This joint session of the International Relations working group and the Legal and Political Theory working group features a presentation by Jitka Štollová, a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
When Mark Carney invoked Václav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" at the 2026 World Economic Forum, he confirmed what this talk argues: that Havel's best-known essay, written nearly half a century ago, remains a potent diagnostic tool for reading the present. Moving beyond the familiar image of the greengrocer, this talk recovers the essay's less cited arguments on language automatism and technological alienation. It traces them through Havel's final play, Leaving (2007), his dramatic testament to the unfinished business of 1989.
Central to the argument is Havel's insight that linguistic automatism does not vanish with regime change: one can sell one's soul just as readily through phrases and slogans in democracy as in post-totalitarianism, as the protagonist, a former Chancellor, demonstrates. The parallels Havel draws between these forms of conformity prove unexpectedly sharp today, when a war in Europe is prosecuted under the slogan of a "special military operation , waged by millions of greengrocers for whom the phrase functions exactly as Havel described: not as a statement of conviction, but as the price of being left in peace. These parallels sharpen further when applied to artificial intelligence. As an engine of linguistic predictability, AI generates the literal "most probable states" of language, perpetuating automated uniformity, efficiency, and soulless perfection at scale — the precise opposite of the "colourfulness" and improbable structures that Havel calls the aims of life .
Speaker's Bio:
Jitka Štollová is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. She has held research fellowships at Jesus College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral research on early modern constructions of tyranny and the afterlife of Richard III in seventeenth-century literary and non-literary culture. Her work spans early modern English literature, the history of the book, and the modern reception of Shakespeare. Her current project at HCAS examines how Havel's plays engage with the broader European literary canon, and what that engagement reveals about his understanding of power, language, and political resistance.
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