Cutting the Romantic’s Throat: Witkacy’s Nasty Nightmare

• Authors: Lease Bryce
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This text, based on Witkacy’s The Anonymous Work, explores the devastating effects of revolution and the mode in which altruistic causes function as pretenses for power mongering. Witkacy exposes the mechanisms of ideology, the hopelessness of a large-scale utopian revolution. It is in Plasmonick’s ability to traverse his fantasy to overcome his love for Rosa, whose ideological interpellation is strictly contained within the coordinates of Romantic ideals, that Witkacy leaves behind the Romantic universe, the symbolic network that refuses to renounce the desire for desire. In so doing, Witkacy exposes the paradox of Romanticism: freedom and desire are exclusive; the metonymic nature of desire is always-already related directly to the subject’s fundamental fantasy, that inaccessible kernel which anchors the subject to his social field.

Keywords

EN

Witkacy’s "The Anonymous Work"; Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz; Witkacy; ideology; utopian revolution; the paradox of Romanticism

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii - Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Estetyka i Krytyka
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 4(31)
• Pages: 155-165

Dates

published

2013

Contributors

author

Lease Bryce

• University of Exeter

Identifiers

ISSN

1643-1243