ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses three major strands of transgressive humanist explorations, which are closely entangled with and emerge from crisis—in most cases, the crisis of the Second World War and Holocaust. With the help of Bogdan Wojdowski’s novel Bread for the Departed, this chapter discusses the relevance of surviving as a blurring of the borders between life and death, and the erosion of the notion of humanity during the war as incentives for transgressive movements in culture. The past finds its space in the present through the destabilisation of reality, as in Tadeusz Konwicki’s filmic essay How far, how near, or through transgenerational embodiments as sketched in Kalman Segal’s novel “The Associated.” The palimpsestic recomposing of human corporeality, as in Andrzej Wajda’s Roly Poly or Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre, dishevels the notion of a coherent subject and individual agency. An environmental awareness towards the material social world emerges, in the context of which Jerzy Skolimowski’s early films virtually present an immersion guide to the polyphonic cityscape.
