Freudian concept of unconscious is discussed in the article from the perspective presented by Jacques Ranciere, a French theoretician, in his work L’inconscient esthétique (The aesthetic unconscious). Having presented a general structure of Ranciere’s notional instrument, the author of the text moves on to the analysis of the relationship between Freudian discovery and the tradition of an aesthetic thought. The last part of the text presents the way Freudian notion of unconscious, or, better, his Ranciere’s interpretation, refer to a contemporary theoretical-political context.

The author of the article persuades us that the slogan of ideology is no longer “They do not know what they do, and, hence, they do it”, but, following Peter Sloterdijk, “They know what they do very well, and, yet, they still do it”. The article is an attempt to derive political consequences from this belief, namely, the ones having ambition to determine a direction of a collective life. In his article, following psychoanalytical intuitions, the author wonders how it is possible that even a full awareness of manipulation being made does not protect the subject from behaving in a way imposed on by the system. In this context, what becomes useful for the author is the analysis of the role of fantasy-fetish included in works by Slavoj Žižek. It is him who does not only describe the mechanisms of postmodern ideology, but also proposes a psychoanalytical remedy referred to as an act.

In this short dissertation, the author makes an attempt to answer the question of the usefulness of psychoanalysis in the field of a political practice, beginning with Freudian analysis of group psychology and Lacanian concept of paranoia. The central point, around which interpretation revolves, is the moment of the flag collapse described in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel. It is possible to reveal what is called psychotic crisis and the nature of social order based on the concept of empty meaning, thanks to the precision of the plot. In this context, psychoanalysis eliminates its instrumental use in all possible political practices. Since, it’s impossible to support a project which, as a project itself, is a source of all problems.

The article investigates the issue of conducting empirical social research informed by psychoanalytic theories. An abundancy of contemporary theoretical perspectives – as political discourse theory – ulitises Freudian or Lacanian inspirations. However I do not question the legitimacy of psychoanalytic knowledge stemming from clinical or analysis context, I argue that using these inspirations in social research demands a prior careful consideration. Procedures and processes constituting psychoanalytic epistemology – as free association method, transference and countertransference, among others, have no direct equivalents in the context of social research or discourse analysis. Therefore, utilising psychoanalytic concepts in new context demands their reiteration, transformation and rearticulation. Some branches of psychoanalysis – as the Lacanian one – due to their theoretical structure – pose an appropriate ground for such alternations. Nevertheless, still some aspects of assumed reality escape any empirical coverage. For instance jouissance or a death drive, however elusive and ungraspable, are crucial explanatory factors for mere empirical phenomena as political identification.

The article constitutes an attempt to reconstruct modern attitudes and political theories in a language of the Lacanian theory of four discourses. Within this reconstruction, exemplary right-wing (Bruce Fink and Pierre Legendre) and left-wing (Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt) models of society and postulates of its transformation are referred to philosophical traditions from which they derive (Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Deleuze). Lacanian philosophical inspirations (Kant, Hegel) and Deleuze’s psychoanalytical ones point to the moments common to all three groups of discourses (political, philosophical and psychoanalytical ones), which allows for formulating a synthetic theory of a higher level, covering them all thanks to the reinterpretation of the notions of freedom, community and (self)-education of the subject.

The author of the article, writing about political events from 2011 that took place in the Far East, as well as in Europe (Madrid) and the United States of America (the Occupy Wall Street movement), questions the accuracy of liberal perspectives of the process of democratisation, and, at the same time, arguments in favour of the universality of demands (“the centre” and “the periphery”), a hypothesis saying that traditional divisions into, for example, a left, right and central wing, vanish in today’s (post)political reality. The article is an attempt to capture a multi-dimensional aspect of the Arab Spring, and place it in a wider context of global democratic changes. The author introduces a collective and communist point of view in a sense postulated by Hardt and Negri. In his analysis of ultra-democratic practices of folk meetings, he uses Jacques Lacan’s concept of voice as a partial object. On the basis of this concept, a key distinction between the people and the multitude as the subjects of two extremely different political systems is made. The author encourages us to take an attempt at a political application of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which would allow for capturing multitude as the subject remaining beyond castration, namely the subject that is, though, capable of being embraced by a psychoanalytical language.

The article aims at exposing complex relations between Marxism and psychoanalysis as two purely modern discourses. In order to account for their specific position, suspended between philosophy and science, I attempt to outline the structure that conditions both of these “quasi-sciences”. This structure does not influence their content directly, but organises the very rhythm of Marxist or psychoanalytical thinking. However, while all scientifical discourses are conditioned by similar structures, only Marxism and psychoanalysis attempt to refer to it directly. In other words, the key difference that distinguishes them from other sciences consists in their self-referential loop. Consequently, Marxism and psychoanalysis do not possess an object neatly separated from themselves, but constantly return to the reality in which they are already included. Contrary to idealism, they do not take this self-reference for a starting point, but for a contradiction that needs to be sublated. As a result, both Marxism and psychoanalysis aim at sublating themselves along with the present reality they reject. In this regard they are the only discourses that are able to reconstruct the conditions of possibility of sciences, even though they pay the price of having at least dubious reputation in the scientifical world. In my exposition I refer to Luter’s doctrine, Hegelianism and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to explore the status of Marxism and psychoanalysis as specifically modern discourses, being not only profoundly conditioned by mechanisms of modernity, but also having the capability to reconstruct them.

The article focuses on different attitudes towards psychoanalysis within the frames of queer theory. Is psychoanalysis conservative power serving stabilisation of social order or has it subversive potentiality which goes hand in hand with queer politics? How Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Didier Eribon and other queer theorists use psychoanalytical tools in their writings? What are the similarities between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian “history of sexuality” understood as the starting point of queer theory? Are psychoanalytic ideas rooted in given social conditions (as Oedipus complex) useful in describing queer reformulations of relationships and social conditions which “produced” psychoanalysis? The author tries to answer abovementioned questions but the answers are always partial and unsatisfactory as the relation between queer theory and psychoanalysis is tortous and sophisticated: queer thinking can cut psychoanalysis off (as Didier Eribon proposes) but it can be psychoanalytically motivated as well (as in Lee Edelman's theoretical proposals).

The article makes an attempt to show how the birth of modernity is connected in Europe with the development of towns, and constitution of a certain model of awareness that is political in reality, that is, grounded in affective and ideological relations where the town and its internal dynamics are an image. Using analyses by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, I claim that the town constructs a modern and de-centred subjectivity. I would particularly like to ponder over the possibility of applying a psychoanalytical method to the interpretation of this “unconscious polis” (through e.g. “spatial analysis” referred to as such by E.W. Soja) What I concentrate on is above all a wide series of phenomena covering practices of an every-day life, artistic interferences as well as collective actions. As a result of covering them, just like symptoms, with a notional web worked out by Freud and Lacan, the very phenomena reveal a fundamental political basis whose discovery allows for a better understanding of the nature and reasons of the phenomena accompanying us in a local life, such as alienation, panopticism or street-art. The appropriateness of these phenomena can be understood, as I try to show, analysing this Benjamin’s dream, dreamt by a contemporary town, a dream about the community, that can be read as utopia. Accepting this utopia as salutary or damned is a fundamentally political gesture.

The author, assuming that identity is not given, but just a matter of construction, asks for the possibility of shaping a Silesian identity in a more or less free way. At the same time, he underlines the fact that politics based on identity exclusively, leads nowhere (for example to aggressive nationalism). The author sees an alternative in a polyphonic identity, referring to Michail Bachtin’s idea of multi-voicing. Based on this type of a political inclusivism where there is no place for the excluded (because everyone is an indispensable part of the system), the author postulates creating a beyond-local structure, notably a Silesian Metropoly. The article analyses the reason and conditions of the (im)possibility of its creation.

The author of the article concentrates on the relationship between the father figure, the law of a father and political identities in a postcommunist and Western Europe. The argument is grounded in a psychoanalytical discourse, particularly in Jacques Lacan’s conceptualizations (and his followers), concerning an imaginary and symbolic order, an incoherent symbolic field and tension between an ideal ego and ego ideal.

Polish translation of the text by Mladen Dolar.

Conversation with Krzysztof Siwczyk, Polish contemporary poet.

Poems by Krzysztof Siwczyk, Polish contemporary poet.

The author of the text makes an attempt at naming and describing the phenomenon of receiving poetry by Krzysztof Siwczyk, highlighting author’s personality and radicalism, thanks to which the poet still escapes from his own style and critical literary clichés.

The text constitutes an attempt to capture a performatory nature of Krzysztof Siwczyk’s poetic language through the prism of dominating motives in his works: innertion, stillness, paralysis and boredom. The background of recognition constitutes interpretative conclusions coming from already-made critical literary reflections concerned with works written by the author of Gody.

The author describes Krzysztof Siwczyk’s debut volume, concentrating on the image of childhood and maturation included in these poems, presented by the poet without shame or excessive exaltation. She also pays attention to the unique nature of such a presentation in the Polish literature.

The author ponders over predilections for abstraction, and the lack of particular points of reference visible in Krzysztof Siwczyk’s poetry, and pays attention to the situation in which the poet avoids any clear theses. What is more, he describes a theoretically strong or philosophical basis of many poems written by the very poet, pointing at the same time to the place Siwczyk has in a bigger and contemporarily noticeable tendency.

The text is a critical attempt at getting closer to the poetics by Krzysztof Siwczyk presented in his volumes Koncentrat and Gody. The very attempt tries to touch upon a popular aesthetic tension working within the scope of these poems. This is a tension between a linguistic element, perceived as an intrinsic being and independent of the forms of subjectivity and a tendency to crystallize meaningful echoes, moods, and intensities that could constitute the trace of subjective positions observed in his poems. The author of the text poses a question on the source and addressee of these intensive traces within the alleged absence of the subject.

The collection of ten letters written by Teodor Parnicki to Aleksander Wat between 1942 and 1961 is included here. The first two letters concern the article of the author of Bezrobotny Lucyfer in “Polska”, a weekly published in Kujbyszew, the editor of which was Parnicki. The remaining letters were sent by the author of Tylko Beatrycze from Mexico to Italy, and concerned the issue of publishing the novel Srebrne orły in Silva Editore, which eventually did not happen.

Wielkopolski alfabet pisarek, the first literary alphabet in Poland devoted to female writing, consists of forty-nine profiles of women authors creating and living in different periods, from the medieval to modern times. A conceptual idea of female authors-editors, namely Ewa Kraskowska and Lucyna Marzec, realizes a feminist idea of locality, in this case, Great Polishness, that is becoming a place of radical opening, but also a dividing line for female writing. A literary image of the region, derived from Wielkopolski alfabet pisarek, show the space of dynamic variety that is not and should not be a destination place of all considerations, but just their beginning.

The text treats about dilemmas of queer studies within which such individual projects as the queer movement timing at deessentialization of the category of identity and LGTB realizing emancipation strategy are enclosed. Eventually, it turns out that their mutual dialogue leads to precious socio-cultural diagnoses.

The article contains a discussion of the volume Od poetyki przestrzeni do geopoetyki, edited by Elżbieta Konończuk and Elżbieta Sidoruk. The publication is a result of the conference organised by the Department of Theory and Anthropology of Literature at the Institute of Polish Philology of University of Bialystok that took place in 2011 under the slogan of the space as the category of poetics. Interests in spacious problems and considerations on the meeting of the theory of literature and geography, geopoetics, geocriticism, as well as humanistic and cultural geography were divided into four interesting parts, containing nineteen theoretical-literary and interpretative texts, them each time being a full-dimensional case study of the category of space in the material under investigation. Accordingly, in the beginning, the reader is introduced into what is common for the literature and geography, next he / she gives his / her attention to the space and metaphor to get to know the studies concerning the space in prose and poetical creations of the space later on. The very monograph, though, is not a theoretical outline of categories connected with geopoetics. Instead, it becomes the examination of methods and practices deriving from the latter one.

The text is a discussion of two publications: Max Herrmann-Neiße: Czas pośredni. 68 wierszy i 2 fragmenty prozy w 70. rocznicę śmierci (selection, translation and introduction by Beata Giblak and Wojciech Kunicki. Wrocław–Dresden: Neisse Verlag, 2012, 300 p.) and Auch in Neisse im Exil. Max Herrmann-Neiße. Leben, Werk und Wirkung (1886–1941) (published by Beata Giblak and Wojciech Kunicki. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012, 541 p.). Max Herrmann-Neiße’s writing, though unknown for many years, has been translated into Polish and a has resulted in a monograph. The Upper-Silesian author, writing in German, as it turns out, is a universal word artist, an important figure in the German culture of the 1920s.

The sketch presents a parallel nature of the conception of literary tradition by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, and the conception of the influence by Harold Bloom. Both books: Rymkiewicz’s Czym jest klasycyzm? Manifesty poetyckie and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry appeared at the same time, namely at the end of the 1960s. The author of the sketch points to the similarities of both conceptions, showing the dependence of contemporary writers on their predecessors that are considered as “living” in the overtime duration of Tradition. She also points to the differences deriving from different inspirations by psychoanalytic conceptions, that is, Jung’s theory in the case of Rymkiewicz and Freud’s theory in the case of Bloom.

Międzywojnie (1982) by Jan Brzękowski is a novel situating itself in the current of the “genealogy of avant-garde”. The writer, like other authors from the circle of the First Avant-garde, returns to his youth times, though the very return is determined by not only a nostalgic impulse, but also certain bitterness, deriving from the impossibility to find a place in the literary environment in emigration. Międzywojnie is at the same time a summary of his experiences and artistic achievements so far. The first part of the work, entitled Start is a flourishingly outlined portrait of generation entering adulthood alongside gaining independence by Poland, and a peculiar spiritual biography showing the basis of experiences of generation from which the authors from the circle of the “Nowa Sztuka” came. The second part, on the other hand, Collegium Novum, constitutes the continuation of earlier prose experiments by Brzękowski who, returning to strategies and solutions proposed a few decades earlier, wanted to underline not only their significance, but also up-to-dateness.

In this linguistically-philological essay, the author familiarizes the reader with lexical richness of the Polish language. Designing a crossword containing 100 letters, according to the scrabble rules, he conducts an analysis of earlier masterly constellations (the record in 2006 was 3973) in order to go beyond the limits of 400 points, which he forecasted in “Teksty Drugie” in 1990. So as to get the record results, the author was forced to figure out the strategy of filigrene (‘granulations’), consisting in adding a letter after the letter of extension (e.g. BA, BAR, BARĆ or AR, ARA, ARAK) as well as using the technique of a combination of three 15-letter with 10-letter as well as 8-letter words to avoid any “useless” (non-functional) word. The basis of the game is the exploitation of all contemporary dictionaries and infrequent words (e.g. “zadosyćuczyńmyż”, it being incredible for most of the Poles).

Report from the scientific conference 'Polityczność psychoanalizy. Freud – Lacan – Žižek' (Katowice 2012).

The author makes an attempt to work out a model of reading works by Krzysztof Siwczyk, one of the most interesting poets last years. On the one hand, the author of Koncentrat seems to be immersed in radical modernist discourses (e.g. numerous references to Maurice Blanchot’s writing) and, on the other, Siwczyk writes in the world right after “closing” and fulfilling all possible modern narrations. According to the author of the article, the poet proposes a special vision of poetry as discourse and metatheory, and unique, as well as consciously introduced rhetoric of writing as catastrophe of sense, representation, thought and image on the map of the Polish poetry. All these elements create a rich and complex dialectics of neutrality in which a post-historical time is tightly related to the experience of a momentary taking over the world by language.