ABSTRACT
The 1960s had seen the development of a strand of Marxist humanism in Poland, which however was soon overruled by the political repressions and an intellectual crisis in mid-socialism. In its stead, structuralism and cybernetic visions thrived, threatening to some as a burial of the human under an omnipotent structure, which was uncannily mirrored in the bureaucracy of the socialist state. In the cultural sphere, negotiations of the human and of humanity still occurred. In considering the phenomena of transgressive humanism, the work of literary scholar Maria Janion delivers some aspects central to its discussion: the relevance of human being to the processes of knowledge production and the decentring of rationality with a consideration of the irrational—feeling, affect, bodily sensations—in cognition; an epistemological focus on dialogue as a dialectic exchange not only between humans, but also as a process taking place with the environment; and polyphony as a means to destabilise notions of fixated truth and identity, which emerges parallel to a consciousness of vulnerability not only of the self, but also of others.
