The George Markus Archive is intended as a site for the collection and preservation of Markus’s unpublished writings and lectures from his years at Sydney University (1978 to 2001). It is a reflection of the high esteem of an informal group of ex-students who are committed to the project. The initial undertaking was scoped between Marysia Markus (George’s wife who died in 2017 one year after George) and John Grumley one of his ex-students and colleagues. At its core this is an exercise in saving George’s works, and related material for contemporary access and future scholarly endeavours. Agnes Heller, George’s close friend and Budapest School colleague, once observed that George’s lecture series were an integral addition to his ‘works’. Anyone during those years who had the good fortune to attend his lectures and seminars (perhaps even the discriminating attendees at the mass First Year series on Political Philosophy) could tell that something exceptional was taking place. George left 25 bulky school exercise books packed with the complete notes for his lectures.
Written for himself alone, these ‘texts’ are handwritten in tiny, scrawling, sometime illegible, script –the magnifying glass proved an indispensable aid as we jointly puzzled over key words. The undertaking is to attempt, as best we can, to transcribe and so preserve as many of the lecture series as possible. Difficult and extremely time-consuming to transcribe, the lectures will no doubt also prove to be very frustrating for readers This was a time in university life where a heavily accented Hungarian philosopher could speak for hours at a time (25 transcribed pages or more) on topics like: Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, the history of Marxism, 16th century metaphysics, German idealism, the history of culture, Kant’s 3 critiques- to deeply appreciative, sometimes quite small, classes.
About the archive
Arriving as a political exile from Communist Hungary to the University of Sydney in 1978, Markus’s work was only formally recognised in his country of birth in the early 1990s as the sole external appointee to Hungary’s prestigious Academy of Humanities. Australia’s gain has been Hungary’s loss and we started up the Archive partly in acknowledgement of this. We hope that the transcribed lecture series will give contemporary Hungarian students and colleagues some greater sense of Markus the teacher to add to the growing appreciation of thr importance of his published works. The international profile of the Budapest School has also continued to increase. We hope that the transcribed lectures will make a useful contribution to this international research.
Convinced that George’s lectures have much still to offer the specialist as well as those willing to put in the effort, we are committed to saving something of the experience. George’s knowledge of the texts he introduced us to was formidable. His own scholarly rigor in representing the ideas of others was impeccable and so we have had our misgivings about putting online frustratingly very imperfect transcriptions of his notebooks. We take courage though from Marysia’s authorisation of the task and, again, from an unwillingness to opt for the alternative: erasure.
The Transcription Process
The work is exceedingly slow and often frustrating. Sometimes we have not been able to decipher key words in the text and the shorthand references are personal prompts and, unfortunately, we are sometimes not able to make them out. The densely packed exercise books use the double-sided pages to the fullest. On one page George writes his lectures in longhand interspersed with his own idiosyncratic abbreviations(that we have increasingly began to master). These pages contain all manner of little coloured symbols that refer to additions that are written out on the facing page. Ourtranscriptions have inserted these additions and qualifications into the text. Often these additions interrupt the flow of the text, but we have attempted to stay true to George’s intentions. At times inserts of several loose pages would flutter to the ground as we opened the exercise book, and some panicked detective work would follow. We noted that when George gave the classes a second, sometimes third, time he would rarely cross anything in the original version out. A meticulous scholar, he got it right the first time and the later annotations largely qualified and clarified. We hope that the Archive provides a living resource, expanding and constantly improving.