Granice tranzytywności
The Borders of Transitivity

Summary/Abstract: The notion of transitivity comes from Emmanuel Lévinas’s lectures collected and edited as Le temps et l´autre, where it is defined as ecstatic absorption of the world as a food, as part of one’s material care about himself/herself. This essay focuses on two consecutive records, dated 1958, in Gombrowicz’s Dziennik (The Journal), where the author’s transitivity seemingly stops in the face of fate/death. In the first record, a static and passive submission to the rush of time proves correspondent with it being (im)possible to read of one’s own history (or face) from blurred traces. In the second, transitivity is halted when it comes to facing what is radically different and scaring (lofty); where the border between the inner and the outer, the hidden and the open, the expressible and the inexpressible gets violated.

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