This essay was written while working on a new translation of Hans Bellmer’s A Brief Anatomy of the Image, published in December 2025 by Ha!art. It seeks to reconstruct the philosophical foundations of Bellmer’s work based on his essays and visual art. This reconstruction is possible by his extensive comments and his original interpretation of the concept of the object. This, in turn, allows a shift from the aesthetic perspective of the art object to the philosophical question of being, as well as to the epistemology associated with it. The outcome of this inquiry is the proposal of epistemopotia as an alternative cognitive model. It replaces rational models of cognition with the recognition of desire as the main principle that determines the existence of an object and reality.

Hans Bellmer compared his way of depicting female doll bodies as severely deformed to the poetic art of creating anagrams, which involves freely rearranging the order of letters and words in a sentence. According to him, the art of anagramming is not just innocent linguistic fun or a game, but has something magical about it. It is an exploration of the possibilities of language/body through the devising of unusual, fantastic configurations of their parts. Therefore, only a genius, full of extraordinary ideas and ready to boldly transcend existing conventions and norms, can tackle it. In this article, I attempt to extract the assumptions underlying Bellmer’s concept of anagrams by thoroughly analyzing his statements on the subject. I point to the specific features of this concept, which in many respects differ from the assertions of linguists and critics of literature and art.

This article analyzes selected spatial volumes by Ilse and Pierre Garnier, the works in which both the word and the line are important. The focus was on examples in which the visual layer is either severely limited or, conversely, exceptionally prominent, as well as those in which non-obvious combinations of text and image pose interpretive challenges. Referring, among other things, to the theory of drawing and the methods of line analysis by Tim Ingold and Nicolete Gray, various ways in which lines function in logovisual works are presented.
The article outlines how the Garniers play with perspective at the junctures between word and image. Particular emphasis is placed on the aspect of absence. The paper analyzes the purpose and impact on the viewer of removing the visual representation of a leading element from a work and potentially replacing it with traces of its action. Finally, drawing on the writings of Gottfried Boehm, among others, the paper reflects on the nature and manner of the Garniers’ use of iconicity.

The article discusses Krzysztof Pietrala’s creative strategy in the context of anagramatic games, considered here as avant-garde plays on reflections (textual, physical, auditory), which originate from the historical avant-garde movement of Cubism, assimilated in Poland mainly through Adam Ważyk’s translations of Apollinaire’s works. Pietrala’s prose poem Story Jones can be treated as a multi-level game of transforming and mimicking two myths of the avant-garde: the myth of Inkipo from Ważyk’s poem and the myth of Ulysses as the archetext of all future avant-garde prose, including OuLiPian combinatorics. At the same time, these references are pretextual and evocative in nature, revealing a different character of dialogue with the past than in modernism, based rather on serial repetition and flatly understood analogies than on an erudite invocation of contexts.

The article focuses on the issue of literary journeys to utopian worlds. The motif of travel – present in utopias since the time of Thomas More and continued and transformed in various ways by other authors of the genre – has become one of the key elements organizing utopian narratives. Using several selected utopian works as examples: More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis fragments of Adam Mickiewicz’s The History of the Future, Anna Zahorska’s novel Utopia, Herbert George Wells’s Men Like Gods, and Antoni Lange’s Miranda, the text presents differences in travelling to those lands. These differences can be observed when considering two eras that represent milestones in the development of utopian thought. In the early modern period, fascination with utopia grew out of a series of expeditions and geographical discoveries, whereas in the modern era, such thinking came to be associated primarily with a belief in civilizational progress.

The article presents reflections on Georges Perec’s Le grand palindrome. The work is situated in the perspectives of poetology (an analysis of the effects generated by sign symmetry and the more general paradoxes of the mirror figure), historical and literary (the presentation of the palindrome form as a “constraint,” with reference to the manifestos and programmatic texts of the Ou­vroir de Littérature Potentielle), and biographical (its place in the French writer’s oeuvre, its reception, and interpretation). The specificity of palindrome interpretation proves to be a separate issue: firstly, its subject is as much a specific work as the generative rule behind it; secondly, it inevitably projects meaning onto a text whose shape is determined by a hidden “axiom.” Comparisons of the original Le grand palindrome with English translations and a philological translation into Polish reveal textual incoherence and a characteristic flickering of meaning, as well as the wealth of intertextual references. At the point of arrival, the emphasis shifts to the philosophical problems implied by the work, in particular those related to an unstable, performatively created subjectivity, entangled in a mirrored mise en abyme.

This article focuses on Five Poems from a Notebook by Aleksander Wat, published in issue 2 of the weekly Nowiny Literackie in 1948. Wat’s texts, written in the Soviet Union and Poland between 1941 and 1947, illustrate the slow revival of his poetic output after a long period of silence. The author of this essay proposes reading these five poems together as a cycle, even though later book publications loosen the connections between them. The analysis focuses on the image of a dry tree, which recurs in the texts while also being transformed. The article outlines new interpretations suggested by the proximity of the poems, particularly regarding the poet’s reflection on religion, the Holocaust, and his own complex identity. The article also highlights the significant role of Paul Éluard, who inspired the last of the five poems and to whom Wat dedicated it. In this context, the article discusses the French poet’s visit to Poland in 1947, his poem from that period about the Warsaw Ghetto, and the shifting approach to Surrealism in the works of Wat and Éluard, as well as in Polish literary criticism of that time.