Dream? Democracy! A Philosophy of Horror, Hope and Hospitality in Art and Action

CHAPTER 1. The Other Methodology of the Other 9

A Theory and Praxis of HospitALTERITY 9
Fichtean Hating versus Kantian Hosting 18
Today’s Transvalued Humanism after Anti-Humanism 28
A Philosophy of Affective Alterity: Love, Faith, and Democracy 39
Poetics and Politics. From Literary to Social Hospitality 56
Action! – After Hannah Arendt and Performative Art 64

CHAPTER 2. Interpreting Art, Interpreting Subjectivities, Interpreting Shared Life 67

Toward a Philoxenia of the Verbal and the Visual 67
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s Affective (Inter)textuality and (Inter)visuality 70
Of Beauty, Brain and Sacred Bodysouls: Sublimation, Mother-Daughter, and Tenderness according to Helen Chadwick 84
Alina Szapocznikow’s Vulnerable Fetishes of Her Self 97
Krystiana Robb-Narbutt’s Art: Biophilia Against Trauma 105
Women’s Theatre à la polonaise Bisexuality and Jewishness on Stage 113

CHAPTER 3. The Power of Culture and Activism against the Far Right 125

Nationalism, Economic Neo-Liberalism, and Necrophilia 131
A Successful Uprising? 141
Culture, Always Already Counterculture 145
The Art of Revolt 150
The Social Impact of Art Exhibitions 157
Intertextuality as HospitALTERITY 164
The Transeuropa Public Art Festival in the Intercultural City of Lublin 169
Hostility toward Jewishness and Interculturality 182
A Brief Literary History of Cleanliness and Abjection in Poland 189
The Power of Poetry and the Crisis of the Academy 196
Art versus Moral Revolution in Poland and the U.S 201

CHAPTER 4. The Paradox of Poland and Europe: Caught Between Hostility and Hospitality 211

A Fragile Legal and Political Context 213
Culture and Activism Strike Back 227
A Hidden His-tory: Masculinity, Hysteria, and Homosexuality 238
A History of Male Hysteria 242
Against the Philosophy of the Death Drive 251
The Birth of Homosexuality 254
A Visual Politics of Europe’s LGBTQ Visibility Campaigns 267
The Art of Imagining Futurity – after Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, and Today 269
A Queer Utopia of Love 271
An LGBTQ Dream of Diversity? 280
A Queer Utopia of Childhood 283
The Future-in-Love and in-Hospitality 285

CHAPTER 5. A Political Philosophy of Hope versus Horror 291

Eastern Europe’s Tales of Terror: the Gothic Art of Paulius and Svajone Stanikas 301
Hope: the Hospitality of a New Civil Society 320
Research as Activism: Thinking, Visualizing, and Performing the Ideas and Images of the Other 326

Bibliography 333