The publication of Marxist Aesthetics in Eastern Europe is an appropriate moment to reflect on the work of Fu Qilin especially on the Budapest School, and, as a consequence of this commitment, his contributions to Thesis Eleven over the last fifteen years, which has led on to the present strong connection and collaboration between the journal and the University of Sichuan. It is equally appropriate that I turn to Agnes Heller as my guide to the present reflection. In 1995 Agnes Heller asked in an essay in Thesis Eleven ‘Where are we at Home?’ (Heller 1995). Her question remains as pertinent as ever in our globalized world of space and time travel. It is to my mind the question that also best illuminates the work and the life of Fu Qilin, Professor in the College of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University, Chengdu. Professor Fu has made the study of Marxist aesthetics in Eastern Europe the subject of his academic career. The result is eight books in Chinese, including Agnes Heller’s Thoughts on Aesthetic Modernity (2006), The Critique of Grand Narrative and the Construction of a Pluralist Aesthetic (2011) in relation to the Budapest School together with The Face of Janus. Selected Works of Agnes Heller’s Aesthetics (2020), translated and edited by Fu (Jiayang 2022), Eastern European Neo-Marxist Aesthetics (2016) and mostly recently Marxist Aesthetics in Eastern Europe (2025), which explores in detail the key theoretical paradigms in this field: praxis aesthetics, theories of realism, paradoxes of aesthetic modernity, semiotic theory and the aesthetics of genre (Fu 2020). Central to Fu Qilin’s interest in the Eastern European Marxist thinkers is their return to origins, that is, their rediscovery of the open-ended and multi-dimensional nature of the classic texts of Marx. This return, and with it the awareness of the need to renew tradition by linking past and present, stands as the model for Fu’s activity as a teacher and scholar, reinforced by his own schooling in classical Chinese language and culture. I should add here that the most remarkable demonstration of the seriousness with which he has pursued his studies is, for me, his decision to learn Hungarian in order to read Heller’s early Hungarian writings. This same seriousness is evident in the range of texts consulted for Marxist Aesthetics in Eastern Europe covering English, German, French, Czech, Hungarian and Serbian and Croatian sources. This, his most recent book forms a major contribution to the research project, led by Fu Qilin: ‘Bibliography and Research of Eastern European Marxist Aesthetics.’ His book was evaluated as excellent and included in the ‘National Achievements Library of Philosophy and Social Sciences’ in 2024.

To return to our guiding question, where are we at home: as I indicated, the revival and reconstruction of the humanistic spirit of Marxism, both as critique and as utopia by Eastern European thinkers, offers for Fu Qilin a particularly relevant model for the development of Marxist literary and aesthetic theory in the context of Chinese aesthetic theory. This relevance is embodied historically and figuratively in the journey out of the stultifying orthodoxy of the Soviet system into exile, into the new world of contingency and possibility after the collapse of of the grand narratives of European historicism, doubly new in that the Anglosphere called the cultural self-understanding of these Europeans into question and posed ever more insistently the question, where are we at home. This theme of the journey appears very clearly in Fu Qilin’s essays in Thesis Eleven, which together with the related themes of cross-cultural exchange and translation (Fu 2025) and ‘Utopia or Dystopia: On Eastern European Marxist insights into science and technology in aesthetics’ (Fu 2022), amount to a book on Eastern European Marxist aesthetics in their own right and are to be read as the English counterpart to his Chinese publications. In these essays the theme of the journey is central; with Zygmunt Bauman, it is the journey from sociology of knowledge to liquid modernity, with Agnes Heller, it is the journey from a Marxist Renaissance to a postmodern Marxist paradigm (Fu 2014), with Gyȍrgy Markus, it is the journey from praxis aesthetics to a theory of aesthetic modernity (Fu 2023). And again, as the question ‘Can we still be at home? Agnes Heller and China’ (Fu 2021). These journeys, as reconstructed by Fu Qilin, both pose and answer the question of being at home. What I mean by this requires a detour which involves examining more closely Heller’s own answer to her question.

Our sense of home is multi-layered. The foundation lies in our early memories, in the immediate lived experience of family, things and places. This is the spatial (and premodern) world of the immediate that never leaves us and remains as attachment and nostalgia or as irremediable loss and trauma, both personal and collective, amid the horrors of the past and present. Beyond the space of origins is the temporal world of Dasein, existence in time, a consciousness all the more acute as history destroyed the last illusions of the grand narratives of historical destiny to leave us with a modernity bereft of certainties and defined by contingency. It is the situation of living on the railway station in the absolute present tense, according to Agnes Heller, where we are confronted by the need to choose our own possibilities. This is no longer the world of community; at best, it is the world of indifferent social distance, the dissatisfied society of strangers. What lies beyond all our singularities of contingency and choice? Heller proposes two forms of the transcendence of isolation: dwelling in the enduring legacy of the past, the sphere of high culture, of absolute spirit (Hegel) as our home, and second, the civic institutions of democratic society as our home. These two forms of shared experience and meaning are for Heller European and American respectively. They have in common, however, a similar relationship to the world. Each is defined by openness as opposed to closure. Heller’s insistence that democratic institutions can only be maintained and preserved by the liberal spirit of respect underlines her awareness of the fragility of democracy that exists to contain the latent civil war inherent in the contending forces of openness and closure in every society, where fundamentalisms of all kinds, from racism to religious and ideological intolerance, patriarchy, culture wars and conspiracy theories through to dictatorships and totalitarianisms all operate as forces of exclusion against the other who is made alien.

Although these two versions of shared experience express the same spirit, they stand for two distinct forms of home and world. The society of civic institutions is a home which offers a world in the full sense that participation and action can change the common world. The communality of absolute spirit by contrast has a world, but it is that of the cosmopolitan affinity of kindred spirits. Between these two homes, there is another possibility of home, which does not appear in Heller’s essay but which is nevertheless part of her answer to her question. It is that of the symposium, the ‘Invitation to Luncheon with Immanuel Kant’ (Heller 1993), the convivial experience of conversation among equals about culture. We can approach the symposium through the concept of beauty, as understood by Heller (Roberts 1999), and through the concept of friendship; particularly relevant here is the essay by John Rundell, ‘From the Budapest School to Intellectual Friendship: Reflections with Agnes Heller and Immanuel Kant’ (Rundell 2022). Beauty and friendship (the symposium) make up what I would like to call the utopia of conversation, each dimension offering a bridge of sociability from the private to the public sphere in that they participate in the Kantian Republic of letters. The republic of letters, especially for scholars, is the presiding ideal of the symposium, which is carried in turn by the binding spirit of friendship in which we celebrate the utopia of the shared experience of discussion in its own right as the expression of mutual esteem, respect and openness to others. One thinks here of Bakhtin’s emphasis on the dialogic self-crucial to the work of cultural translation.

The question, where are we at home, brings me at last to what I see as the key to the identity of life and work in Fu Qilin: it is the utopia of conversation, which is best exemplified in the highly productive friendship between Fu and Peter Beilharz, the visitor from distant parts. Together they have added a new dimension to the research project on Eastern European Marxist aesthetics at Sichuan University, precisely in the form of the symposium, in the dual dimensions of their joint teaching and of their joint organization of conferences. Let me just mention the 2018 Conference at which Agnes Heller was the leading guest and speaker (Thesis Eleven 159, 2020), the 2020 Conference in Melbourne in memory of Agnes Heller, the 2021 Conference ‘East European Marxism: Legacies and Entanglements’ (Thesis Eleven 179, 2022) the Conference ‘From Marx to Markus’ (Thesis Eleven 178 (1), 2023), the 2024 Conference on Zygmunt Bauman. As regards teaching, we have Fu’s warm account of his collaboration with Peter, first mediated by Agnes Heller, over 15 years (Fu 2023 A), which has made Thesis Eleven an important source for the Chinese reception of the Budapest School in particular, but also of the other exile from Eastern Europe, Zygmunt Bauman.

Peter Beilharz’s equation of critical theory with cultural traffic – to which I would add cultural translation – captures well the metamorphoses of the emigration of European theory to Australia and America and on to China, that has resulted in a productive and mutually rewarding Australian-Chinese collaboration.

Teaching in the threefold form of critical theory, cultural traffic and cultural translation may be regarded as a specific expression of the spirit of the symposium, which at its best continues and sustains the utopia of conversation in that full participation demands of all, teachers and taught alike, the willingness to learn, the willingness that makes us all equals. For all those who knew Agnes Heller as a teacher, there remains the deep impression of her openness to the questioner and her always thoughtful and stimulating responses, aimed at the continuation of the conversation. Fu Qilin stands in this tradition through the unity and integrity of his life’s work, dedicated to the global republic of letters.

References

Fu Q (2014) On Agnes Heller’s aesthetic dimension: From ‘Marxist Renaissance’ to ‘Post-Marxist paradigm’. Thesis Eleven 125, 105–123.

Fu Q (2020) Six theoretical paradigms of Eastern European Marxist aesthetics. Thesis Eleven 159, 35–56.

Fu Q (2021) Can we still be at home? Agnes Heller and China. Thesis Eleven 165, 169–178.

Fu Q (2022) Utopia or dystopia? On Eastern European Marxist insights into science and technology in aesthetics. Thesis Eleven 171, 3–19.

Fu Q (2023) An introduction to Gyȍrgy Markus’s aesthetics: Transformation from praxis aesthetics to theory of aesthetic modernity. Thesis Eleven 178, 47–65.

Fu Q (2023a) A poetical contact with Peter Beilharz through Agnes Heller. Thesis Eleven 179(1), 44–61.

Fu Q (2025) On Ferenc Tokai’s trans-cultural interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long. Thesis Eleven 190, 95–105.

Heller A (1993) A Philosophy of History in Fragments, chapter 6. Oxford: Blackwell.

Heller A (1995) Where are we at home? Thesis Eleven 41(1), 1–18.

Jiayang Q (2022) The face of Janus. Thesis Eleven 171, 102–110.

Roberts D (1999) Between home and world: Agnes Heller’s The Concept of the Beautiful. Thesis Eleven 59, 95–102.

Rundell J (2022) From the Budapest School to intellectual friendship: Reflections with Agnes Heller and Immanuel Kant. Edukacja Filozoficzna 74, 251–269.