The article encourages treating an image of a gesture as a complex cultural event – a communication process, where following interpretations of an image reconfigure the initial gesture. This requires treating a presented gesture in terms of an argument, that is – as a political issue. As we embrace this approach by analysing Reytan’s gesture known from the Matejko’s famous painting, the article calls for a methodology of observing gesture while emphasising not its memory, but rather its amnesia, meaning the alternatives forgotten (psychologically repressed) in the process of gesture’s development.
In my text, I ask—investigating mainly the works of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Kafka— if humanity empowered by kinship or even contamination with other species would be a sick society, frail and ill-selected, or whether it would rather be a society which is active and audacious, devoid of the traces of resentment towards other living beings. I analyze the mono-individual species (the term was formulated by Lévi-Strauss) on the basis of examples which are clinical (Freud’s Hans, Sándor Ferenczi’s little Arpad), literary (Kafka’s Gregor Samsa), and also those borrowed from mass culture (Spider- Man and Batman) in order to illustrate the course of the process of domestication of the animal as well as the dedomestication of the human and their consequences for delineating an uncertain boundary between a human and an animal in the contemporary world.
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