Squares, circles and triangulations. Roman Jakobson, the Prague Linguistic Circle and the intellectual configurations of interwar Prague

This paper offers a contextualization of the socio-intellectual and epistemological position occupied by Roman Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle in interwar Czechoslovakia. It does so by emphasizing the systematic role of Russian and Ukrainian émigré communities, and proposing a partial reconstruction of the intellectual network in which Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle were involved. This contextualizing effort strives to underscore how Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle were not only the agents, in Czechoslovakia, of a major international scientific project – the development of phonology and modern linguistics –, but also the direct product of the local interactions – across the concrete urban spaces and squares of Prague – of a whole spectrum of “minor” or “national” traditions, from Russian social philosophy and Eurasianism to Austrian (Brentanian and Neo-Herbartian) psychology or Czech positivism. In particular, the paper highlights the “triangulated” nature of intellectual exchanges in Prague, which played out not only as bilateral, explicit dialogues, but also through a pattern of indirect intersections facilitated by the overlapping participation of many actors in otherwise distinct groups or circles.