A Stick, a Sparrow, a Kettle. The Non-Human Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz: Between the Pre- and Meta-Pre-Posthumanistic Approach to the Problem

The text proposes a rereading of Witold Gombrowicz’s Kosmos (1965) in the posthumanistic perspective. It puts forth a thesis that the novel contains pre- and, in a way, meta-posthumanistic features, and, through them, it problematizes this way of perceiving reality. The article proposes to look at the narrator’s message as at a “report” on an experiment that has not turned out to be quite successful, but it opens a new, tempting perspective. In this experiment the human subject is situated in a world in which things perceived by him and real things turn out to be “for a while” (or maybe since forever) parts of the same universe without form or content, interior or exterior, not succumbing to hierarchization in categories of subordination or superiority, almost equally endowed in the power of agency, if by this we mean setting the world in motion (in a sense - creating meaning).

Article Title	Type	Size
08 Gosk	[pdf]	[124 KB]