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Aspen Brinton, Ph.D., assistant professor of International Studies, will be giving a talk on the research for her upcoming book Confronting Totalitarian Minds: Jan Patocka on Politics and Dissidence on April 19. We caught up with her before her presentation to talk about her interest in Patocka’s work and how it helps us see present protests.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How did you find out about Patocka?
My undergraduate thesis was about the revolutions in 1989 in Eastern Europe - that was the thing that most captured my attention as a student very early on. I was reading a lot of works from the Czech Republic. Patocka was really well-known, especially through the references of Vaclav Havel, a dissident, playwright, and later the president of Czechoslovakia. Havel would often talk about how Patocka had inspired him. It was from those references of Havel’s work that I wanted to do a project looking at just the figure of Patocka because he had written lots.
Your book Confronting Totalitarian Minds is expected to be released next month. What drew you to Patocka?
The title of my book was initially going to be different Solidarity of the Shaken, which was a phrase that Patocka used to talk about a form of solidarity that had to do with coming together in small communities of those who were in vulnerable positions, usually in the context of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, nonetheless making something of that group solidarity in a way that could help transform political climates. When you talk about solidarity, you go towards another genealogical historical source – like key essays by other figures. I wanted to take this idea and introduce it into a political theory discussion to show how it can be applied to thinking about dissident movements. In this way, it is a useful lens to examine things that are going on now.
Is there a comparison between Patocka’s work and the Black Lives Matter movement?
Definitely. The premise of my book is that any kind of activism can be made richer and deeper by talking about it through Patocka’s terms. The experience and the thinking of Patocka as a person was well-informed enough that it can be applied to all kinds of issues. What you would do with that question is to say, “what is it then that's going on in Black Lives Matter in terms of the mode of solidarity it engages?” Patocka also did a lot of philosophy of history stuff, so one of the interesting things you're seeing in Black Lives Matter is the reintroduction of historical moments that were interpreted in one way at one time but are now being reinterpreted in a different way at this time. That's being used as a form of political motivation – the monuments here in Richmond, for example – and that kind of thing happened many in many different places all throughout Eastern Europe throughout the 20th century.
Was there anything that jumped out at you while researching your book?
I think what was most interesting was that I didn't expect to find resources in Patocka to talk about something that would relate so much to our contemporary situation, feeling like we're all on a ship that's going to sink. Patocka has this quote in his dissertation at the beginning of the 20th century, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem: "we are all on a ship that's going to be shipwrecked." I went back and read his dissertation and what you see there is a remarkable sense of connection between political problems, the human relationships of the natural world being in a state of crisis, that was fed into the crisis of technology and industrialization throughout the rest of the century fed the political authoritarianism that fed totalitarianism, in such a way that then perpetuated the further destruction of the environment.
Why do I sit in the archives for hours and hours and read obscure philosophical texts? I can't always answer this question but what I offer in this book will help readers see those connections.
Interview by Zachary Klosko, HRC intern
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