ON VIOLENCE: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Polish Academy of Sciences Department of Philosophical Anthropology and Social Philosophy
invites to the workshop:

ON VIOLENCE: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
Warsaw, May 12th
Staszic Palace, Nowy Świat 72, Room 154

PROGRAM:
12:00-13:00
Ludger Hagedorn – Patočka: Arendt on Violence
13:00-13:15
Coffee break
13:15-14:30
Andrzej Leder – You Cannot Contain Violence…
Vlasta Kordova – From Legal Change to a “Fighting Administration”: Arendt, the “Objective Enemy,” and the Transformation of the Police into a Central Instrument of the Totalitarian State
14:30-14:45
Coffee break
14:45-16:00
Tomáš Korda – Violence as the Absence and Emergence of Mediation: Punishment, the Slap, and War in Hegel
Andrzej Gniazdowski – Legitimate Violence in Light of Max Scheler’s War Writings
16:00-16:15
Coffee break
16:15-16:50
Peter Šajda – Political and Existential Modes of Preventing Absolute Enmity: Reconsidering Carl Schmitt
16:50-17:00
Closing of the Workshop

SPEAKERS:

Ludger Hagedorn is a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), Head of the Patočka Archive and Program. He studied Philosophy and Slavic Languages in Berlin at the Technical University (TU) and the Free University (FU). He obtained his doctoral degree from TU Berlin in 2002. For many years he has been actively involved in Patočka-Research at the IWM, where he was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 1997 and later became a Research Associate and Research Director. From 2005 to 2009, Hagedorn was holder of the Purkyne-Fellowship awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences. As a lecturer, he has worked at Gutenberg-University Mainz and, for a number of years, at Charles University in Prague. He has also been a Guest Lecturer at Södertörns Högskola (Stockholm) in 2010 and in recent years at NYU Berlin. He recently published, a.o., „Jan Patočka, Europa und Nach-Europa”. Freiburg: Alber, 2024 (Hrsg. Ludger Hagedorn und Klaus Nellen); “Faith in the World. Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt”, Frankfurt am Main, Chicago: Campus, Chicago University Press, 2021 (co-edited with Rafael Zawisza).

Andrzej Leder — a professor of philosophy, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences—works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a graduate of the Medical University of Warsaw and the University of Warsaw, where he studied philosophy. He completed his residency in psychiatry. His publications include, a.o., „The Sleepwalking Revolution: Exercises in Historical Logic”, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warsaw 2014 (German translation: “Polen im Wachtraum. Die Revolution 1939–1956 und ihre Folgen,” Fibre, Osnabrück 2019); “A Crack in the Mirror. Theory in the Psychoanalytic Field,” PWN Scientific Publishing House, Warsaw 2016; “Once Upon a Time There Was Postmodernism… Six Essays on the End of the 20th Century,” IFiS PAN, Warsaw 2018; “Economics Is a State of Mind. An Exercise in the Semantics of Economic Languages,” Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House, Warsaw 2023.

Vlasta Kordova’s research examines Nazi security doctrine and the transformation of the SS and police apparatus from preventive terror into a reactive instrument for suppressing resistance across occupied territories. The book version of her doctoral thesis will be published by Bloomsbury Academic. She studied history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. She has held several international fellowships, including the Jan Patočka Junior Fellowship, the Simon Wiesenthal Junior Fellowship, and a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Holocaust Studies (Munich). She is the author of two monographs and several peer-reviewed articles. Kordová is currently a University Assistant at the Department of East European Studies at the University of Vienna, where she works on the project “From Ghettos to Gated Communities?”, examining urban security, exclusion, and property control in Central Europe.

Tomáš Korda is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg. He received his PhD from Charles University in 2022 with a dissertation titled Hegel and Post-Communism, which is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing. His research examines the contemporary relevance of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy in relation to debates on post-communism, the ecological crisis, and international conflict. He has held several research fellowships in Germany and Austria and has presented his work internationally, including in Bonn, Coimbra, and Barcelona. He edited a special issue on Hegel for the Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence. His published work includes “Outlining Hegel’s Theory of International Relations” in Idealistic Studies and “Nuclear Power in Times of International Insecurity and Environmental Crisis” in Filozofia (Slovak Academy of Sciences). His forthcoming publications include “Burnt by the Enlightenment?” in Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses in Bonn and “Is the Whole Untrue? The Moral Moment of War or Toward a Critique of Adorno’s Reading of Hegel” in Filosofický časopis. He is currently developing a Hegelian theory of international relations.

Andrzej Gniazdowski is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specializes in the history of ideas, political philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. He is currently conducting a research project titled “The Phenomenology of the State: A Critical-Historical Introduction.” His publications include, among others, „The Polish Behemoth: Critical-Political Essays”, Warsaw, 2018; „Antinomies of Radicalism: Political Phenomenology in Germany”, 1914–1933, Warsaw 2015 (published in Polish). He recently co-authored, with Pavel Barkouski the book „The Awakening of Belarus: Studies in the Phenomenology of Revolution” (Polish and Belarusian editions), Warsaw 2025. Co-translator of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche into Polish.

Peter Šajda is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on anthropological, socio-political, and religious issues, which he examines against the background of the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Buber, Schmitt and Jünger. He collaborates with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, where he serves as an editor of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. He is the author of the monographs Buber’s Polemic with Kierkegaard: On the Relation of Religion to Ethics and Politics (2013) The Kierkegaard Renaissance: Philosophy, Religion, Politics (2016) and Existence between Conflict and Humanity: Philosophy of Existence and the Conservative Revolution (2021), all published in Slovak. He is the editor of the anthologies Modern and Postmodern Crises of Symbolic Structures: Essays in Philosophical Anthropology (Brill, 2021) and Affectivity, Agency and Intersubjectivity (L’Harmattan, 2012). He has translated works by Kierkegaard and Buber into Slovak.

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