ABSTRACT
The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka died at the age of sixty-nine in a Prague hospital, on the 13th March 1977.1 The then Czechoslovakian secret police had interrogated Patočka – one of the three spokesmen for the Charta 77 movement – over a period of eleven hours. It is widely believed that his treatment at the hands of the Czechoslovak authorities triggered a brain hemorrhage that ultimately led to his death. In the days immediately after he passed away, colleagues and protégés of Patočka such as Jiři Němec, and a small number of other associates, many of whom were linked to the Czechoslovakian dissident movement, made preparations to move his written work, samizdat publications, philosophical musings and political statements out of Central Eastern Europe. Patočka’s decision to take an active role as a spokesperson in Charta 77 placed him in a dangerous position at the forefront of the Czechoslovak dissident movement, which was itself a loose and informal community of non-conformists that had emerged following the popular anti-Soviet uprising in 1968, known as the Prague Spring (Skilling 1981). By the late 1970s the group had formed a charter, primarily concerned with the protection of civil and human rights. It drew inspiration from the fact that the Czechoslovak government had ratified the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and had signed the Helsinki Declaration, both legally binding international documents. In this way Charta 77 brought together a range of dissidents who not only challenged the Soviet-sponsored Czechoslovak government, but also called for a new ‘orientation to basic human rights, to the moral dimension of political and private life’ (Patočka 1989 [1977b]: 347). Indeed both the activities of Charta 77 and the role of specific writers such as Patočka are of interest to scholars of international relations insofar as they raise questions about dissidence, rupture and continental philosophy, themes that I have tackled elsewhere (Moore 2009b).2
