Michał Kłosiński

Schulzand Simulacra
Schulz and Simulacra is an analysis of Bruno Schulz’s short essay entitled Mythicization of Reality. Michał Kłosiński argues with Dorota Głowacka, who tried to interpret Schulz’s prose with the use of Jean Baudrillard’s category of simulacrum, that her understanding of the term is wrong. Kłosiński searches for places in Schulz’s theoretical essay, where he is the most ambivalent and where his ambivalence works against the text’s consistency. He performs an interpretation of some of Schulz’s notions, such as sense, myth and poetry, to depict how the author of Mythicization defi nes them and how the poetics of Schulz’s text somehow changes these definitions. The main objective of the analysis is to show that Schulz’s theory points the reader not to the concept of simulacrum, but to another Baudrillardian notion – the symbolic exchange. Kłosiński finds evidence of the possibility of such reading in the example given by Schulz of the fragmented body of a snake in legends and the poetic mechanism which he calls „the short circuiting of sense”. In the conclusion the author performs an analysis of Schulz’s view on poetry and how the mythicization as a poetic act works against simulacra and the excess of meaning produced in language to constantly recreate a bond with reality.

Utopianism of the symbolic exchange models

The paper takes the perspective of Fredric Jameson’s thinking about utopia (from his Archeologies of the future) and is an attempt to answer the question of the status of the theories of symbolic exchange (Baudrillard, Goux) understood as specific iterations of the utopian thinking or the utopian impulse. Jameson sees today the power of the utopian narratives in the alternatives they give to the third stage of capitalism. That is why the main problem presented in this paper is precisely the alternative vision of social and economic relations projected by the researchers referring to the models of symbolic exchange in the primitive societies. Reading the concepts of Goux and Baudrillard in the light of the Jameson’s theory of utopia is to show their proximity with thinking about magical and religious practices on one hand, and, on the other hand, to the fundamental models of social relations in the primitive and ahistorical societies present in the fable and fantasy. These primitive societies believe in the possibility of exchange with the dead and do not surrender to the model of economy governed by the general equivalents: the phallus, the sovereign, the sign, the money.