| Abstract: | The dissertation is the author’s original methodological proposal derived directly from the psychoanalytical discourse, herein first of all represented by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. Putting forward a theoretical proposition to encapsulate the theory of reading in psychoanalytical notions, the author takes into consideration various conceptualizations of the act of reading.
Assuming as his departure point the traditional understanding of theory as a systemic praxis which is both ordered and order-inducing, he concurrently indicates its discursive shortcomings and limitations. Furthermore, the author claims that the paradoxical (by virtue of being entangled in methodology) condition of psychoanalytical reading in fact facilitates the confrontation with one’s own, real “lining” that shatters methodological as well as systemic pursuits of a theoretician. Yet, the meeting of such a supplemental theory with the text results in the experience of trauma pressuring a reader/theoretician into a radical redefining of their subjectivity.
The pivot of the theory advanced by the author is the figure of forgetting, and therefore, the act of reading itself should involve forgetting, for instance about institutional knowledge, being oblivious to téchne, but also forgetting one’s duties towards manifold interpretive communities. This attempt at describing the “motoric” of reading as a process of continuous forgetting, of constant relinquishing memory (and rereading of the past), may be, on the one hand, perceived as a revolutionary transgression of the fossilized academic discourse, but on the other, as a risk-encumbered endeavour by which one can maintain the very discourse intact. What seems to be at stake here, is the proper status of the psychoanalytical theory. According to the author, the only genuine revolution which is to be prompted by psychoanalysis, is the one taking place in the field of literary studies and within the creative act of reading. And along the same lines, the only (relatively sovereign) subject psychoanalysis is able to constitute, is a mature, fully-fledged reader who, by the passage to the act (passage à l'acte) of reading, truly revolutionizes, from within of the academic discourse, her own subject as well as the Other.
In the analytical part of the dissertation, the author attempts to capture the essence of Tadeusz Różewicz’s poetry through a prism of Lacanian gaze theory. He also proposes a psychoanalytical reading of the Polish political subject emerging from the writings of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz. Additionally, the author takes the liberty to read “illegally” a novella by Henry Sienkiewicz Janko Muzykant, to conclude with rereading of the figure of the father central to Bruno Schultz’s oeuvre. |