Carl Cederberg's subproject focuses on a philosopher with his origin in Central Europe, who

in the late 20th century was perhaps the one who developed the most interesting reflections on the European heritage: Jan Patočka.

In the philosophical tradition following Kant and Hegel, Europe has been associated to the notion of universality. Europe, says Hegel, and later also Paul Valéry and Edmund Husserl, is the region that claims as its particularity to have established mankind’s relation to the universal. This seemingly paradoxal claim (to have universality as its particularity) has since been voiced in numerous ways, and criticised in even more ways. In this project, Carl investigates how this idea has been negotiated by Patočka against the background of the contemporary political discourses stemming from the Brussels institutions.

Patočka, the Czech phenomenologist, finds the claim to universality to be rooted in the Platonic tradition of care of the self. He coins the term post-Europe, a Europe so universalised that it has made itself unnecessary.

The thinker uses the tradition of European philosophy against itself in a movement that deconstructs at the same time as it preserves a certain notion of Europe.