Tomasz Kaliściak

The article attempts to describe Witold Gombrowicz’s oral system in Kosmos from the perspective of cultural interpretations of psychoanalysis (Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy Hocquenghem, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) and schizoanalysis (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). Understood as a specific network of connections that organizes the map of Witold’s unconscious mind, this system focuses on the mouth, tongue/language, speaking, eating, etc. The fantasy of spitting in the mouth plays a significant role here, read in the context of a similar motif from Jean Genet’s novel Miracle de la rose. The novel interpretation revolves around an attempt to escape from the power of the Oedipus complex, presented as a network of familial heteronormative relationships and connections. The failure of heterosexuality is treated as an act of queer resistance.

The article focuses on the issues of paleontology, the science of plant fossils, with particular emphasis on paleobotanical threads devoted to fossil vegetation, which in the 19th century was closely related to philology, represented both by the science of literature and language. The author extracts the notions of “fossil literature” (Adam Mickiewicz) and “fossil poetry” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), pointing to their particular relationship with “paleobotany of the unconscious” (Kazimierz Wyka), presented from the psychoanalytic perspective (Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Jung, Charles Baudouin) as an archetype of collective, interspecies memory, reaching back to some common ancestor and root cause reminding us of the eternal coexistence of the organic and the inorganic, plant and animal, human and non-human. The author also draws attention to the ecological and ecocritical aspects of the fossil literature, which he perceives as the trace fossils of human life activity (ichnofossils), which make up the meta-layer of the Anthropocene.