Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrop

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Volume 15 Davor Löffler Boyan Manchev Jules Joanne Gleeson Jose Rosales Andrew Culp Steph Schem Rogerson Gilles Grelet Anne-Françoise Schmid Narciso Aksayam Piotr Szczesny Bogna M. Konior Paulo Ricardo Vidal Stanimir Panayotov Senka Anastasova No. 1-2 / 2018

IV. DOSSIER: PIOTR SZCZĘSNY (1968-2017) Piotr Szczęsny (1968-2017) was a Polish chemist, a training officer, an NGO worker and a member of the Polish Mensa Society. In his youth, he took part in the Solidarity protests, but - according to his own assessment - his engagement with politics had been casual. He was never part of the formal opposition movements in Poland. On October 19, 2017, he selfimmolated in protest of Poland’s ruling party, PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [Law and Justice]). He died at the hospital ten days later. His self-immolation caused an emotional debate in the Polish media, with commentators on both sides of the political spectrum accusing him of being mentally ill. He is survived by his two children, both of whom were doctoral candidates at the time of his death, and a wife he spent thirty years with, who is a pharmacist.

Piotr Szczęsny | Leaflet of October 19, 2017 Leaflet of October 19, 2017 |Piotr Szczęsny ing the law, especially the Polish Constitution. I object to any of those responsible (including the President) taking any steps whatsoever towards changing the Constitu- Translator’s Note Translated here is Piotr Szczęsny’s farewell letter (list pożegnalny), as Polish media called it; it is often referred to as a “manifesto.” Szczęsny distributed it as a leaflet to passers-by before setting himself on fire shortly after 4PM on October 19, 2017, near the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. On that day, a meeting of the Warsaw City Council was held at the Palace, with the participation of Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of PiS, whose policies Szczęsny wanted to oppose. In the leaflet, he addresses many of the recent policies of the Polish government, accusing them of authoritarianism and taking orders from the ruling party rather than following democratic protocols. The translation is based on the original publication in Oko.Press, October 19, 2017, www.oko.press/piotr-s-szary-czlowiek-zyje-czescpamieci. tion - let them first respect the existing one. 4. I object to a model of governance in which those in the highest positions of power carry out the orders of a vaguelydefined organizational command center tied to the PiS party chairman, evading any responsibility for their decisions. I object to a legislative process in the Parliament in which bills are drafted hastily, without debate and appropriate consideration, often at night, and then are necessarily and immediately re-drafted. 5. I object to the marginalization of Poland in the international arena and to making a mockery out of our country. Bogna M. Konior 6. I object to the destruction of the natural environment, especially by those who are supposed to protect it (the logging of 1. I object to the restriction of civil rights by the government. 160 2. I object to breaking the binding rules of democracy and to the factual destruction of the Constitutional Tribunal and of the system of independent courts. 3. I object to the government break the Białowieża forest and other environmentally precious territories, favoritism shown to the hunting lobby, promoting the use of energy derived from coal). 7. I object to creating or amplifying social divides. I especially object to the construction of the “Smolensk religion” and

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 using it to divide the population. I pro- I have been listening to since my youth. test the seances of hatred that the monthly 13. I object to utilizing the special commemorations of the Smolensk events had forces, the police and the prosecutor’s of- become, and the language of xenophobia and fice in the pursuit of one’s own (party or hatred introduced by the government into private) interests. public discourse. 14. I object to the careless, negli- 8. I object to [the government] filling gent, and ill-prepared educational reform. all possible positions with [party] affili- 15. I object to the ignoring of the ates, who, to a great extent, do not possess enormous protests of our health sector pro- the necessary qualifications. fessionals. 9. I object to the diminishing of the accomplishments and to the slander of au- I could level many more objections at the thorities, such as Lech Wałęsa, or the pre- current government, but I have concentrated on vious chairmen of the Constitutional Tribu- the most pertinent [issues] that threaten to nal. undermine entirely the existence and workings cen- of society and the state. I am not appealing tralization of the state and to legislative directly to the current government because I changes that conform local governments and believe that any such actions would be futile. NGOs to the political needs of the ruling Many who were smarter and better-known 10. I object to the excessive than I am, as well as many Polish and European 11. I object to the government’s hos- tility to immigrants and oppose the discrimination of various minority groups: women, homosexuals and other LGBT people, Muslims, and others. 12. I object to the complete incapacitation of the public television and almost the whole of the radio, and to turning them into tools of propaganda. I am especially devastated by the destruction (thankfully, not yet total) of Trójka, the radio station institutions, have already appealed to the government, requiring it to take various actions. These appeals were invariably ignored and those who made them were slandered. Most probably, I too, will be slandered for what I have done. But at least I will find myself in good company. I would, however, wish that the chairman of PiS and PiS’s high representatives understand that my death weights directly on them, and that they have my blood on their hands. I address this call to all Poles who decide who governs Poland, to oppose the actions 161 party.

Piotr Szczęsny | Leaflet of October 19, 2017 of the current government, which I myself am neighbors, friends and colleagues. This is not protesting against. Do not be deceived by the about waging a war on them (this is what PiS fact that their actions might occasionally calm would want) in order to “convert them” (that or have the appearance of normality (as has re- would be naïve), but to appeal to them to carry cently been the case) - in a few days or weeks out their beliefs according to the rule of law they will continue with their offensive, and and of democracy. Perhaps it would be enough to again break the law. They will not retreat or change the leadership of the party. surrender what they have already acquired. Although this saying is admittedly well- appeal to all of you - do not wait any longer! worn, it is fitting here: if not us, then who? This government needs to change as soon as pos- Who, if not us citizens, is supposed to bring sible, before it completely destroys our coun- order to our country? If not now, then when? With every moment of delay, the situation in the country worsens and it becomes harder to repair the damage. Most of all, I appeal to those who support PiS to wake up. Even if you sympathize with their postulates, consider that not every method of their realization is admissible. Realize your ideas within the bounds of the rule of law in a democratic state, and not as they are currently being realized. I call to action those of you who do not 162 I, a common, ordinary man, just like you, try, before it completely deprives us of freedom. And it is freedom I love above everything else. This is why I decided to self-immolate hoping that my death will shake the conscience of many, that our society will wake up and that you will no longer wait for politicians to do everything for you - because they will not! Wake up! It is not too late! It can be expected that PiS will attempt to diminish my protest and search for some kind of leverage over me. I had decided to make this task easy and point out the primary problem myself. support PiS, remain neutral or have other [po- I have been suffering from depression for litical] preferences. It is not enough to wait several years, which makes me a so-called “men- and see what time will bring. It is not enough tally ill” person. And yet, there are million to express discontent to your friends. You have people like me in Poland and they are able to to act. There are possibilities for action, and live their lives more or less normally, often those actions could take a lot of forms. their illness not been known. I implore you, however, to remember that Furthermore, the term “mental illness” the PiS electorate are our mothers, brothers, can also refer to ailments such as insomnia or

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 stuttering, therefore not directly signaling mental incompetence. The issues certainly related to my illness are eating and sleeping disorders, low energy, the tendency to postpone everything (procrastination), and that I perceive reality as bleaker than most “normal” people. But in this situation, it is fine, because it lets me notice worrying signals before others would and react to them in a more decisive manner. And perhaps it is also easier for me to sacrifice my life, even though, I assure you, it is not easy at all. What else can I add - views such as mine are expressed by many in my surroundings, publicists, politicians, thus they cannot be rooted in my skewed view of reality. And why such a radical form of protest? Because the situation is dramatic. This is not about the fact that the government makes many or some mistakes (every government does), but that this government shakes the foundations of our sovereignty and the functionality of our society. Meanwhile most of the society is asleep, paying no attention to what is happening, and Translated from the Polish by Bogna M. Konior 163 it needs to awaken from this slumber.

Piotr Szczęsny | Letters to the Media of October 20, 2017 Letters to the Media of October 20, 2017 |Piotr Szczęsny On December 13 [1981] I was already a university student, I had been up until noon handing out my first leaflets. Under martial law Translator’s Note Along with the leaflet, Piotr Szczęsny wrote two short letters, referred to as “Letters to the Media.” They were handed over by Szczęsny’s family to the major media outlets and published on October 20, 2017. The translation is based on the original publication in Oko.Press, October 20, 2017, www.oko.press/piotr-s-szary-czlowiek-zyje-czescpamieci. [1981-1983] I did what millions of others did in Poland - handed out leaflets, went to demonstrations, listened to Radio Free Europe, burned candles in my window. On June 4, 1989, I participated with joy in the first partially free elections and in all the subsequent ones. My contribution to regaining independence has been microscopic, I am ashamed that I Bogna M. Konior have thus far done so little for my Motherland. And I know that I need to change it. First Letter Second Letter I have done so little for my Motherland. I am ashamed to explain that Poland is I was born in 1963, which puts me in a I am ashamed to have a President, who is Solidarność, the regaining of independence and the president of his party and its supporters the forming of our democracy. Because of that,I only, and who breaks the constitution (the ve- can better evaluate the current events. toing of two unconstitutional bills, only in I was still in high school when Solidarność was ignited. And in this high school, alongside my classmates, we started an Independent 164 not the same as the Polish government. good position to remember PRL,1 to remember Students’ Union, for there was no way to join Solidarność for underage students. order to propose two other, still unconstitutional bills, is no redemption). I am ashamed to have a Prime minister who follows party orders. I am ashamed to explain to my western friends that Poland is not the same as the Pol- Polish People’s Republic, the official name of Poland between 1952 and 1989; translator’s note. 1 ish government.

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 I am ashamed to have to use again the term “nomenclature” and the phrase “the party and the government” as in the times of PRL. I am ashamed to witness the defamation of people who earned nothing but respect for what they have done for free Poland. Translated from the Polish by 165 Bogna M. Konior

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act |Bogna M. Konior Bionote Bogna M. Konior is the Media and Technology editor at the Hong Kong Review of Books, editorial board member of Oraxiom: A Journal of NonPhilosophy, and the director of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Asia. She was recently a visiting researcher in Media and Culture at the ICON Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, and is lecturer at the Department of Cultural Studies in Lingnan University. Her work in media cultures and the Anthropocene is published in Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture and forthcoming in PostMemes from Punctum Press. She hold a BA in Film Studies, a RMa in Media Studies, and a PhD in Cultural Analysis. Her collaborative work exploring theory in the Anthropocene has been exhibited internationally and can be viewed at www.bognamk.com. Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University 166 bognakonior@gmail.com Abstract Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire in protest of the Polish government in October 2017. Charged with political orientation, his selfimmolation posed a challenge to the news media, forcing it deep into the gutter the suicide archive, where commentators debated appropriate aesthetics of protest in a country whose image- ry is predominately thanatic; in a nation-state that has been resurrected after its many occupations yet still remains within a sacrificial grave, with death as the cornerstone of community. In this article, I situate Szczęsny’s death within the nightmare-bound post-Soviet political scene through historically contextualizing the debate around his suicide, where the act itself was criticized on the basis of its inappropriate aesthetics of irrational selfharm. I argue that such binding of a/political catastrophe in a bundle of representations corresponds to what François Laruelle calls media intellectualism, a form of engaging suffering that relies on its mediation. Seeking an alternative discourse of engaging the a/political act, I look to Katerina Kolozova’s non-standard politics of pain and to Oxana Timofeeva’s work on “the catastrophe.” These positions, which I call stances of the unsubject, offer us different starting points for creating solidarity in spaces of void, pain and depression. For the unsubject, pain is the prerequisite for forming the political, albeit in a non-standard manner, where politics cannot oscillate around representations, ideologies or identities. Rather than mediate self-immolation, I ask whether the way that we define “the political” could benefit from a subtraction of mediation, from a catastrophic thinking in parallel with the brutality of the real, rather than the repetition of (national) trauma.1 1 The author wishes to thank Michał Piasecki for providing

Identities Somnambulic Fatalism Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 1989, he explains that his fellow citizens must “wake up” before their fundamental and recently We project onto the future what we can- acquired freedoms have eroded. He laments the not endure as something which already ruling party’s unconstitutional behavior, op- occurred, or which is happening now […] pression of women and minorities, homo- and A fear of the future and anxiety about xenophobia, attacks on the independence of the some indefinite event (“we will all die”) legislative system and the media. In a sepa- is easier to suffer than a certain, ir- rate letter sent to the major Polish news chan- reparable, and irreversible horror that nels, he explains that he blames himself for has just happened (“we are all already not doing enough as a political citizen. He dead”). 2 expresses an outdated impulse to annex Poland Piotr Szczęsny was fifty-four when he set terms, he spells out a temporal fornication; himself on fire in front of the Palace of Cul- in his admonitory vision time loops backwards ture and Science in downtown Warsaw on October into the clutches of authoritarianism. In the 19, 2017. We know little about him. He was a letters to the media, he gives no orders about chemist and a member of Mensa International. He how he wants to be represented, only explana- is survived by his children and wife, a pharma- tions for what he knows will be judged insane. cist to whom he was married for thirty years. He hopes not to attract the attention of those To the passersby, he handed out his manifesto, in power but of citizens whom he believes to be as the media later dubbed it, a document as in slumber. dramatic and archaic in style as the form of Perhaps it is in this desperate yet chaste protest that he chose. In it, next to the oft- call to “wake up” that the tragedy of his under- repeated accusations against the Polish ruling taking rests. It would be a mistake to perceive party, which has been gradually dismantling the any resemblance between Szczęsny’s alarm and the democratic structures built by their predeces- millennial tokenization of wokeness, for which sors since the first partially free elections in the Internet and social media have become the his expertise and assistance in the process of writing this article. 2 Oxana Timofeeva, “The End of the World: From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back,” e-flux, No. 56 (June 2014), www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60337/the-end-of-the-world-fromapocalypse-to-the-end-of-history-and-back. most fertile performance ground. Szczęsny’s act exists within a divergent media paradigm, which cannot be apprehended without first theorizing the void onto which his words fell. Poland, by 167 to the aspirational “West.” In no uncertain

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act its historical circumstance, is a nation of concept of transpassivity to describe Polish somnambulists - as Andrzej Leder writes, Polish political cognizance: “everything is happening political consciousness is trapped in a dream- as if of its own accord, beyond the subject’s state, where agency has been sworn off in favor power” and yet the subject can experience, vi- of patient submission to the violent forces of cariously, both the pleasure and the violence 3 history, which obey only their own logic. With inherent in the Other’s doing.4 Violence is the its turbulent past over the last three centu- kernel of this Polish paradigm of mediation, ries, contemporary Poland perceives itself as where obscure pleasure nests itself in dis- trapped between traumatic hurricanes of his- placed experiences of death and murder. tory. Leder describes how the Polish imagina- Removing any agency from itself, Polish tion dreamt through (prześnić) immense economic politics is not, however, a detached astral changes under Nazi and Soviet rule, resigning body: it is rather trapped in the terrifying itself to detachedly observing grim revolutions vulnerability of sleep paralysis, where, de- carried out by alien hands. The violent dis- spite the subject’s presence, every “revolu- possession of Jews and the elites, who owned a tion is experienced [in the Polish society] large share of land, and the transfer of wealth as a nightmare.”5 The Polish political psyche to the peasantry between 1939 and 1956 practi- thus emerges at the crossroads between Scien- cally gave birth to the Polish middle classes tology (alien presences within us, un-exorcized and yet it remains unregistered in the symbolic specters of communism, and “Jewish” tendencies sphere: what is remembered is Poland’s own bel- in our ruling classes) and Slavic resignation licose struggle for independence, paid for with to the meaninglessness of all struggle, for the blood of millions of Poles. It is no ac- the awakening must be forever postponed. Sleep cident that only a few months after Szczęsny’s paralysis: the violent Other is the determi- death, the government sought to criminalize any nant of all history. Awakening: Poland has to reference to the Polish state’s participation 168 in the Holocaust, thus creating a news storm that Szczęsny’s singular death could never induce. One cannot be persecuted for what alien hands have carried out. Leder evokes Lacan’s Andrzej Leder, Prześniona rewolucja: Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013). 3 Leder, Prześniona, 20 (all translation from Polish are mine, here and below). Leder draws on the work of Daniel J. Goldhagen who analyzed the participation of regular Germans in Nazi crimes. Goldhagen focused on the possibility of vicariously experienced pleasure in the acts of violence carried out by others. See Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). 5 Leder, Prześniona, 16. 4

Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 face the living nightmare of the void. Between we should speak instead of a nightmare-bound folksy fantasies of the Sarmatian manor house subject stuck in the waking life of somnambulic and aspirational belonging to the Western demo- fatalism: what has happened so far has been a cratic elite, there lies only the nothingness nightmare but wakefulness is worse yet. Per- of an unregistered social transformation, which haps this is why, in the post-USSR, we can also never birthed a coherent national identity, but find the Russian necro-realists who practiced a rather is itself a vacuum around which Polish- “politics of indistinction,” considering them- ness oscillates. Some of the most popular Polish selves as not belonging to any particular na- Internet memes reflect this sense of groundless- tion or politics because they did not consider ness: “Poland is not a country, it’s a state of themselves alive.9 mind.” At the end of the nineteenth century, If Szczęsny’s call to awakening must fall when Poland really did not exist on the map on deaf ears, it is the fire in which he clothed of Europe, French surrealist Alfred Jarry set his stubborn, frail body that sentenced him to his play Ubu Roi “in Poland, that is to say a double misfortune as soon as the Polish media 6 Nowhere.” If the African American subject is, machine awoke to the event, spewing images of as Abdul R. JanMohamed writes, “death-bound,” I heroism and illness like a spider spins its web would say that the Polish subject - or perhaps around a fly. If asleep during its entry into in some cases the post-Soviet one - is “night- the twentieth century, Poland developed its na- mare-bound.” 7 For JanMohamed the death-bound tional imagination under the partitions (1772- subject is “a deeply aporetic structure to the 1918). Colonized by three different empires extent that he is ‘bound,’ and hence produced - Russia, Prussia, and Austria - the country as a subject, by the process of unbinding,” solidified its political imagery in Romanticism; where the slave can be in two ways: to remain a the struggle for independence was tied with slave or to die, a choice between two modes of the thanatic imagery of combat, martyrdom, mes- death. In the post-Nazi, post-Soviet condition sianism, and sacrifice. The debate between our 6 two greatest Romantic poets, Juliusz Słowacki 8 Alfred Jarry, The Ubu Plays, trans. by Kenneth McLeish (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000), 65. 7 Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005). 8 Jan Mohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 2. JanMohamad also draws on the concept of social death, where the slave’s powerlessness is the extension of the master’s power and as such the slave is subject to death at any moment. and Adam Mickiewicz, whose statue stands beSee Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). 9 Alexei Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia. The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 2008), 199224. 169 Identities

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act fore the Palace where Szczęsny died, on whether apprehended as symbols of Polish identi- revolution is a matter of organized collective ty, such as the Motherland, freedom, na- action or individual sacrifice not only comple- tional solidarity. With structural changes mented political discourse; but it became that in politics and economy, aimed at turning discourse, with politics and poetry superposed Poland into a “normal,” democratic, free- onto one another. (Poland has as many stat- market country, this peculiar homogeneity ues devoted to poets and artists as it has to has been challenged.12 war heroes: aesthetics was war. Any respectable Polish government must have at least some art- No wonder, then, that the Polish media ists on its side.) Maria Janion, influenced by focused its commentary on the aesthetics of psychoanalysis, created a method for the type Szczęsny’s protest, explicitly or implicitly of critique that engages Polish society pri- rejecting or embracing pagan Catholicism, ide- marily on the level of the imagined: phantas- alistic pessimism and Romantic symbolism. Ag- For nieszka Holland, influential Polish filmmaker who Janion, the phantasm, an interstitial area in had lately directed episodes of House of Cards which the subject weaves fantastic worlds into (2013-) and a Jan Palach biopic titled Burning material ones, is the locus of culture, both Bush (2013), ecstatically celebrated Szczęsny emancipatory and manipulative. However, after as a modern-day prophet, “more sensitive than 1989, anticipating Francis Fukuyama’s thesis any of us [...] fire annihilates but - just on “the end of history,” Janion proclaimed the like anger - it also shines bright, lighting matic critique (krytyka fantazmatyczna). demise of the phantasmatic: 10 11 the way,” she wrote.13 A large opposition party, PO (Platforma Obywatelska [Civic Platform]) likewise (at times) embraced this act, turning och in Polish culture, the epochal ascend- Szczęsny into a symbolic guillotine over the ancy of the Romantic-symbolic style. For head of the ethno-nationalist ultra-Catholic the last two hundred years, our culture PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [Law and Justice]). organized itself around spiritual values, Marches were held, dirges sung, even po- 170 [1989 is] the symbolic end of a grand ep- 10 Maria Janion, Projekt krytyki fantazmatycznej: Szkice o egzystencjach ludzi i duchów (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo PEN, 1991). 11 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 12 Janion, Projekt, 6. Agnieszka Holland, “Agnieszka Holland o samospaleniu Piotra: ‘Ogień niszczy, ale też oświetla drogę,’” OKO Press, October 22, 2017, www.oko.press/agnieszka-hollando-samospaleniu-piotra-ogien-niszczy-tez-oswietla-gniew. 13

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 ems were written. Szczęsny’s words, where he relapse rather than a challenge to the dominant calls himself “a common, regular man” (zwykły, rhetoric. Death, freedom, sacrifice and resur- szary człowiek) were projected onto the build- rection are the most pervasive memes in Polish ings of Warsaw, solemn and imperative. His face political culture. Since 2010, as Szczęsny him- landed on the cover of the biggest opposition self notices, PiS has been building a pseudo- newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. His funeral was de- religion around the Smolensk plane crash, when livered by one of Poland’s most vocal opposi- a Tupolev heading from Poland to Russia to tion priests, Adam Boniecki, who later received commemorate the Katyn massacre - a mass mur- a short-term media appearance ban from the Pol- der of 22,000 Polish citizens by the soviets, ish Catholic Church. An engraving was made in many of them intellectuals of military officers, front of the Palace. Mementos were sold at a big crashed, killing ninety-six officials, includ- charity fundraiser. This kind of mythologizing ing the President and the First Lady. Amidst did not fare well with the Polish intellectual conspiracy theories and growing anti-liberal liberal left, gathered around publications such sentiment, Poles elected the deceased presi- They re- dent’s brother, Jarosław Kaczyński, to power. jected Szczęsny’s act, not only arguing that It was not long before traditionalist, Catholic he was mentally ill but also condemning the thinkers transmitted to us this conspiratory dramatic rhetoric of his death. In the rational prophecy from their corner of the Internet: liberal discourse, they argued, there is no Katyn was now twice-christened by the blood place for Szczęsny; such irrationality turns of Polish martyrs, the crash took place on “us” into “them,” retorts to the same arsenal the vigil of the Sunday of Divine Mercy, our of archaic patriotism, martyrdom and suffering saint stigmatic Faustyna Kowalska spoke with that PiS built its populist platform on. 15 the words of Christ himself when she said: Indeed, next to the party’s passionate tenfold blessed will be Poland if it suffers resurrection of patriotic martyrdom, Szczęsny’s for the fulfilment of the divine plan (my para- death seems to be a symptom of a phantasmatic phrase). Enforcing Poland’s self-perception as 14 the great martyr of history, Tomasz Terlikows- A note here: I focus my analysis of the left mainly on the example of critics writing for Kultura Liberalna and Dwutygodnik, yet by no means is this an exhaustive account, simply an attention to the main strand of criticism. 15 Tomasz Sawczuk, “Nie wchodźmy w buty prawicy!,” Kultura Liberalna, November 14, 2017, www.kulturaliberalna. pl/2017/11/14/sawczuk-nie-wchodzmy-w-buty-prawicy. ki writes that through sacrificial suffering in Katyn, Poland will incarnate Christ.16 It is Tomasz Terlikowski, “Bojaźń i drżenie,” Salon24, April 16, 2010, www.salon24.pl/u/terlikowski/171531,bojazn-idrzenie. 16 171 as Kultura Liberalna or Dwutygodnik. 14

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act not mediation, but transubstantiation that defines the Polish right’s approach to politics, culture and national identity. An example: eager to accelerate the divine plan, to prepare itself as vessel for the resurrection of the undead god, the party had recently ceremonially crowned Christ the king of Poland.17 In this curious superposing of temporality, even our head of state has been dead for two thousand years - there is no escape from the phantasmatic graveyard. In an interview discussing Szczęsny’s death titled “Suicide Is Not Politics,” essayist Tomasz Stawiszyński observes that “Polish patriotism is steeped in these stories. Only death can facilitate collectivity. The specter of Thanatos haunts our political reality.”18 There is a fear on the left that “politicizing” this self-immolation would be akin to creating another hysterical counter-religion, wrapped around Szczęsny’s grave like a poisonous vine. One critic openly wrote that more dangerous than authoritarian policies is the fact that “the supposedly modern, rational and liberal opposition unknowingly uses “Oficjalnie: Jezus Chrystus ‘Królem Polski’ Prezydent, posłowie i 6 tys. ludzi wzięło udział w uroczystości,” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 19, 2016, www.wiadomosci. gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/7,114883,21000510,tlumy-naintronizacji-jezusa-na-krola-polski-uroczystosc-trwa. html. 18 Adam Puchejda and Tomasz Stawiszyński, “Samobójstwo to nie polityka,” Kultura Liberalna, November 14, 2017, www. kulturaliberalna.pl/2017/11/14/stawiszynski-puchejdasamospalenie-polityka. the language of Jarosław Kaczyński’s party!”19 That this is the main trajectory of criticism on the Polish liberal, educated left clearly shows that the loss of political identity, self-perception and image, the blurring of borders between the left and the right is what appears to be a far greater menace to the left than the policies of their government. In this, the Polish left is not so different from the Western left, focused on grooming its cultural identity. Assuming that there is no difference between unreasonable and apocalyptic, such defensive reactions affirmatively answer the question that David Chioni Moore posed over fifteen years ago: is the “post” in “post-colonial” the “post” in “post-Soviet?”20 For recently independent nation-states, the desire to join what leftist Polish refer to as “the Western liberal democratic family”21 rejects bodily terror and the body’s visceral thirst for annihilation as feral or primitive. Eager to uphold the image of a rational who holds in disdain populist, romantic imagery of sacrifice, the left argued that it was ill-mannered to have laid at their feet an ashen body that they had never filed an order for. 172 17 Łukasz Pawłowski, “Samospalenie. Polskość radykalna,” Kultura Liberalna, November 14, 2017, www.kulturaliberalna.pl/2017/11/14/piotr-Szczęsnysamospalenie-polityka-polska. 20 David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA, Vol. 116, No.1, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (January 2001), 111-28. 21 Pawłowski, Samospalenie. 19

Identities he appreciate once was reasonable, before the theatrical pop- mourning, sadness and grief, when it came to ulism that they are currently patiently endur- performances of political misery, Walter Ben- ing, confident, however, that this state of af- jamin already harshly criticized the inclusion fairs is temporary and things will eventually of self-satisfied suffering and victimization return to “normal,” that is, as before. into politics. 22 never failed to In her article “Resisting Left Self-immolation is not only an ethical Melancholy,” Wendy Brown picks this thread up problem. Charged with political orientation, to denounce the contemporary left, unable to it poses an epistemic challenge to the media, produce a coherent theoretical worldview, para- forcing it to delve into the tormented archive lyzed in its internal struggles over culture of suicide imagery in search of appropriate and identity, each with its hermeneutic vision representations. These trips down the sacri- of utopia. She admonishes “the revolutionary fice lane, often charted within the turmoils of hack who is more attached [to the failure of national trauma, release an ostensibly feral some kind of political ideal] than to seiz- unreason of self-harm, which in turn creates ing possibilities for radical change. [This fear around the loss of political identity. attachment] to the object of one’s sorrowful Szczęsny’s death forced Polish media and its loss supersedes any desire to recover from this flagship intellectuals knee-deep into the gut- loss.” 23 Ostensibly distancing themselves from irrationality, the reactions to ter of the suicide archive, where they debated Szczęsny’s appropriate aesthetics of protest in a country death ascribe to a similar logic. They seek to whose imagery is predominately thanatic; in a preserve an idealized Western democratic lib- nation-state that has been resurrected after eralism, well aware that to awake to a sense of its many occupations yet still remains within a void that constitutes Polish identity would a sacrificial grave, with messianic death ever irrevocably reveal no such belonging. They deem the cornerstone upon which community is to be the form of self-immolation to be too archaic built. How does a subject that remains para- and yet they remain likewise melancholic in lyzed on the edge of an identity void create their yearning for a return to a politics that representations of political death-drive appropriate for mass circulation? 22 Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästner’s New Book of Poems),” trans. by Ben Brewster, Screen, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 1974), 28-32. 23 Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1999), 19-27. 173 While Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act Media Intellectualism and that it never chose to be implicated, or obses- the Violence of Mediation sively polishing its own “liberal rationalist” image. Representations are bounced off one an- The victim is twice victim, once as other until nothing else is seen, their pri- wronged [...] and a second time by ef- mary stakes lay in debating appropriate forms facement, albeit legally, of the injury of protest, decay and death, ultimately turn- that had been suffered, an effacement ing the question of violence into one of an whose publicity offends the victim. 24 image of violence. Natalia Kaliś, for example, compared Szczęsny’s self-immolation to Marina As it circulated in the media, Szczęsny’s Abramović’s performances: both put spectators brutal death was rapidly repackaged as a to- in the uncomfortable position of witnessing ken, or better a ruler with which to measure self-harm.25 The sheer brutality of death was the intensity of political participation and obscured to then be resurrected within a for- the spectrum of convictions: where you stood malist media debate concerning the return of on Szczęsny was used to outline how far to the the Polish-Romantic phantasm and the interplay left or right you were, or even how much of an of political images. Such tokenization of the understanding you had of the Romantic phantasm victim, its overrepresentation in ideology and (which, if you had it, would naturally lead you image, François Laruelle argues, is the condi- to dismiss Szczęsny as yet another martyr). tion of media intellectualism today: 174 The act itself had been entirely overshadowed by the question: How would it reflect on us to The embrace this form of protest? Szczęsny’s sui- forgetting of its origins, of its neces- cide was parceled into political options: those sity, and its contingency. Like any term who embrace it are romantic liberals, those that sees its media moment arrive, the who reject it are manipulated by the imperial victim passes through a stage of expansion dismissal of unreason, those who mock it have and then of nausea, of ascendance, and of blood on their hands. Simulacra stripped down decline. By the time we grasp it, it is to its core: no longer able to think death, already perhaps too late; it is theoreti- politics writes itself out of it, protesting cally dubious, eroded by the media [...] 24 François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, trans. by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 64. victim’s overrepresentation is the Natalia Kaliś, “Samospalenie pod Statuą Niewolności,” Dwutygodnik (November 2017), www.dwutygodnik.com/ artykul/7477-samospalenie-pod-statua-niewolnosci.html. 25

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 As though it were miming and fabricating demise, its entry into the global imagination an artificial unconscious, media corruption in 1963 overlapped with the acceleration of the has made the victim a new ethical value, a global circulation of images, when a grainy, point of condescension and effervescence, black-and-white footage of the eerily calm Vi- of the exacerbation of ideological con- etnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức set- flict. Here are the affects proper to the ting himself on fire to protest the repressive excess Catholic regime in South Vietnam appeared on of information, like the that affects certain philosophers. nausea 26 television screens worldwide. Now easily found Those who kill themselves in protest can snuff films, it obscures the suffering inherent have death sewn onto their corpses like a re- in setting fire to one’s limbs. We see no pan- flexive straightjacket, binding them forever in icked flesh clinging to its own survival, only a a bundle of representations: a hero, a revo- man as calm as if he was meditating on an un- lutionary, a madman, a radical, a terrorist. eventful day. Unlike those who perish in large Under what conditions are these representations fires, most often suffocating after passing out created and circulated? What is the connection from carbon monoxide poisoning, the scattered between media and the kind of intellectual- fires of self-immolation burn unevenly through ism that, according to Laruelle, corrupts the the body. What causes death is a heat stroke victim to the “point of condescension and ef- that melts internal organs or an extraordinary fervescence, of the exacerbation of ideological gushing of blood through boiling flesh wounds. conflict”? And is it possible to think Szczęsny’s The Polish phantasm, oversaturated with mes- act without its many mediations? sianic images of romantic sacrifice, seems to To burn to death can take as long as thir- have little tools left at its disposal to com- teen minutes but most suffer excruciating pains prehend the sheer brutality of annihilation by long after, like Szczęsny, who died in a hospi- fire, even though two of the earliest recorded tal ten days after the initial five-minute-long self-immolations in Europe were committed by auto-cremation. In the tradition of suicide as Poles: Karol Levittoux burnt himself in 1841 political protest, self-immolation occupies a to protect his friends during an interroga- place spectacular, shocking, alluring and pain- tion, and priest Andrzej Fedukowicz reportedly ful. In splendor of both peaceful and violent set himself on fire in 1925, consumed by guilt over his collaboration with the Bolsheviks, who 26 Laruelle, General Theory, 1. 175 online, one of the Internet’s few uncensored

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act tortured him into obedience.27 Self-immolation monk in fifth century China wrote that the body then entered the arsenal of anti-USSR protest. was “like a poisonous plant; it would really be In 1968, Ryszard Siwiec set himself on fire to right to burn it,” to which emperor Liang Wudi protest the invasion of the Warsaw Pact mili- replied: taries into Czechoslovakia, in which another dissentient, Jan Palach, also burnt himself to When your body and life become imperma- death. His body ablaze, angrily pushing away nent, then you should have your corpse the militia, who tried to both rescue him from cast into the forest. By donating it to the the fire and obscure him from sight, Siwiec was birds and beasts one completely perfects - tragically - scarcely noticed by his fellow dânapâramitâ and also makes good karma. citizens, who were happily celebrating a public Because of the eighty thousand worms it holiday at a busy sports stadium. is not appropriate to burn yourself. It is not something to be encouraged.”29 Despite this history, perhaps because of the intransigence of political positions with which self-immolation is associated in Eastern The eminent monk and the devout emper- Europe, Poland has no interest in theorizing or thus debated whether the body should be this form of death. In the (much older) Chinese abandoned as a matter of principle in an act Buddhist tradition, for example, auto-cremation of will, or rather donated to eighty thousand falls under 遺身 (to abandon the body), a term worms in an act of exchange. And yet, this path that also covers contemplative violence pre- to Buddhahood was not only a sacral matter but sent in: feeding one’s body to insects or wild the monks’ political act of protest against the animals, starving or drowning oneself, leaping corruption of the ruling elites, who strayed from trees, or self-mummification.28 Daodu, a from the righteous path. Buddhist self-immolation can lead to Buddhahood, although for 176 27 Levittoux’s death was the subject of a few poems, including Burza, authored by one of Poland’s most esteemed national poets, Cyprian Kamil Norwid. Little is known and much disputed much is disputed about Fedukowicz, here I follow sociologist and priest Roman Dzwonkowski, Losy duchowieństwa katolickiego w ZSRR 1917-1939. Martyrologium (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1998). 28 James A. Benn, Burning for the Buddha. Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 9. many of the literati it was nothing more than a sorry manifestation of hysterical, overzealous mind of the faithful. Nevertheless, throughout the ages it was often performed in public spaces and, sometimes, generated respect and pious 29 Benn, Burning, 4.

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 reflection as well as political turmoil.30 In Po- tograph them in language, writing, or image.”32 land, however, metaphysical inquiry is left to “To photograph in language, writing or image” the stigmatics, while self-immolators are un- should not be understood as a taking of a phys- flinchingly political: they let flames turn their ical photo or putting words on a screen but bodies into screens, a combustion meant to pro- rather as an overdetermination, where victims duce a hologram of a violent world, a mediation are used as source material for representa- of state violence or the violence of foreign tions and interpretations that become more im- occupation. Could it then be possible to think portant than their original suffering. Laruelle Szczęsny’s death without this pervasive sense is no luddite: for him, contemporary “tele- of mediation inherent in Polish somnambulic fa- intellectuals” are as invested in representa- talism, the mediation of the Romantic phantasm, tion and mediation as Voltaire and Zola once the mediation, finally, of self-immolation it- were.33 Against overdetermination, the purpose violence? In General Theory of Victims, Laruelle describes how the victim is the new politicoquotidian doxa: the horrific events of the twentieth century turned philosophy into a great dramatizer of suffering; gradually the media, too, took up this figure to “bear witness” to it, ultimately overexploiting the images of victimhood for the pleasure and power of philosophy, with its self-proclaimed ability to give voice to the suffering of victims.31 He defines a media intellectual as any intellectual whose currency is in the creation of representations, images of non-philosophy would be to subtract representation rather than to qualify it, to think not about deciphering the victim and its motivations but think according to the silence of victims, their unrepresentability. It is this silence, this resistance to representation that most troubles media intellectuals: “the victim is too silent for the philosophers, those men of speech; that is the problem, and it is this victim’s silence that must be [according to them] interpreted by identifying it in a repeated mediatic display.”34 The media intellectual cannot bear the horror of this silence, nor can she draw power from it. and mediations of suffering, “who is engaged While specific instances of suffering and and embedded by power and who emerges through the media sphere are rarely discussed in the the press and the media and derives profit from volume true to Laruelle’s practice of thinking- this, is content to represent victims, to pho32 30 Ibid., 1-10. 31 Laruelle, General Theory, 2-3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 51. 34 Ibid., 70. 33 177 self as a holographic projection of political

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act without-example, Katerina Kolozova’s work, in an unsubject, a subject undone: pain is a void its explicit focus on physical pain, articu- that suspends all meaning, all worldly affairs. lates a (non-)political practice that I want to This lived pain is generic and unknowable, it consider in relation to Szczęsny. In her non- resists any representation, even though phi- philosophy, rooted in the brutality of physical losophy wants to make zombies of all humans, pain and shared horror of recognizing the in- parading them around as identities for its own difference of the real to suffering, the sharp benefit. For Kolozova, then, only negating all shock of pain is the prerequisite for forming the representations piled up on the lived suf- the political, albeit in a non-standard man- fering can create solidarity and compassion: ner, where politics do not oscillate around ideologies or identities.35 Kolozova amplifies The Laruelle to argue that humans (not as subjects, victim, the one produced by the media and but as generic humanity without the shroud of the intellectuals who represent the vic- representations) are defined by the possibility tim, pretends to be the reality of the - and, for many, actuality - of being tortured, victims persecuted solidarity lated to identify with these images and stems from a bodily, mute avoidance of this the meanings assigned to them [...] The violence from the position of the lived (le media are one of the most powerful and vécu), stripped to the brutality of indifferent most active “machines” of the production real, beyond the veils of philosophical meaning of philosophical images (or of the ruling and signification: “It is the real of the radi- representation in and of the world which cal vulnerability and immanent revolting. The dictate our actions). The more they seek inexhaustible force of revolt is not based in to be realistic the more detached from the philosophy or in the world - it is situated in real they are.37 and pained. Political philosophically suffering mediated and one is idea of a interpel- the radical opposition to it, it acts from the 178 standpoint of the lived.”36 We could call this 35 Katerina Kolozova, The Lived Revolution: Solidarity with the Body in Pain as the New Political Universal (Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2010). 36 Katerina Kolozova, “Of the Possibility of Immanent Revolt as Theory and Political Praxis,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (2013), 95. Such media intellectualism envelops Szczęsny’s death in a threefold manner: formalizing it and focusing on aesthetics; debating the crime committed or not committed by the politicians; discussing what reflections this 37 Ibid., 96.

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 death can cast on activists, intellectuals and of these narratives, not only in Poland. They cultural actors who use or decline to use it. focus on the legacy of a harmful past, because The closer it wants to get to death, the less it is easier to believe in the restoration of it can grasp it. It fits in neatly with all some kind of a lost order than to look beyond the practices of mediation inherent in Polish the horizon of disintegration: of societies, of history that I outlined before. While liberal nature itself in consequence of climate change, intellectuals specifically want to dissociate of the organization of labor, and even humanity themselves from exalted unreason of symbolism, following mass automation. Although she does they, too, cannot help but to practice a media- not follow on that thought, Agnieszka Holland tion of the lived. mentions in her commentary on Szczęsny that Catastrophic Revolt scale - the data revolution, comparable to the Ultimately, Szczęsny’s act cannot escape industrial revolution in the nineteenth cen- the confines of media intellectualism because tury, the consequences of which were two world Poland keeps enacting its own trauma - the wars; globalization, which excavates all kinds dream of the Other who controls history, of of stubborn fears around losing national iden- Romantic messianism, or of aspirational belong- tity; and the emancipation of women, which, if ing to the West - without confronting what lies followed through, could be a profound challenge underneath: the void of the unsubject, frozen to the current economic organization of the under the partitions of history and paralyzed world.39 It is not despite but because of these in the nightmare of transpassive mediation of seismic changes that, fanatically, the past violence. In “The End of the World: From Apoca- echoes through the present, projecting itself lypse to the End of History and Back,” Oxana into a promise: make “something” great again, Timofeeva writes that national narratives of remedy the harm that has been done to protect a traumatic past “serve to establish an idea from the violence to come. Nostalgia, founded of the present, which can be cured, and of the in obsessive repetition of trauma, is why even future, which by this remedy can be saved.”38 an event as brutal as self-immolation cannot Such mantras of unjust past wounds stabilize break through the wall of media intellectual- the fantasy of redemption or recovery. No wonder that these days we can find a proliferation 38 Timofeeva, “The End of the World.” ism. What is Timofeeva’s solution? 39 Agnieszka Holland and Lukasz Pawlowski, “Musisz krzyczeć coraz głośniej,” Kultura Liberalna, November 14, 2017, www.kulturaliberalna.pl/2018/01/02/agnieszkaholland-wywiad-polityka-pis-opozycja. 179 the changes happening around us are of an epic

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act I propose instead of trauma, to talk about Szczęsny’s suicide are based on the exact op- catastrophe. The difference between the posite idea: that there exists a stable ground, two is that one cannot really recover af- a deviation from which is aberrant and there- ter a catastrophe, as one normally recov- fore apolitical. Tomasz Stawiszyński warns to ers after a trauma. Catastrophe is meta- not lose touch with “real” politics or “you traumatic. It happens absolutely: at the will find yourself part of David Koresh’s sect, beginning there is - there was, always al- surrounded by FBI agents because you took seri- ready the end [...] You cannot change any- ously apocalyptic prophecies about the end of thing; the worst is what just happened. 40 civilization.”42 In this scenario, apocalypse equals political autophagy and only a specific This might sound not only terrifying but brand of politics, such as voting, can make a also unviable: how could we live with a sense change. From such a stable ground, political of an all-pervasive catastrophe? And yet Timo- commentary turns into one of measurement and feeva pushes our thinking in that direction: approximation: just, enough, still, not yet. not only she would disagree with complaints of Stawiszyński further writes: no one is in jail the Polish liberal left that apocalyptic think- yet, we still have our passports, the situation ing is apolitical, she would argue the exact has not yet warranted this form of protest.43 opposite. The root of the word apokalypsis, For Timofeeva, the opposite: the worst has al- from Greek, denotes revelation or unraveling of ways just happened, it is worse than nothing a certain reality: “as far as it unveils (i.e., and better than nothing, the catastrophe is unveils what is), etymologically, the apoca- where we come from and where we are heading. To replace trauma with Perhaps this catastrophic thinking could create catastrophism would thus mean to say neither a generic, incomprehensible ground of solidar- that it will get better nor that it will get ity, one without empathy and without ever fully worse. It is rather to see that it is already understanding one another. Catastrophe means worse but - I would add - worse than nothing knowing the indifference of the real to suffer- since qualitative comparisons lose their power ing, recognizing its brutality and ongoing vio- in face of an ever-repeating end of the world. lence, which manifests in the world constantly, Not worse than, just worse. The criticisms of not only in the spectacular events, such as 41 180 lypse is always now.” Puchejda and Stawiszyński, “Samobójstwo to nie polityka.” 43 Ibid. 42 Timofeeva, “The End of the World.” 41 Ibid. 40

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 suicide, that the media builds its intellec- fering of others originates from our tualism around. The indifferent real is what ability to identify with the pain of cannot be perceived, and yet, once glimpsed, the other body [...] In fact, the less cannot be unseen. We are undone by it and see we can recognize the other as human each other as unsubjects, or unsee each other [...] [t]he less we see a Subject in as subjects. Once encountered, this horror of control of the potentiality of violent indifference must necessarily inform all of our threat against the body, the more we thinking, creating no exception, admitting no are called upon acting towards its pro- possibility for a non-catastrophic life. tection: the level of vulnerability is For Kolozova, bodily pain and terror proportional with the absence of the masterful subject of humanity.45 occupies an important place within this horfor forming of (non-standard) politics, with- Such solidarity is built in the occlud- out identities or representations, before the ed reality of each painful encounter with the world’s mute indifference and incomprehensibil- real, for each person once each time. These ity. Pain is pre-discursive, it shreds signifi- encounters, although they escape signification, cation and meaning, it is what must necessarily are the fabric of the world. This is no univer- escape all media intellectualism, all attempts sal horror but rather a generic one, it unveils to bind it in image, language or interpreta- “internally according to the syntax of the real tion. Even for those living with chronic pain, of what took place”46 for each person that ex- it escapes the sphere of signification. As Mar- periences pain and violence. Kolozova gives us garet Atwood writes, “who can remember pain, an example of the Gezi park protests in 2013 once it is over? All that remains is a shadow to describe how the unmasking of violence is [...] in the flesh.” This radically solitary afterwards diluted by its media representation: experience of pain is - perhaps paradoxically the activist knew the truth of violence which - the prerequisite for solidarity: cannot be mediated and translated into a po- 44 litical agenda. Sheer revolt is at first anti… I would say that solidarity and po- political, not coherent, dictated only by real- litical responsibility toward the suf- ity, and yet it is the reason for the forming of 44 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002), 207. 45 46 Kolozova, The Lived Revolution, 114. Kolozova, “Of the Possibility,” 94. 181 rific recognition: it is pain that is the ground

Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act any recognizable politics further on. Timofeeva to the media he wrote that many suffer from allows many events into the catastrophic: what depression and live on. He added that what he people do to each other, what people do to the perceived anyone could see, in fact his criti- environment, but finally also the “catastrophe cisms had been voiced many times by others and of one’s own existence, the apocalypse of the therefore could not had been rooted exclusively now,” the senselessness of reality, which we in his mental disorder. He did, then, make a can glimpse holding together only by a shred plea to not overdetermine his pain through his of an inexplicable reason that permits without depression. Depression is the new hysteria, not 47 only in its commonality but also in its con- By its very indifference to human thought, en- nection to the bodies of those who are never counters with horrors of the real cannot be allowed political authority. To come back to spoken; this is a terror that ties our tongues the unfortunate comparison of Szczęsny’s death into knots, and yet we can recognize each other to Abramović’s art: throughout the history of in the shared obscurity of suffering, in the art, women who exposed their pained, fright- black-box of violence and in the thrust of ened, grotesque, abject bodies were accused of the unspeakable. Knowing this is an exercise perversity and hysteria, that old cunning dis- in non-relational co-suffering: not empathy, ease that once mysteriously affected females not understanding, but rather a thoroughgoing only, whether because the witches cursed the recognition of the obscurity of our struggles, uterus to stray inside the body, or because pa- the reasons and motivations for which we might triarchy perceived the feminine as inherently never grasp. unreasonable, untrustworthy. Like self-immola- 182 explanation the countless violence of life. Szczęsny intuited this, he knew that there tors, these women understood that their bodies was really no way of ever explaining why some- were akin to pathographic media that registered one would sentence himself to this most painful patriarchal violence. Sometimes violence tips of deaths. Perhaps this is why his impulse was over from mediation to transubstantiation: Ana to try and explain the unexplainable, to photo- Mendieta showed that womanhood is like a splash graph himself in language before others could. of blood on cold dirt and - tragically - she He admitted openly to suffering from depres- became just that, on the pavement outside her sion, a common illness that, he said, does not drunk husband’s apartment.48 Where, then, is prevent political engagement. In the letters 48 47 Timofeeva, “The End of the World.” Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a performance artist, who featured blood and pain prominently in her work. In the Silueta series she created forceful images, often in

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 the border between mental and physical pain, subjectivity, to feel at ease with the demand between individual turmoil and structural vio- of positivity and attainment of satisfaction lence of societies in which we live? When does through labor.50 What I believe is rarely con- depression cease to be an individual matter sidered is that this should include political and becomes a societal one? Kolozova notices labor. From his own words, we knew that Szczęsny that physical pain is, in fact, an element of felt that he had failed as a political subject. depression, despite its label as a mental ill- In a culture that is increasingly politicized, ness: and given his past work with pro-independence movements, he said that he felt like he had Even when experienced and categorized as not done enough in politics. Perhaps Polish “mental,” “emotional” or “psychological” liberal left asked the wrong question about is a bodily category. When the perplexities of the troubled, humiliated soul that has been subjected to violence are experienced as pain, one inevitably recognizes that an immediate transposition of the psychic experience onto the bodily plane has taken place.49 To add to that, Byung-Chul Han describes extensively how depression is tied to our “burnout society,” with its never-fulfilled promises of realization through endless work: depression for him is the failure to achieve a “successful” response to real-life violence against women, such as the rape and murder of Sarah Ann Ottens. In one of them (Untitled), a female silhouette is created out of blood on snowy ground. Mendieta is widely believed to had been murdered by her partner, artist Carl Andre, although her death was not legally ruled to be murder beyond reasonable doubt. She fell to her death from a 33-storey apartment building during a violent argument with Andre. 49 Kolozova, The Lived Revolution, 108. Szczęsny when they debated whether his suicide was justified by the current political system, or whether it was hysteria. While they produced interpretations rooted in their knowledge of the Polish phantasm, claiming that suicide was apolitical, they missed the fact that Szczęsny had already told them that he had suffered from a failure to realize himself as a political subject. This a/political burnout, experienced as real, physical pain of depression is what underlined his tragedy, not something that was produced by it. They posed as their conclusion what in fact was his beginning: the failure to rise as a subject to fill the confines of what is perceived as a political life, being instead trapped in the position of the unsubject, the pained, the apolitical. 50 Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 183 in its identity-in-the-last-instance, pain

184 Bogna M. Konior | Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act Postscript: From Catastrophic Archive and therefore could not easily define, under- to Nightmare-Bound Future stand, and control.”51 Obsessed with taxidermy, The reactions to Szczęsny’s death show especially “noncorpses” on the border of life a failure of contemporary media intellectual- and death, and what they called “dimwitted mer- ism, caught in the loop of representational riment” or “energetic idiocy,” they produced culture, bound in their own obsessive produc- several works and performances, but it would tion of “photographs of victims.” Timofeeva’s be difficult to call their practice artistic in catastrophe and Kolozova’s pain offer us dif- any colloquial way.52 Their whole way of life ferent starting points for creating solidarity (and for some, also death) was that every situ- in spaces of void, burnout and tragedy, where ation could be turned into an absurd one that understanding and empathy do not come easy, but resisted interpretation, and any subject could a mutual recognition of obscure suffering could be turned into a noncorpse, not quite living or produce a non-standard politics, which does not dead and therefore escaping the power of the conform to the contemporary preoccupation with state. Once, for example, they beat up a man- identity and representation. nequin in public with such devotion that many As a parting reference, I want to look to onlookers thought they were assaulting a human a manifestation of this kind of non-standard, being. In the midst of this affair, the police a/political practice in the post-Soviet ar- finally arrived, with the crowd already hysteri- chive: the “non-Soviets,” as they called them- cal. They were dumbfounded to find out that no selves, the necro-realists, a group active just crime actually took place. By making this kind before and after the collapse of the Soviet Un- of behavior their way of life, the necro-real- ion, and their politics of indistinction. They, ists not so much opposed the state as completely too, wanted to practice a catastrophic (non-) confused it: “this was their strategy of becom- politics in the shadow of the world’s collapse. ing a kind of subject who could use many of the In “Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction resources of [the] state (social welfare, sub- and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet,” Alexei sidized housing, employment, education, etc.) Yurchak wonderfully describes their core prac- and yet largely avoid the political subjectiv- tice: “Instead of challenging the state by oc- ity of a citizen.”53 Their lives were extreme: cupying an oppositional subject position, these they avoided the news, worked only low-paying people carved out a subject position that the 51 state could not recognize in ‘political’ terms Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia,” 200. Ibid., 202. 53 Ibid., 212. 52

Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol. 15, No. 1-2 / 2018 jobs to cover the minimum necessities, sought necro-realists sought to negate and suspend the maximum free time and minimum engagement with political not to criticize it but because they the state and forced themselves, sometimes to wanted to create a parallel practice: a non- the point of death, into an existence that was politics, a politics of indistinction. There drastically reduced, a status of the nonperson. is little sense in any direct replication, each Living under a system that they experienced as non-political practice must be situated in its immutable, they wanted to “suspend the politi- own times. After Szczęsny’s death and its af- cal,” they sought to relate to each other as termath, which exposed the failure of subsum- not-quite-humans, who existed in the zone be- ing the political under the aesthetic, we could tween life and death, sanity and insanity. In debate not the deviations from a political norm short, they embraced the very void of identity that contemporary Poland, trapped in sleep paralysis, fears to recognize as its own. Rather than seeking to qualify themselves in opposition to the state, they practiced a politics of indistinction; they “cultivated a negative linguistic skill,” politicians only interested them when “they were not quite alive but in a state of being transformed into nonpersons.”54 Looking to this archive, we could perhaps avoid the temptation of media intellectualism. Rather than mediate self-immolation, we could ask what is it about the way that we define “the political” today that fails to actualize many as political subjects, including Szczęsny, who himself deeply felt this failure. Could this definition benefit from a subtraction of representations, from a catastrophic thinking in parallel with the brutality of the real, rather than the repetition of (national) trauma? The but find ways to suspend it. In Poland specifically, this could mean inhabiting, rather than rejecting, the position of the unsubject trapped within sleep paralysis, nightmare-bound. Such catastrophic suspension of what is expected of the political is not angst, it is not fatalism, it is not an excuse to disengage. It is, however, a denial of the promise of trauma and rejuvenation, whether that trauma is the phantasm of Polish martyrdom, or the current leftist promise of a return to the Western democratic family. The catastrophic does not pass points of no return, it rather expands our perspective to the realm of the nightmare and the unsubject where there were never any checkpoints: violence and struggle erupt constantly throughout the world, despite the tendency of media intellectualism to only style some events, such as suicide, as violence. Perhaps from this ground a different mode of non-standard politics could form, which necessarily admits an obscurity of suffering alongside its painful immediacy. 54 Ibid., 210. 185 Identities