The figure of a philosophical authority in the Polish post-modernist literary criticism – on the example of Martin Heidegger

Abstract

The paper presents the circumstances of Heidegger’s text reception in Poland in the 1970s and in during the political transformation. Just as he did in France, Heidegger proved a significant reference point for text-centric methodologies of poststructuralism also in Poland. The paper shows how the critical-literary interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophical theses combined with a strong inspiration from Michel Foucault shaped one of the most original Polish critics of the literature from the political transformation period – Tadeusz Komendant. His peculiar, philosophical-literary style, together with poetic definitions with which he tried to capture the rules of post-structuralism for the sake of Polish literary criticism, had a significant impact on the discourse of post-transformation poetry criticism.