Er(r)go…,
The preface to the present and the following issue of Er(r)go will be different than usual. To mark the tenth anniversary of our periodical, we have decided to venture back into the past, and remind our readers of a selection of articles and essays, which—though varied in character—will best express the atmosphere of the journal and represent its development throughout the years. Three of the authors printed here are no longer with us—Stefan Morawski, Liliana Barakońska and Andrzej Chojecki have passed away during the last decade. Thus so much more important is to recall their texts, as both intellectually and creatively, they will remain with Er(r)go forever.
Texts from different, yet akin areas meet here, whose kinship Er(r)go always accentuated: philosophy, history of art, anthropology, literary theory, cultural theory, literary history, contemporary views on history. Agata Bielik-Robson reads Richard Rorty from the perspective of a barbarian, for whom the philosopher’s three fundamental maxims—contingency, irony and solidarity—are “‘falsely colored,’ which makes them sound impure.” Stefan Morawski reflects upon different possible interpretations of postmodernism as the declining phase or opposition to modernity, pessimistically concluding that “the new emerging mutation is a continuity of the pernicious side of modernism, which has developed under the victorious pressure of modern civilization.” Wojciech J. Burszta enters the no man’s land stretching between the theory of anthropology and literary theory. “That soil,” he writes, “is irrigated by the bordering territories only infrequently. This is why I have made the central subject of my reflection the concepts of sensitivity and the presented world, relocating them to a place where they can grow in harmony, devoid of their original connotations.” Andrzej Chojecki traces different states of representing reality in philosophical reflections, but what remains most important for him is that “the philosopher behaves as though he wanted to reach the primal evident and then disavow it. The one who settles for naming the evident, can be certain that others already lie in ambush for it. The search for the evident means navigating between the Scylla of cogito and the Charybdis of dubito, but also between sensuality and intellect.” Ewa Domańska, posing questions about the „ontological status of the remains of the past and their being,” in a contemplative approach to the past concentrates on the archeontology of a dead body and the various forms of its existence. Liliana Barkońska in a refined essay devoted to the digestive metaphor in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, eventually concludes that “the melancholic imagination, filling with moldering remains the empty space of a ruin (space, which it itself creates [...]), clearly indicates that its only point of reference is the constantly decaying past. Transforming such-understood past into its only capital, the melancholic imagination gathers only the remains and leftovers.” Rafał Borysławski, discovering pornographic elements in medieval discourse, demonstrates on the example of three fabiliaux “what happens in medieval discourse when mouths of people are closed, and when communication occurs through their ‘other side,’ when people speak with their bodies, and the body speaks for them.” Sławomir Masłoń’s essay demonstrates how “the aesthetic logic of recycling leads to the creation of a cathartic kind of art, whose main characteristic is not necessarily the provoking of pity and fear (though it can do that as well), but that it is based on a therapeutic understanding of the role of culture.” Marta Zając attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: “what is theology and when does the so-called feminist theology stop being theology.”
The present issue is also leaden with double nostalgia: "The Text—(The Reader)—The Margin" recalls one of the Er(r)go issues of the past decade, but also, with its four voices and at the same time foundation memebrs (The Text—Tadeusz Rachwał, the Margin—Wojciech Kalaga, the Paranthesis—Tadeusz Sławek, the Reader—Emanuel Prower), returns to the bygone times when the Er(r)go seminar was still active.
Wojciech Kalaga
No. 49 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-30
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski