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Dinekov's diaries paint an interesting and broad picture of every day life of a leftist intellectual and communist rule.
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The author presents the history of the concept of "civilization" from around 1750 to around 1880. He analyzes texts written by the creators of various nationalities and specialties: philosophers, historians, linguists, anthropologists, politicians, travelers, writers and poets. The adopted method of work, leading from philological analysis to philosophical interpretation, is inspired by research on the concept of "civilization" conducted by historians of the Annales school; it also refers to the methods of work of researchers from the Warsaw school of the history of ideas.
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A collection of articles based on materials obtained during ethnographical fieldwork in Lelów and neighbouring towns. The authors describe activities connected to the construction of local heritage, analysing them in the broader context of the memory of Lelów’s past and its inhabitants, the memory of the Jewish community and the Holocaust, as well as in relation to the experiences of the interviewees resulting from contact with the Hasids who visit Lelów contemporarily.
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The process of moving on from a ritual concept of communication to communication based on sincerity. A description of the transformations of European culture, coupled with an analysis of the changes taking place in Polish epistolographic practices in the 17th century and in the beginning of the 18th century, among others, using the example of the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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An interesting study on interspecies relations in cities, set in concrete cultural phenomena. It is a radical re-definition of human-animal relations, an analysis of mutual dependencies, a description of complexity and dynamics of changes in urban spaces. On the one hand, the publications refers to various cultural contexts, on the other hand, it shows local characteristics of the presented phenomena and the Polish perspective, which includes different towns. The book may inspire reflections on relations between humans and animals in future cities as well as the ways of organising them, especially in the context of the 19th and 20th century modernising movements.
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The book is the first attempt to comprehensively examine and describe the daily writing practices of a Polish psychologist Julian Ochorowicz (1850-1917). More than one hundred notebooks of the scientist, now stored in the archives of the library of the Ossoliński Institute in Wrocław, constitute an extraordinary and so far unexplored source of knowledge about his intimate writing practices. The author proves that the method of introspection, crucial for the psychologist and understood as constantly repeated turning towards oneself, made it possible for Ochorowicz to choose his own research path and, consequently, to abandon the well-trodden paths of scientific development.
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The authors present the theoretical and conceptual foundation of the Laboratory of Reportage, established by the remarkable reportage writer Marek Miller. The Laboratory of Reportage operates at the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies of the University of Warsaw. Papers presented in the book give insight in the status of reportage as practice and a form of journalistic and journalistic-literary expression, they describe in detail the method of reportage writers (documentary novel writers), as well as of participants of creative and research workshops. They define the areas of the Laboratory’s search as: using oral history sources, collective writing, multimedia storytelling and penetrating the area in between journalism and creative writing, journalism and screenwriting, journalism and stage writing. They express a belief that journalism is a form of art and that the reporter’s work combines the qualities of original writing with belles lettres, film and theatre as well as research from the field of social sciences and humanities: sociology, anthropology, psychology and history. The founders of the Laboratory of Reportage are particularly interested in analysis and comparison of journalistic methods and sociological interview, psychological interview, anthropological interview and in-depth interview. They also appreciate the value of participant observation and experimental provocation of events in social sciences as well as using elements of acting in journalistic work. We present this interesting publication to the English-speaking readers in a slightly amended version - not a full translation, but an English edition - with one article removed and one replaced with a newer paper.
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In our brief overview of the most important works on the history of literature and language that have appeared in the last 25 years, attention is primarily directed to studies that are useful for the work of the historian. In recent times, it is felt in the thematic orientation and in the method of literary history, as indeed in all the social sciences, the entry on the scene of Marxist scholars who do not consider the search for facts as the end in itself but strive to place the results of their studies in the current of historical development and to determine their direct social relations. And it should be noted that thanks to this path, Czech literary history has acquired many positive results expressed not only by numerous titles of studies but also by substantial contribution to the knowledge of national history.
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In the article, the author attempts to answer the question: who was Judas: a traitor, a suicide or a man in need of mercy? To this end, he uses the texts of the New Testament as well as ancient and modern interpretations to establish the facts. While the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are unambiguous in their presentation of Judas and see him as a traitor, a son of perdition and a man who betrayed his vocation, interpretations of this tragic figure eschew such categories. Judas appears in them as a man who, after his suicide, needs Jesus’ mercy. He is a key person in the process of Christ’s revelation, an apostle thanks to whom the mission of the Master from Nazareth is fulfilled, and finally a lost sheep. The multitude of interpretations of Judas proves that his story is still alive and it is difficult to unambiguously assess his deed.
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Romanticism brought a previously unknown identification of the fate of a literary hero and a real human being. The phenomenon of suicide in the Romantic era must therefore take into account the suicide written into literary fiction and the real one. The reason for the young people’s suicide was a feeling of deep alienation, a split between the idealistic image of the world and its true form. The impossibility of fulfilling ideal love, political oppression, and finally the feeling of being lost most often pushed young desperate people into the arms of death. But older people also made suicide decisions. Most often, the source of this decision was the inability to realize one’s own existential project in a world where there was no room for individualism. The inability to express themselves, the end of the logosphere, was synonymous with their decision to commit suicide. Romantic suicide was not the end of life, it expressed hope for a transition to a better world, friendly to human feelings and truth.
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In Polish literature witches, vampires, mermaids and beings with a different ontological status from humans already appeared in Romanticism. Suicidal plots are present in the poem Ghoul ("Upiór"), which preceded Mickiewicz’s poetic drama Dziady, in the ballad "Świteź" (mass suicide), and in "Konrad Wallenrod". Słowacki viewed suicide differently, from his personal experience. His "Godzina myśli" is a metempsychosist poem dedicated to the suicide of his friend, Ludwik Spitznagel. Słowacki never came to terms with this death.
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The article analyzes essays by Boleslaw Micinski in which reflections of war appear. Micinski reinterprets the Freudian way of thinking about war as a fundamental existential scandal. For the author of Journey to Hell, self-destructive (on many levels) war annihilation destroys the people and communities it affects and by which it was unleashed. However, at the same time it gives humankind the opportunity to make fundamental decision about humanity. The opportunity arises to choose a dignified life crowned with a true mysterium mortis. Zygmunt Haupt’s prose, in whose literary works this theme also comes into view, is the context for these analyses. In Haupt’s prose, war is primarily an experience of omnipresent death. Both Micinski and Haupt contemplate on how to deal with this stigma that marked them as 20th-century exiles.
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This article attempts to analyse the path to suicide of one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s more important suicide heroes – Smerdyakov from the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". This path is understood as a combination of the protagonist’s background, his characterological and personal traits, as well as dynamically growing circumstances and conditions. All these factors, stretched over time, entailed the final solution, i.e. death by suicide. Underneath the mask of an ill-advised, simple-minded epileptic, hid a person who was intelligent, reasoning logically and, at the same time, clever and cynical. His developed self-consciousness became his enemy, causing his opposition to the world to evolve into a complete negation of it. Hatred and anger were – in his view – the antidote to offended pride. The stigma of his origins that haunted him gave rise to a desire to take revenge on those to whom fate had granted a better life. Humiliation and shame became a driving force that was impossible to tame. He was able and willing to use even his own suicidal death as a weapon against those he hated. Smerdyakov also proved to be the perfect soil in which to germinate the seeds of the ideology preached by Ivan Karamazov, who, proclaiming that in the absence of God there is no morality and everything is permitted, maneuvered Smerdyakov with a vision of absolute freedom, giving permission for arbitrariness. The hero, eager for revenge on the Karamazov family, succumbed to the idea (exploited it?), bringing Ivan’s extreme ethical rationalism ad absurdum.
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The attempt presented in this article to interpret the two suicides described in Dostoevsky’s "Demons", committed by Stavrogin and Kirillov, starts from the recognition that the novel in question can be read not only as a text that fits into the local context of the Nechayev and his followers’ case or points to the metaphysical foundations of revolution, but also as a commentary on the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Europe. In this culture, in turn, two tendencies are discernible: the first is revolutionary and activist in nature, while the second is pessimistic, expressing itself in the pursuit as the highest form of freedom. I believe that the author of the Demons, by placing at the centre of the revolutionary world two protagonists that persist in immobility and end their lives in suicide, sought to integrate these two tendencies into a single image. Analysing the two suicides in question: the first, by Kirillov, who sees it as a path leading to the salvation of mankind, and the second, by Stavrogin, which is the end of the process of extinction of the will, I come to formulate a view according to which the extinction of the will could be considered as more permanently linked to the essence of modernity than striving and movement.
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The article, referring to the concept of “chagrin” (“zmartwienie”), as introduced by Marek Bieńczyk, suggests the application of this category to the topics presented in "San Junipero", one of the parts of Charlie Brooker’s "Black Mirror". The chagrin should be understood as deadness, the act of imitating the dead, being, like a zombie, half-dead. From this perspective, the article discusses the issue of destruction and self-destruction of digital specters that exist, mostly on the Internet and in electronic media, in a completely undead form.
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The topic of this essay is self-destructive behaviour analysed as way to become a subject of one’s life and feel pleasure. The author begins with discussing concepts of violence and power, recalling Simone Weil’s essay about "The Iliad" ("The Iliad or the Poem of Force") and the examples taken from literature about German-Nazi death camps (the short stories by Tadeusz Borowski and the novel of Jerzy Fąfara, devoted to the story of Józef Szajna, the prisoner of the Auschwitz camp). The individual, forced by violence to become a victim, could regain the status of sovereign subject and control over one’s life by using violence to himself or herself. The three faces of the phenomenon of self-destruction are discussed in the text: control, pleasure and offering. The author describes them with the reference to the novel of Elfriede Jelinek "The Piano Teacher" (control), the film "Crash" by David Cronenberg (pleasure) and the film "Breaking the Waves" by Lars von Trier (offering). The three concepts of self-destruction have a lot in common, as they lead to the same situation, when the individual regains sovereignty. As Martin Heidegger says ("Being and Time"), the death is something most private for human beings. Being-toward-death leads the individuals to recognize their own nature and to search different pleasures of life. Self-destruction could be one of them, sometimes bringing the pleasure and death at the same time.
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I approach the phenomenon of self-destruction from two perspectives, individual and collective. Within the framework of the first perspective, I characterize two types of its manifestation in the form of suicidal tendencies of the individual. The first type are the impulses through which these tendencies make themselves known in life situations. The second type is the individual’s readiness to commit suicide consciously, usually occurring on the basis of depressive states (calculated suicide) and ritual suicide. In the collective perspective, I consider self-destructive tendencies in relation to the late version of Freud’s theory of drives based on the opposition of Eros and Thanatos. I point out that these tendencies are linked to Thanatos, despite the fact that man tries to repress them into the unconscious by means of prohibitions, constitute a permanent threat to human culture. This threat has increased in modern culture due to such phenomena as the accumulation of powerful arsenals of nuclear weapons by the world’ military powers, increasing global warming, the use of artificial intelligence technology in various areas of social life, the emergence of new forms of aggressive behaviour (hate) on the Internet. All these phenomena contain powerful destructive and self-destructive potential. Being synonymous with progress, they can become the harbingers of the decline and the end of human civilisation.
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The text is an attempt to think through the famous film and play by Pier Paolo Pasolini entitled The Pigsty. The author focuses mainly on the mystery of Julian and his desires. Julian is neither a rebel nor a conformist, neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. Julian is a refugee from the bourgeois world in search of other love objects that are not culturally defined and expected. The concepts of desire and drive are considered in the text in a philosophical and psychoanalytic context, thanks to references to concepts proposed by Spinoza, Freud and Lacan. The author of the text also tries to think through Julian’s subjective structure, comparing it to the subjective structure of Hamlet. Finally, conclusions are drawn about freedom and coercion in choosing the object of desire.
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The article concerns the influence of popular culture on suicidal behavior. It focuses on the issues of the Werther effect and the Papageno effect. The author indicates that a serious factor that may cause the Werther effect is the glorification and romanticization of suicide in works of culture. What deserves special attention is the wide reach of popular culture among young people, who are extremely vulnerable to suicidal behavior and susceptible to the influence of imitations. The main thesis of the article is the need to involve the creative culture community in activities aimed at preventing suicidal behavior.
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