Konfiguracje i rekonfiguracje doświadczenia
Experience (Re)Configured

Summary/Abstract: Review of the book: Martin Jay, Pieśni doświadczenia. Nowoczesne amerykańskie i europejskie wariacje na uniwersalny temat, trans. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska, Universitas, Kraków 2008. Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience is a spending example of the history of ideas. Presented is a map of meanings of the notion of ‘experience’ in the European and American afterthought, starting with Michel Montaigne’s concept through to considerations of 20th-century French poststructuralists. Experience, initially treated as an integral concept, gets ‘decomposed’ into cognitive, religious, aesthetic, political and historical experience, which is followed by an idea of fading experience and, lastly, a concept of experience without a subject, and attempts at getting the idea ‘regained’. Critics have seen in Jay’s work a quasi-Hegelian pattern, as well as a Kantian-Weberian model of division of modernism into three basic areas of experience. Jay does not clearly put forward the criteria for selection of concepts under analysis; he takes three perspectives into consideration: the one of critical theory, pragmatistic, and poststructuralistic. The most serious thing seems to be no phenomenology taken into account within which a new anti-psychologistic and anti-positivist concept of experience has appeared.

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