Mikołaj Ratajczak – The Psychoanalysis of Passive Revolution in Poland

Úvodní přednášku cyklu Literárněvědné fórum, který se v tomto semestru zaměří na nejnovější dějiny středoevropských literatur ve filozofických kontextech, přednese v úterý 14. října 2025 Mikołaj Ratajczak (Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii PAN).

Vstup na přednášku je zdarma a bez registrace.

Anotace:
Mikołaj Ratajczak – The Psychoanalysis of Passive Revolution in Poland: Discussing Andrzej Leder’s The Revolution of the Sleepwalkers

In 2014, one of the most influential philosophical books in Poland after 1989 was published: Prześniona rewolucja [The Revolution of the Sleepwalkers] by Warsaw philosopher and psychoanalyst Andrzej Leder. It immediately became a bestseller and significantly shaped discussions on post-war history in Poland, as well as on political conflicts and social memory in the Third Polish Republic. However, Leder’s book should also be treated as a symptom – a place where the unuttered conditions of possibility and the limits of discussing political conflicts in contemporary Poland converge. The main framework for such a reading will be the clash between Leder’s proposed psychoanalytic framework for interpreting the 1939-1953 revolution and the concept of “passive revolution” formulated in the 1930s by Antonio Gramsci. The question from which the lecture will proceed is: why was it the psychoanalytic revolution of the sleepwalkers, and not the passive revolution of the subalterns, that proved to be such a description of class conflicts in post-war Polish society that it became the language of critical self-reflection of the hegemonic class in contemporary Poland?

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