close to us. This experience can be induced by entering a suicidal space. According to Hauser, this creates radical freedom, thanks to which a person gains distance from the given order of the world and from the characteristics and ideas that this order imposes on a person. The decisive factor is whether we perform an act in this space that defies death. This "antithanatical act" is the basis of the subject in Hauser's conception. We have an experience of death that transforms our lives.
Hauser's theory of the subject differs from Žižek's conception in that it includes not only the psychosomatic level of the human being, which is the subject of psychoanalysis, but also the physical or biological level, which Hauser refers to with the Greek word "sarx". (It appears in the New Testament, for example in the Gospel of John, where Jesus' physicality is understood in this way: "And the Word became flesh" (sarx), John 1:14). Hauser follows Walter Benjamin, who writes about the "suicidal heroic passion" caused by the blocking of essential human forces, which occurs in modern artists and the proletariat. He also refers to Karel Marx´s book On suicide. According to Hauser, the subject is connected to our physical corporeality "sarx," as he elaborates in his study on Althusser and Feuerbach.
Taking into account the physical body "sarx" in its evolutionary biological nature distinguishes Hauser's conception of the subject not only from Žižek's understanding, but also from other post-Marxist or cultural constructivist concepts, such as Judith Butler's. In this way, Hauser follows Adorno and Marx, according to whom human beings are shaped not only by culture and society, but also by their natural physical characteristics.
Responsive ideas and the path out of nihilism
Hauser's concept of ideas is closely related to his antithanatical concept of the subject. Hauser specifies that the antithanatical act is not a one-off event, but rather a repetitive one. Thanks to it, the experience of death or radical negativity is maintained in the subject. According to Hauser, this experience can be understood more broadly. It occurs when we experience the death of someone close to us or encounter other forms of death. We experience it by empathizing with the suffering of other people or animals, and also by imagining ourselves in extreme situations such as war, concentration camps, strenuous athletic performance, or states of deprivation, poverty, enslavement, or exile. We maintain an experiential state within ourselves that changes our relationship to ourselves, to other people, and to the world. According to Hauser, this also changes our relationship to ideas, art, politics, and other things. We look for answers to the experience of radical negativity in them and ask whether they form its opposite. This is the possibility of identifying with something positive, intense, and even infinite or eternal.
Hauser sees this identification with "ideas" as a response to the experience of radical negativity as a way out of postmodern nihilism. In contemporary art, there are many novels and other works that express the hopelessness, anxiety, and meaninglessness of human life, as in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, or that attempt to empathize with people and nature, but there are very few works that go further and take a particular idea, ethical principle, or vision seriously.
"It is a matter of turning the whole perspective around and rediscovering how poetry or art was able to respond to the passion evoked by the destructive Night of the World. Only in this way can a return to the heights be achieved in the postmodern landscape, heights that will not appear as a binding power, but as liberation." The term "Night of the World" comes from Žižek's book The Ticklish Subject.
Hauser does not reject postmodernism as such, as he shows that the postmodern experience of the disintegration of the world, things, and subjectivity creates space for the renewal of the relationship to ideas, art, and politics. His criticism of the postmodern subject is that it is not radical enough and has not completely emptied ideas of their content. In postmodernism, ideas survive as ghosts that the subject needs to deconstruct over and over again. According to Hauser, they must be allowed to die a second time and then be resurrected.
In his books, articles, and public activities, Hauser deals with how, in an age of skepticism and nihilism, to give new and vivid meaning to key concepts in philosophy, social sciences, pedagogy, politics, art, and theology. He expresses his approach by saying that it is necessary to deal with concepts that have a bad reputation but great potential. He develops his approach to these concepts primarily through the work of Alain Badiou. Hauser focuses on the following ideas or concepts: human being, subject, truth, work of art,democracy, socialism, communism, nation, infinity, God. He examines these concepts as part of a period of transition or interregnum.
The present era as an interregnum
Hauser first conceived of the present era as a time of transition in his book Paths from Postmodernism, in which he dealt with the crisis and possible end of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and liberal democracy. He formulated the idea of the weakening and end of postmodernism at the same time as several other cultural theorists. The collection of texts Supplanting the Postmodern was published three years after the release Paths from Postmodernism. Hauser has been critical of neoliberalism and capitalism since the beginning of his public career. His first socially oriented article, entitled "Democracy in the Shadow of Capitalism," was published in Salon, the literary supplement of Právo, on 13 April 2000.
In his book Kapitalismus jako zombie (Capitalism as Zombie), he put forward the thesis that "current economic, political, and social structures are internally fractured and beyond the control not only of the public but also of those in power." His approach is close to the theory of late capitalism, which he dealt with in connection with the collapse of the welfare state.
He also wrote about the crisis of liberal democracy at the beginning of the new millennium. He pointed to the gap between the ideal of liberal democracy and its socio-political reality and understood it as a sign of its decline.
Hauser then developed a comprehensive theory of the transition period, or interregnum. According to Antonio Gramsci: "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".
Hauser presented this concept in his books Badiou's Ontology of the Present. Society, Economy and Culture in Transition and Metapopulist Democracy. Politics of Transition. He divides the interregnum into its prehistory, the first and second periods, and the upcoming third period. He focuses on three social dimensions: culture, politics, and the socio-economic level.
In Badiou's Ontology of the Present, he first focuses on the period that preceded the interregnum. He understands it, through Badiou's concepts, as a time when truth procedures were taking place and there was a notion that an emancipated classless society could be created. Artists participated in various ways in groundbreaking artistic events such as the emergence of Cubism or Abstract painting. Emancipatory politics was related in one way or another to the groundbreaking events of the Russian Revolution or other revolutions. Hauser focuses on the period in which these truth procedures are dying out. According to Badiou, the sequence of communist ideas came to an end in the late 1970s, when it became clear that nowhere had the transition from state socialism to an emancipated classless society been successful, and the hopes associated with the revolutionary stirring of May 1968 in France and with Chinese Culture Revolution had faded. In the book Revolutions for the Future. May'68 and the Prague Spring he emphasizes the significance of the Prague Spring, when society began to move towards new forms of politics and economics.