Er(r)go, (paste the English text) Wojciech Kalaga

Irony, Tragedy, Community: Richard Rorty in the Eyes of a Barbarian Abstract in English The essay is a perverse attempt at interpreting Richard Rorty from the perspective of a barbarian, that is, a person whom the author of “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” excludes from the conversation of civilised people. For Rorty, the basic criterion of barbarity is adherence to a culture which has retained distinctly pre-modem characteristics, i.e., those which predate “the process of civilisation.” The author, by identifying herself with the excluded "barbarian," seeks to indicate the merits of the pre-modem paradigm which has been unjustly disparaged by the leading philosopher of American postmodernism. Thus the author wants to redress the postmodernist tum from a pre-modern position; by evoking those categories that modernity has made to sink into oblivion - e.g. ritual un-differentiation and the catharsis experience – Agata Bielik-Robson argues that they are a natural supplement to Rorty's “call for universal solidarity.” Without this supplement, Rorty's call is just a vacuous declaration.

Problems with Postmodernism, or Can We Grasp the Essence of Postmodernity? Abstract in English Stefan Morawski takes as his starting point the problems with defining modernism and modernity as those two notions undoubtedly affect our understanding of postmodernism. While discussing four basic reasons why it is so difficult to grasp the essence of both modernity and postmodernity, the author emphasises their affinites and divergencies. Thus postmodernism can be seen either as a kind of self-rectification of modernism or as its decline/decay which must follow the modernist crisis of culture. Stefan Morawski argues that the phase of postmodernism we have entered now can be characterised by its dominant consumeristic permissivism which derives its impetus from cyber-culture. By bidding farewell to the culture we have cherished since ancient Greece, we seem to opt for taking over a destructive facet of modernism which developed under the pressure of modem civilisation.

Anthropological Sensitivity and the World Presented. An Essay on the Anthropology of Literature Abstract in English Wojciech J. Burszta's essay takes its inspiration from two different sources: it recognises a new, modified attitude to "classical" anthropological texts by Frazer. Malinowski, Mead, Levi-Strauss or Benedict but it also centres round a theory of the literary truth developed by Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa differentiates between the truth of non-fictional writing (e.g. history, journalism) and the truth of fiction which depends on its power to create illusions and captivate the reader's imagination. Burszta points out that the anthropological discourse is a hybrid form in that respect: it combines a commitment to facts with imaginative recreation of the world, which is characteristic of literature. Thus. according to Burszta, anthropology comes to occupy the no-man's-land in between nonfiction and fiction. Consequently, anthropological imagination will be in close rapport with aesthetic imagination which does not have to rely on the author's actual experiences. .

The Evident Abstract in English In "The Evident" Andrzej Chojecki sets out to illuminate the eponymous category through recourse to its etymology which demonstrates that the evident is a matter of visual perception in the first place. His project of demarcating the semantic boundaries of the category prompts him to discuss Aristotle"s views in the light of their subjectivisation of the evident: what is evident for one person, does not have to be evident for another. As the absolutely primary determinant of the evident. We must recognise God, which is conveyed by means of the formula Ego sum qui sum (I am that I am). In what follows Chojecki refers to the views of such philosophers and writers as Hegel, Heidegger. Husserl, Schopenhauer, Shestov and Nietzsche in the context of the relationships or encounters of the category of the evident with the categories of truth, certainty. understanding, identity. perceptibility, representation. Finally, he elaborates on the association of the evident with the Cartesian "ergo." .

Ewa Domańska

Towards an Archeontology of the Dead body (A Contemplative Approach to the Past)

Ewa Domaiiska distinguishes a distinct contemplative approach to the past which — unlike doc­umentary, commemorative or 'oral evidence' approaches — undertakes, among other things, reflec­tion on various aspects of the dead body's existence and functioning. She traces the facets of 'end-ism' in historical reflection, which is increasingly skeptical of the prospects of historiography characterised by anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, eurocentrism and phallocentrism. Thus many scholars think that present-day historiography should first of all study historians — their motivations, sponsors and backgrounds. Those who want the Third Millennium to be a new beginning for histo­riography postulate that scholars should give more thought to death, the deceased and their corpses. Domaflska's claim is that in future-oriented human sciences questions concerning the past cannot be answered until we refer to ontology, to those thinkers who — like Martin Heidegger — study exist­ence, death and the issue of being.

Liliana Barakonska

Of Books and Foods

Summary

The article is an attempt to analyse the functioning of the consumption metaphor in the context of Robert Bur­ton's work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) with special attention paid to the link between the writing activity and the process of digestion. Thus it explores the ways in which Burton reads Seneca' s project of constructing the self out of hypomnemata, selected fragments of various texts to be digested and incorporated to model a new personality; a project evoked by Erasmus who advocates digestion of classical authors in order to produce a new and individual style in writing.

Establishing an analogy between the space of his book and the space of an inn, Burton establishes an analogy between words and foods, thus endeavouring to refer his work to the oral literary tradition. Writing his discourse in the Jacobean context, however, the feast Burton presents the reader with is, as he puts it, exremental: what he has at his disposal as a writer are remnants and leftovers. Hence, to study the implications of Burton's vision, it is necessary to relate it to the prevalent presentation of food imagery. The article is thus a reading of the changes in the representation of food between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and situates the discourse of melancholy in the digestive and excretory metaphor of the time.

Title in English, Abstract in English.

Title in English, Abstract in English.

Rafał Borysławski

The Un-mouth: Pornography and Political (In) Correctness in the Fabliaux.

The question whether it is possible to view the discourse of the body present in the fabliaux as a manifestation of medieval pornography is the starting point for the discussion of what might have constituted the medieval sense of political correctness. The author briefly examines medieval perspectives on sexuality and sinfulness, which the Church Fathers constructed around the notions of potentiality and actuality. This, in turn, provides an analogy with the pornographic discourse of the fabliaux, where the potentiality of sin becomes actualized by the act of communication. Thus a correlation between pornography and speech in the fabliaux is also a correlation between sinfulness and a sense of political correctness. In this way, then, medieval sexuality shaped cultural correctness and medieval correctness shaped medieval cultural sexuality. However, both medieval pornographic discourse and medieval political incorrectness, so often represented by the former, could have only taken place in the sphere of the potential rather than the actual. In other words, what was politically incorrect in medieval pornography, was only so within the politically correct impositions of the discourse of social or literary norms.

Sławomir Masłoń

Therapeutic Recycling/Uncanny Repetition

Using a few hints from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the paper attempts to distin­guish between two possible attitudes towards repetition in culture. One is the happy recycling of culture propagated by most of postmodernist discourses as the very practice of freedom and whose ultimate incarnation is Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is, however, the therapeutic freedom of the possible. The other would be an attempt at cultural repetition in Kierkegaardian sense, that is, changing the coordinates of the possible by means of bringing out the uncanny surplus in the familiar and thus introducing a breach in the discur­sive space which would make room for the impossible to appear within it, as exemplified by the work of Kafka.

Odnosząc się do istotnej dla tak zwanej teologii feministycznej pozycji Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, artykuł bada związki między wiarą i rozumem oraz wiarą i niewiarą, między innymi w oparciu o dzieło Josepha Ratzingera Wprowadzenie w chrześcijaństwo. Zasadniczo, argument stanowi obronę tradycyjnego rozumienia teologii, odwołując się przy tym do zasad logiki bardziej niż dogmatyki. Przeformułowanie pojęcia teologii, jakie dokonuje się w teologii feministycznej, unieważnia sens innych, kluczowych dla teologii pojęć, takich jak wspomniane wiara i rozum. W rezultacie, termin „teologia” traci swój sens i staje się bezużyteczny.  

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