Introduction: Approaching Olga Tokarczuk

Huss,

doi:10.5406/polishreview.66.2.0003

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…This form of universalization looks more like the universe itself, full of interplanetary bodies and constellations above, and rhizomatic connections below, with human and non-human agents interacting in between, passing into and out of existence while generating light and heat, darkness and cold, in places that give rise to spaces which collapse, grow again, and are inhabited and abandoned by all manner of beings. (Trzeciak Huss 2021) Although this panoptical, integrational picture of the narrator's world may appear universalizing, it nevertheless embodies a perspective enabling the world to be perceived and valued as a heterogeneous, changeable, fluid, ambiguous whole. Trzeciak Huss writes about the rhizomatic connections structuring reality, in which each human or nonhuman being creates a network of changing relationships.…”

Section: Czułość (Tenderness) As a New Ethical Imperativementioning

confidence: 99%

From the Feminist Ethic of Care to Tender Attunement: Olga Tokarczuk’s Tenderness as a New Ethical and Aesthetic Imperative

Michna

2023

Arts

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In her Nobel speech in 2019, Olga Tokarczuk presented the category of tenderness as a new way of narrating the contemporary world. This article is a proposal for the analysis and interpretation of tenderness in ethical and aesthetic terms. (1) From an ethical perspective, tenderness is interpreted as an extension and complement of feminist relational ethics, i.e., the ethics of care. In the proposed approach, tenderness is a broader and more universal quality than care in the feminist understanding. This article opens with a brief discussion of feminist interventions in ethics, with particular emphasis on the ethics of care. Next, the differences between care and tenderness are enumerated and described, in order to show how tenderness can serve as an extension and complement of the feminist ethic of care. These considerations are guided by the question of why tenderness is a better—more appropriate and more responsive to contemporary challenges—moral guidepost than care. (2) From the aesthetic perspective, tenderness is the negation of a contemplative, distanced, impersonal, and rational view of reality. As an aesthetic imperative, tenderness implies engaged experience of the beauty of reality in all of its manifestations. Therefore, in the last part of the article, existential tender attunement is described in aesthetic terms, as a position serving to sensitize others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world.

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Section: Czułość (Tenderness) As a New Ethical Imperativementioning

confidence: 99%