Wykoleić język, wykoleić historię. „Anarchiwum” Leopolda Buczkowskiego
To Derail Language, to Derail History. The Leopold Buczkowski “Anarchive”

Summary/Abstract: The author attempted to outline the consequences of a diagnosis situated at the very foundations of the literary project proposed by Leopold Buczkowski, who regarded the Holocaust not as one of many historical catastrophes but as an Event that, first of all, challenges our language by undermining its ability to bear witness to extreme events. The Polish writer has no precursors in proposing such an interpretation of the problem, and the radicalism and astonishing aptness with which he formulated his opinions about “language after the Holocaust” are still without an analogy (although a suitable context is to be found ,predominantly, in the writings of Paul Celan). The heart of the matter, therefore, is not a presentation of the Holocaust (order of contestation) but presentation by means of the Holocaust (performative order). The disassembly of traditional, causal-effect logic is followed by the disassembly of the entire heretofore model of historical narration, which from that moment becomes infected with intermittent and ephemeral memory. In this manner, the key figure around which the Buczkowski project revolved was the ”archive” in which the Polish writer saw not only an institution collecting, conserving, and cataloguing historical artefacts but also a matrix of individual identity. Its task involves gathering literally everything that happened (together with the innumerable, and not exclusively human, perspectives with which it was perceived). Long before the narrativists the author of Czarny potok also formulated a thesis about the strictly textual character of history. The Buczkowski utopian ”anarchive” possesses, therefore, a huge critical and emancipatory value because it reveals history as not yet dominated by any arché authorities but as a real chaos of events that are discontinuous and not arranged in order.

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