The seminar is concerned with the reading of selected texts by Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, and Ladislav Hejdánek. We will focus on a set of topics which connected and at the same time divided the mentioned authors, such as power and powerlessness, freedom and political action and its relation to the so-called non-political politics.
We will also deal with Patočka’s and Havel’s concepts of “living in truth” or “living in lie” in contrast to Hejdánek’s concept of the relationship to the truth as the pure non-objectiveness as well as to Arendt’s tendency to exclude the truth from politics.