Adam Lipszyc

Locked-Up Bodies, Locked-Up Souls: Freud, Nancy, Jelinek

Taking as his point of departure Sigmund Freud’s famous remark on the extension of the psyche, in the first part of the article the author develops the idea of the relation between “soul,” body and space in the psychoanalytical tradition. In doing so, he refers to the interpretation given to Freud’s remark by Jean-Luc Nancy. Crucially modifying Nancy’s perspective and moving back to the psychoanalytic tradition, the author develops a general notion of das Unbehagen im Raum – the discomfort felt in space. In the second part, the author deepens this analysis by looking at a certain desperate strategy of confronting this discomfort – a strategy adopted by the protagonist of The Piano Teacher, a novel by Elfriede Jelinek.

The most original book on Schulz written so far
The paper is a review of Michał Paweł Markowski’s book Powszechna rozwiązłość (Universal promiscuity) devoted to the work of Bruno Schulz. The author acknowledges that certain elements of Markowski’s reading – such as pointing to the links between Schulz and German Romanticism – are of undeniable value. However, the main line of the reading which sets Schulz’s work against the background of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy is criticized as shallow and inconsistent. Moreover, whereas the author agrees with Markowski’s criticism of Władysław Panas’s all too theological reading of Schulz, he also tries to show that a more subtle interpretation of Schulz’s work in messianic terms does more justice to it than the one offered by Markowski.

The Pocket Knife of Moses. On the Marrano Homotheology in Julian Stryjkowski

The paper deals with a variety of ways in which the phenomenon of Marranism can be perceived as being at play within the work of the Polish-Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski. First, the author discusses Stryjkowski’s explicit references to Marranism in a novel and two short stories where this historical phenomenon becomes a   point of reference for a reflection upon contemporary Jewish condition. Then, by means of a close reading of the first chapter of Stryjkowski’s first novel (Voices in the Dark), the author shows a deeper, implicit and metaphorical understanding of “Marranism”: this time the term would refer to the disguised presence of the  homosexual desire within  the framework of the traditional Jewish life. The author points to the complex relation between homosexuality and the transgressive lure of Christianity within Stryjkowski’s work, as well as to the ways in which the Frankist heresy can be seen as offering a historical precedence and context for Stryjkowski’s ‘homotheology’. Finally, the third and most comprehensive understanding of Marranism is presented. This time the term refers to the fragile identity of the Polish-Jewish writer himself, which precisely due to its fractured nature enables the writer to capture a whole universe of tensions within the Jewish world and the complex dialectics of heretical homotheology.