The thinking about the idea, forms and practices of communitas has developed a specific discourse in political philosophical writing since the 1980s. This paper retraces the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy established a “community of writing [and] the writing of community,” how in his view community compears with philosophical writing. Taking Nancy’s discussion as a ground line, the author modulates the perspective on writing—as both text and practice—and focuses on the confrontation with community in reading. By poetologically tackling Nancy’s essay “The Confronted Community” (2001), she investigates into the text’s performing of community and the affective interaction between text and corporeality. Her reading of Nancy’s writing thus activates not only its ecstatic valences leading towards the proposed community of those who have no community; it also uncovers the aesthetic, social and political implications that emanate from Nancy’s writing in this situated reading. Therefore, this paper analytically retraces the textual micro-performances of community in writing as a performative confrontation entailed in reading.
The article discusses mechanisms of social immunisation in the context of the Polish ‘March 1968’. Whereas immunising strategies are a normal part of sociality, I argue that around 1968 a growing anxiety about the mechanisms of being-in-common led to an autoimmunitarian dissociation of the Polish society, which I conceptualise as an atmosphere of minusivity. Strategies to counter exclusions and discriminations were trapped in this immunitarian paradigm as well. A crisis of communication arose from the dissonance between the reality created by the official language surrounding March 1968, and the reality experienced by many people, as this latter reality was silenced and repressed. Mistrust in language resulted in an immunitarian retreat from affective communication, which was replaced by impersonal communicative scripts. This communicative crisis widely prevented the March experiences from being conveyed in the cultural production of the time; nonetheless, I will try to retrace some of the immunitarian and counter-immunitarian strategies in literature, film, and retrospective accounts.
The concept and realization of family and gender issues in socialist Poland was generally a contested topic. The family had remained a core institution of society—and yet, it underwent a significant transformation due to changing life-style models and social expectations. In the late 1960s, a crisis of the family was officially acknowledged, as the new models and expectations increasingly conflicted with the shortage of economic and social resources, and systemic limitations. Diverging ideas about gender roles and stereotypes intensified the tensions in the family and private sphere. This article discusses manifestations of the family crisis in literature and film of the time, tracing the issues debated in society and uncovering dominant narratives. Social problems like alcoholism or domestic violence found their way into official statistics as well as into literary or cinematographic productions, the arts presenting a qualitative seismology of the family in crisis. In staging issues like partnership pragmatism or a “monetarization” of gender relations, literature and film functioned as an introspective tool for social and cultural discourses. This cultural debate on the family crisis will be cross-read with the March 1968 crisis in Poland. The student revolts, their repression and an anti-Semitic campaign, events known as “March ’68”, brought about an ethno-nationalist paradigm in politics and society that silently reframed family lineage as a socially and politically relevant dimension. Yet the narrative of class and ethnic family liability suggested by the mass media went mostly unregistered in the arts, emerging only on the margins of cultural production.
This article analyses the appearance of insects in Polish literature of the mid-socialist period. It will elaborate a post-humanist perspective on the peaking presence of flies, wasps, bugs or worms in literary texts both as a motif and as an aesthetic strategy. The article investigates the way the deployment of insects in and through the text modulates the view of and the perspective on their human fellows, and how these modulations can be traced to the social reality of the socialist 1960s and 1970s.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.