Abstract

Er(r)go...

…somewhere out there obviousness, clarity and transparency, and here aletheia, mystery and mysteriousness, inexpressibility of mystery, covering, uncovering, secretion, exposure, concealment, unconcealment, (un)concealment, transition from concealment to non-concealment, unveiling and veiling, unveiling through veiling, appearance and obliteration, appearance through obliteration, elusiveness and inscrutability, incommunicability, opacity, obfuscation, impenetrability, unattainability, migration of meanings, confusion of tropes, relocation of senses, undying and uncontained proliferation of discourses, following traces and delving into their meanings, an apophatic experience – well, just an ordinary hermeneutic commonplace. And the truth keeps happening anyway.

Various are the participants and witnesses of the hermeneut’s travails, both predictable and unpredictable: Simone Weil, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Carl Schmitt, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, John D. Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, Charles Taylor, Master Eckhart, Jacques Derrida, Yuriko Saito, Ludwik Fleck, Bruno Latour, Louise Glück, Olga Tokarczuk, Leonardo da Vinci, Octavia E. Butler, and more.

Around them, and in front of both female and male reader’s eyes noteworthy things are taking place and, among the actors, persons, objects, and concepts play their part. Paul Ricoeur performs at the peripheries and provides a guiding thread, John D. Caputo quits waiting for a new dawn, Jacques Derrida questions the mechanisms of public mourning, and Hermes swaps packages. A Japanese couple resides in room 224, a monk transgresses the borders of gender, nostos perpetually subjugates itself for the sake of its own survival, Achilles and Odysseus hide their double references while symbolic structures – what arrogance on their part! – demand interpretation. So what if man opens up to things and allows them to be, the Oankali keep mutating, being of a chair reveals itself to us, and the essence of truth is essencing, since Briseis loses the right to her own suffering, the human life recognizes itself as an error, the hierarchical system leads to catastrophe, the daughter renounces her femininity and performs the exequiae over her dead father’s body, not to mention that the blind mechanism does not allow to withdraw from the use of force – the night of nothingness returns. And then the imperative: the chair must stand on the floor! How, under these circumstances, to think oneself into the being of a pair of shoes?

A moment of existential trembling – we are touching upon the deadly effects of reason and nakedness of the suffering Other: an insane mechanism grinding young bodies on war fronts, factories of corpses, invasion of brute force and violence on human order, solitude, dread, despair, helplessness, terror, vermin, blood, mouldy food, stinking urine, shit, dirt, teary eyes, swollen bellies, kids – frightened, exhausted, bruised, hungry, frozen, aching, miserable, wasted, dirty, parched, bent in half – suffering from typhus, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, trachoma. Passing and mourning, death inextricably intertwined with life. A face-to-face with pain that calls for a response.

But we also encounter relatively neutral and harmless acts: Master Eckhart wants to avoid taming the Absolute through anthropomorphisation, the flowers speak from positions of hard limitation, subtraction of meanings gives meaning, the woman with a beard aspires to sainthood, Jacob rewrites the Erotic into the Errotic, the mother wakes up after a two-hundred-and-fifty-year sleep and lives again, a corpus of texts replaces a living body, separatists do not accept the cross-breeding of species, discourses confirm their primacy over the determinacy of the workof art, Butler rejects the logic of purity, being emerges from concealment before Da-sein, and useable artefacts gravitate towards the concealment of being. Someone wants to get rid of wanting, but still wants something – wants non-wanting, naturally. And behind the text, interestingly enough, stands a human being.

Here and there interesting objects and phenomena come in sight, too: beings soiled with relationships with other beings, hotel text-rooms, finite reason, the gesture of self-dehumanisation, ethics of dissipation, the spectacle of faith based on deception, the esoteric circle, the exoteric circle, a creative craftsman, the personal centre of fresh thoughts, the tautological scheme of instrumentality, the interpreting reminiscence, life-beyond-life, non-human actors, microscopes, desks, microbes, test tubes, hybrids, viruses, plants, dead bodies, quanta, a thin line between the revealed truth and a lie, the innocence of becoming, a particular pair of sneakers (as the ontological original of itself), empathic wolves, the dominant mother, the cold and distant father, and hitherto ontologically absent entities and similar creations.

Finally, we are being overwhelmed by a priceless sense of disorientation, after all, we are all brothers and sisters thrown into the flux. Do the senses really need to be disclosed? In any case, thinking should be re-thought. 

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

We owe the concept of the issue to Dr Tomasz Kalaga of the Kujawy and Pomorze University in Bydgoszcz.