Agnes Heller, free figure of the Hungarian opposition

Three times, the future philosopher Agnes Heller (1929-2019) was aligned with her mother on the banks of the Danube, in the “international ghetto” of Budapest, by the Arrow Cross, the pro-Nazi fascists, in power in Hungary in 1944- 1945. Faced with the certain defeat of the III^e Reich, these auxiliaries of the Germans had undertaken to shoot all the surviving Jews before the arrival of the Soviets. Three times the executors stopped without explanation before reaching the two women. Agnes Heller, who recounts this episode in her autobiography, ­The Value of Chance. My life (Shores, 2020)confides not to have been afraid, planning to jump into the water, when the time comes, but to have drawn from it a phobia of the bridges erected on this river, which it will take decades to overcome. “A good psychologistshe says, told me that he couldn’t help me, that only I could. And indeed I succeeded. »

Extensive reflection on modernity

This traumatic memory concentrates two essential traits that sum up the personality of this energetic woman, whose existence took place in very dark times: the tragedy of totalitarianism and the continued confidence in human reason, in order to resist it. By receiving the Wallenberg Medal in 2014 (named after the Swedish diplomat who undertook to save the Jews of the Hungarian capital and died in Soviet jails), she links these two aspects, with the weapon of her unfailing humor and her sense of provocation, when she asserts that“there is only autobiographical philosophy. Philosophy is nothing but the expression of our time in concepts. » In her Memoirs, she attributes her vocation as a philosopher to the creeping Stalinization of Hungary at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. “Because we could no longer talk about politics, we had to do it in another way”, she says ironically. But his work cannot be reduced to the circumstances in which he was born.

For Agnes Heller indeed leaves behind her a considerable philosophical work, although better received and translated in Italy than in France. The hope of amending Marxism and making socialist regimes more livable, long nurtured by the philosopher, inspired the “Eurocommunists” of the Peninsula, who soon opened up to her work, intervening in her favor with the Hungarian authorities. when they harassed this “revisionist”. Today, her thought imposes itself as a vast reflection on modernity, totalitarianism and political liberalism, which she ended up judging unsurpassable after her long companionship with Marxism under the leadership of the philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs (1885-1971), of which she was the assistant.

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