Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz, Editorial Introduction

PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL VOLUME I / 2012 / ISSN: 1899–9484 Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz, Editorial Introduction . 2 Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz, Sophocles in Quebec . 3 Piotr Nowak, The Last Step in The Clouds . .11 Krzysztof Rosiński, Supersensible Necessity . 23 Piotr Graczyk, The God of Young Marx. 34 Janusz Dobieszewski, Nikolai Fyodorov – the Extravagance of Resurrection . .41 Mateusz Werner, Witkacy and Modernity . .51 Mikołaj Wiśniewski, W. G. Sebald’s Elective Affi nities: on The Rings of Saturn . 67 Irena Księżopolska, Loitering with Intent: Daemonic Author and Self-Inventing Heroes . 79 Jan Tokarski, Sacred Power Drenched in Blood . 92 Lena Magnone, Karol Irzykowski’s Lacanian Reading of Freud . 104 Małgorzata Kowalska, Lévinas’s Concept of Justice: from Ethics to Politics and Back . .118 Zofi a Rosińska, Aestheticisation and its Axiological Consequences . 130 Notes on Authors . 145 Contributors: Grzegorz Czemiel, Janusz Dobieszewski, Piotr Graczyk, Małgorzata Kowalska, Irena Księżpolska, Lena Magnone, Piotr Nowak, Zofi a Rosińska, Krzysztof Rosiński, Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz (editor-in-chief), Renata Senktas, Jan Tokarski, Mateusz Werner, Mikołaj Wiśniewski. Published by Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego ul. Mianowskiego 15/65, 02-044 Warszawa, Poland ISSN: 1899–9484 This project was fi nanced by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of the "National Programme for the Development of Humanities" 2012-2014. All material remains © copyright of the respective authors. Please address all queries to the editor at the following address. [email protected] Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION „Kronos” quarterly was established in 2007 as a project of a particular generation of philosophers all of whom started their studies around the transitional year 1989. “Kro- nos” soon became the largest philosophical journal in Poland. It is a new voice in Polish philosophy. Poland at the turn of the 21st century was and is an inspiring place for thinkers; it is an interesting vantage point for observing and studying human nature. It is a place which saw genocide and two murderous experiments – the Nazi and the Soviet – the aim of which was to create a new type of human being. A philosopher brought up in Warsaw is living in a city destroyed by Hitler and rebuilt by Stalin. The place and the time when we started studying philosophy infl uenced our choices and interests. Perhaps a philosopher is nothing but an emanation of the place and time which shaped him. These factors no doubt explain our interest in Hegel and Marx whom we have read through the lenses provided by religious messianists (Fyodorov) or 20th century prophets of the apocalypse (Kojève and Witkacy). The spirit of time and place prompted us also to study the Classics, to return in thought to Greece where – infl uenced by Hei degger and Nietzsche – we saw the eternally recurring point, where all history ends and every history begins. 2 2012 Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz SOPHOCLES IN QUEBEC Everything that I do or write, I sometimes summarize as follows: I only express in a new form something that people always knew. I only try to say it in a learned discourse – a discourse capable of adequately grasping the dramatic challenges of the world to come. That is my position summarized. Pierre Legendre, Scattered Views Pierre Legendre’s The Crime of Corporal Lortie is an exceptional book for many reasons. The fi rst reason is its Author, his place in European culture, both current and future. The second reason is the perspective offered by the Author, encompassing areas usually viewed in isolation. The third and fi nal reason would be its Hero, the unfortunate Corporal Lortie – the real Hero of Our Times, a fi gure typical in its madness: a contemporary everyman, a diminutive, postmodern Antichrist. 1 Pierre Legendre, born in 1930, belongs to the French generation of 1968. We can without hesitation place him next to Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, with whom he in many ways shares both methods and convictions, at the same time standing as their fi rst antagonist, formulating the fi rst – serious – response to their critique of Western civilization. It is a surprising response. Legendre uses his contemporaries’ counterculture argumentation against their own criticism, turns it into a shield and sword for the defense of the old forms: Subject, Fatherhood, Tradition. This particular stance – for Legendre fi nds himself in the very center of events: Paris is the very hub of philosophy in the second half of the past century; and yet deliber- ately positions himself, in a true spirit of contradiction, somewhere at the margins – this peculiar stance insured that the author of The Crime of Corporal Lortie remained for many years in the shadow of his contemporaries. His work did not become popular, nor was it properly appreciated worldwide. It developed gradually, with growing indifference to fashions and upheavals of its epoch. His work is colossal in its breadth – encompassing over ten books, starting with professional works on the history of the French administration and editions of medieval legal manuscripts, through a dissertation on dance, a monograph on dogmatic anthropology, ending with a collection of poetic aphorisms entitled The Fabrication of the Western Man. However, we live in a different world today. The revolution of 1968 has run its course, exposing all its consequences, and the ideas behind it or connected with it became an academic commonplace. Legendre’s position – at the same time central and marginal 2012 3 WAWRZYNIEC RYMKIEWICZ – inevitably causes a burgeoning interest in his work. A distinctive group of legendrists is active in the United States and in England. The gigantic project of translating Legendre’s oeuvre into German began in 2010. The Parisian theoretician of community theatre gained followers in India and Japan. The wave is rising. We see a well known pattern repeat itself: a writer ignored by his contemporaries becomes in the eyes of the next generation one of the most important fi gures of its epoch. Let us stick, however, to his peculiar stance – at once in the center and at the margins – and not just because this is the proper stance of the Philosopher or a Wiseman, but because it also describes Legendre’s place in European culture: his attitude to it, as well as the way in which he fi nds his own place in it. Legendre began as a law historian, researcher of Roman and Canonical Law, a pub- lisher of medieval manuscripts – texts which remained unread for centuries, the very existence of which was forgotten, but which, according to Legendre, have a great importance for our life. For within the history of law the most basic forms of rational human existence are formed: the idea of a “subject” – essentially connected with the category of responsibility and crime; as well as the idea of “factual truth” – in its turn linked with the category of “evidence” (while in our daily life unproven statements are often acceptable, not so in the Court of Law). And this, precisely, is Legendre’s main thesis: our rational life rests on the scaffolding of Law, supported by its invisible order. This center, however, remains hidden from us: it shapes our life, dictates the rules of our conduct, while remaining secret. The text of culture, according to Legendre, is something unconscious. We will err, however, if we consider Legendre to be one of the representatives of the library fauna. Right after so-called l’agrégation, the future creator of dogmatic anthropology travels to Gabon where he works as an expert for one of the UN agencies. There he has a chance to observe in person the Western postcolonial politics in Africa, which under the mask of Progress attempts to reeducate the natives. Legendre vividly explains this project’s goals as follows: “The former savages are to march as subjects of the universal rule of law.”1 That is where Legendre will see for himself the postmodern perversion of the Western culture which at its peripheries – but also at its heart – produces a new human type: a man uprooted from his Tradition, condemned to look for support within himself and unable to fi nd it, and in consequence – sliding into confusion, disorientation, chaos. The new savage populates not only the gigantic cities or rather – city dumps of Africa, but also the so-called HLMs, ghostly suburbs of Paris and disintegrating apartment block districts of Eastern Europe. Legendre resigns from his position as UN advisor and from that time on calls himself a mind “negrifi ed”, négrifi é, while naming among his teachers such black intellectuals as Doudou Guèye and Hampaté Bâ.2 Once again we recognize the familiar pattern: having appeared at the very center, starting from Roman law, Legendre chooses to view Europe from an external point of view. The author of the The Crime of Corporal Lortie dislikes contemporary Europeans. At the same time, one of the 1968 ideas – third-worldism – acquires in Legendre’s work a special meaning. To complete the picture, we also need to mention that Legendre was Jacques Lacan’s friend, and for some time the two would meet regularly, every Saturday 1 P. Legendre, La passion d’être un autre. Étude pour la danse. Paris 2000, p. 16. 2 P. Legendre, Vues éparses. Entretiens radiophoniques avec Philippe Petit. Paris 2009, p. 121–22. 4 2012 SOPHOCLES IN QUEBEC morning, to discuss law and psychoanalysis. Since, as Legendre points out, he luckily was not Lacan’s patient, they could regard each other as equals. Legendre is frequently considered to be a lacanist. Yet it is worth remembering that Legendre transformed Lacan’s theories, channeling them in a rather unexpected direction. 2 Lacan used to say that unconsciousness is a text. One should treat it as a sequence of signs.

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