Andrzej Juchniewicz

In the article the author reconstructs the critical reception of the Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse by Tadeusz Śliwiak (Andrzej Kaliszewski, Konstanty Pieńkosz, Jan Pieszczachowicz, Artur Sandauer, Stanisław Stabro, Piotr Sobolczyk) and interprets the work using posthumanist instruments to prove that it is ecological and pacifist. The main idea of the author is to depict both the animals transported to the Municipal Slaughterhouse in Lviv and the Jews working there. The poetic volume of Śliwiak meets the demand of Éric Baratay, who wrote that the animal could not continue to be a white spot of history. The poet emphasizes that animality is a state devoid of human aggression and desire for domination and assigns a negative value to what is considered human (if there murder among people is impermissible, it is due to fear of spreading violence to human actors). In the Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse, the strategy that prevents animals from being brought into the role of raw material is the perspective of a child which sees the death of animals as equal to this of humans. Until now, the reception of the poem has been dominated by analyses of its dominant turpistic and expressionist aesthetics, reducing Śliwiak’s testimony to the role of a “great metaphor of war.” The author proves that the poet emphasizes the stigma of violence (the human victims were forced to work on the handling of the bodies of non-human victims), which invalidates the hierarchy of victims, preventing a comparison of suffering. In addition, the author describes two situations depicted in the poem using the category of excess (by Wolfgang Sofsky), in which human life could be taken away at the whim of the overmen.

The article is a review of Arkadiusz Morawiec’s book Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa [Polish Literature and Genocide], the first Polish literary study to address the acts of genocide that occurred before the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing after World War II. The reviewer recognises the researcher’s scholarship and the ethical sensitivity with which he revises his previous theses about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The book has been composed in a cross-sectional manner, the articles on Holocaust and Genocide Studies are accompanied by analyses informed by poetics and sociology of literature. Thus, the reader becomes acquainted not only with the historical realities of the described conflicts but also with the mechanisms of collective memory, which is shaped by both institutional activities (museums) and the reception of survivors’ testimonies.