“Widmontologie nowoczesności”
Jakuba Momro's book's promotional meeting

  • “Widmontologie nowoczesności”

    Book's cover

Join us for a meeting focused around Jakubo Momro's book “Widmontologie nowoczesności” with Jakub Momro, Agata Bielik-Robson, Adam Lipszyc and Paweł Mościcki.

When Jürgen Habermas was receiving his 1980 Adorno Award he delivered a speech in which he outlined his vision of modernity as an „unfinished project”. The author of “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity” claimed that the Enlightenment entered a post-critical phase in which it struggles with the exhaustion of its own culture-making potential. Habermas underlined the fact that ideas of modernization, both in the esthetic aspect and in the technological or political sense, are a basic element of the contemporary experience. They remain radically historical in the sense that it is possible to see in their development their dialectic opposition of reactive mechanisms that threaten the project as a whole. This ambivalent quality of modernity can perhaps be seen most clearly in the ambiguity of the esthetic experience model.

It seems as though the descriptive and diagnostic character of Habermas's words is adequate when it comes to the esthetic situation of late modernity, in which individuals and communities have to confront the dark dialectics of the Enlightenment, the catastrophic belief that the dreams of emancipation must end. But modernity, in spite of Habermas, can be though of as not only a prospective narrative of modernization that, because of its nature, cannot end, but as a process that can neither begin nor reach its conclusion. It is in this perspective that modernity can be perceived as a phantom that endlessly haunts individuals and collectives in various forms of incomplete, perishable, radically asynchronous, temporary ontological forms. The question the author poses in the book is rather transcendental – he asks about the conditions in which the phantom can be a paradoxical “incomplete fulfillment” of modernity. Starting with Jacques Derrida's intuitive notion that the world of modernity is based not so much on the purely progressive narration as on a noncontinuous, interrupted tale of returning phantoms, impossible to categorize, the author attempts to propose a general theory of spectral modernity.

Agata Bielik-Robson shares her time between Warsaw and Nottingham. She works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences and teaches Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham's Department of Theology and Religious Studies. She has published dozens of papers in Polish, German and English, as well as six books in Polish: Na drugim brzegu nihilizmu (Warsaw, 1997), Inna nowoczesność (Cracow, 2000), Duch powierzchni: rewizja romantyczna i filozofia (Cracow, 2004), Romantyzm, niedokończony projekt. Eseje (Cracow, 2008), “Na pustyni”. Kryptoteologie późnej nowoczesności (Cracow, 2008) and Erros. Mesjański witalizm i filozofia (Cracow 2012). In 2011 Northwestern University Press published her American book on the philosophy and literature of Harold Bloom – The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction. She is interested in modern philosophy of subject, literature studies and the philosophy of religion, especially concerning Jewish heritage. In the fall of 2014 Routledge published her newest book, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos.

Adam Lipszyc is an essayist and a translator working for the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, teaching at the School of Social Sciences and the Franz Kafka University of Muri. He published several books in Polish: Międzyludzie. Koncepcja podmiotowości w pismach Harolda Blooma (Cracow, 2005), Ślad judaizmu w filozofii XX wieku (Warsaw, 2009), Rewizja procesu Józefiny K. i inne lektury od zera (Warsaw, 2011), Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka. Czytanie Waltera Benjamina (Cracow, 2012) and Czas wiersza. Paul Celan i teologie literackie (Cracow, 2015). Winner of the Andrzej Siemka Literatura na Świecie award and the Gdynia Literary Prize.

Jakub Momro is a philosopher, literature expert, essayist and translator. He is assistant professor at the Department of Literary Anthropology and Cultural Research at the Jagiellonian University's Faculty of Polish Studies. Author of Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativity (Peter Lang 2015, Polish edition - 2010) and Widmontologie nowoczesności. Genezy (2014).

Paweł Mościcki is a philosopher, essayist and translator. He is assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute of Literary Research and a member of the editorial staff of the “Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej” quarterly. He edited Maurice Blanchot. Literatura ekstremalna (2007) and wrote Polityka teatru. Eseje o sztuce angażującej (2008), Godard. Pasaże (2010), Idea potencjalności. Możliwość filozofii według Giorgio Agambena (2013), My też mamy już przeszłość. Guy Debord i historia jako pole bitwy (2015).