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.

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.