Papers by Dorota Glowacka
Teksty Drugie, 2013
Od narodzin określają nas spojrzenia. Wpleceni w nie, patrzymy na innych, oni-na nas. W przestrze... more Od narodzin określają nas spojrzenia. Wpleceni w nie, patrzymy na innych, oni-na nas. W przestrzeni publicznej ("na wolnym rynku przypadkowych spojrzeń" mówi Peter Sloterdijk) muśnięcie wzrokiem, przelotne bycie widzianym nie nakładają się na siebie, nie zagrażają podmiotowej autonomii. Spojrzenia (wy)mijają się, czasem krzyżują. Ich przedłużonego spotkania nie tłumaczy znajomość czy jakikolwiek inny element poddający się interpretacji; choć pojawiają się ulotne komunikaty (na przykład uśmiech), momentalne zbliżenie stapia się z fundamentalną obcością. Intersubiektywne "krótkie spięcie" (lecz nie przejście od stanu "obcości" do "znajomości") trwa sekundę, po czym odwracamy głowę, by wrócić do uprzedniej roli. Bez tych barier-równie koniecznych, jak granice między światem żywych i umarłych-niemożliwe byłoby stworzenie świata społecznego. W jego ramach spełniamy zarówno nasze pragnienie bycia z innymi (zbliżenia), jak potrzebę odróżnienia się od nich 2. Czasami dystans znika. Spojrzenie przebija niewidzialną otoczkę (niewidzenia, bycia niewidzianym), wędruje ku nam, byśmy mogli się w nim dostrzec, tworząc "wyjątkowy stan intersubiektywny" (Sloterdijk). (Roz)poznajemy się w oczach innych, przeobrażonych w nasze zwierciadła. Poddani spojrzeniu, przestajemy władać sobą, łączymy twarze w "intymnym univer-1 Wersja skrócona ukazała się w języku angielskim (tłum M. Mrozik): The gaze of Medusa, w: Vision and cognition, ed. T. Dobrzyńska, R. Kuncheva, Sofia 2011, s. 3-27. Pan Profesor Benedetto Bravo zechciał przeczytać tekst przed drukiem. Jego uściślenia i krytyczne uwagi były dla mnie bezcenne.
Trying to describe his ordeal of surviving Auschwitz, Aba Beer once remarked, "It takes a poet to... more Trying to describe his ordeal of surviving Auschwitz, Aba Beer once remarked, "It takes a poet to describe it. I don't have the words."2 What does it mean when an eyewitness to the horrors of the Shoah summons poetic imagination to convey the truth of his experience? What does it tell us about the relation between imagination and the duty to remember the past? We acknowledge that, as members of our respective communities, we are responsible not only for preserving the memory of the dead but also for how this memory is being shaped, transformed, and sometimes abused. As keepers of memory, aware of the power of the past to mold the future, we guard it against the trespassers, the disbelievers, and the make-believers, lest they offend the dignity of those who suffered. If, after the Shoah, we are wary of aestheticizing pain and transgressing against the unspeakable, can we agree with writer Aharon Appelfeld that "Only art has the power of redeeming [this] suffering from the abyss"?3 Yet we also need to ask about another limit to the powers of imagination, and that is whether we can truly imagine what we do not know, or what we have forbidden ourselves to know. It is no longer controversial to accept imaginative representations of the Shoah as a credible modality of bearing witness. They are often preferred to historical accounts and documents because they can evoke sympathy and transmit emotional knowledge. As Marianna Hirsch notes, moreover, memory is never a literal transcript of events; its connection to the past is always mediated by "imaginative investment, projection and creation."4 But not all literary and artistic representations have been accorded the same privilege as witnesses to history. In the realm of Holocaust visual art, for instance, the works by Marc Chagall, Felix Nussbaum, and Bêdrich Fritta have been called upon as authentic documents of the time, yet Charlotte Salomon's testimonial paintings from the cycle Life? Or Theater?, 5 which she made between August 1941 and August 1942, were ignored for almost sixty years.6 When, in 1963, brief selections of her oeuvre appeared, they bore the title, Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures, and were considered at best to be a visual equivalent of Anne Frank's Diary. Salomon's work, however, which combined image, text, and music, was an artistically innovative and bold reflection on the transmission of trauma between generations of women in her family and on the social construction of gender in relation to her development as an artist under the darkening skies of National Socialism. The idiosyncrasy of her artistic approach and the frankness with which she delved into the socially proscribed subject matter consigned her art to the margins of both dominant historical narratives and prevailing artistic canons. If only some imaginative representations are recognized as authentic witnesses and others are not, and the criteria for extending that recognition are constrained by ideologies and social beliefs, shouldn't we acknowledge a certain ethical shortcoming of our own imaginative faculty? Further, if artworks and works of fiction are capable of producing empathy, but only some experiences and persons become objects of our compassion and grief, maybe our powers of imagination are less unbounded than the philosophers and poets have claimed. If this is the case, then a different ethics of imagining is needed. I would like to call this ethics "compassionate imagination." It is a way of imagining that is always implicated in the other and that renders us responsible not only for what we have imagined but also for what we have failed to imagine. For several years now, my imagination has been riveted to one iconic image, which I first saw at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington D.C. It shows three Jewish women as if posing for the camera, shortly before their execution in Liepaja, Latvia, in December 1941. Haunted by the photograph, I have wondered what these women felt at that moment shortly before their death, when, partly undressed, they were made to stand in front of the camera, most likely held by a German soldier. Perhaps it was my tacit acceptance of such covertly sexualized images of female Holocaust victims
This dissertation investigates the role of alignment in morphology and phonology and its implicat... more This dissertation investigates the role of alignment in morphology and phonology and its implications for the theory of Generalised Alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993) via a close examination of Polish data. An issue of great theoretical interest is the asymmetry between Left and Right Alignment. Left Alignment enjoys a privileged treatment in prosody and morphology. In prosody, LEFT alignment is obeyed even in languages with right oriented primary stress: left alignment is crucial in the assignment of secondary stress. A similar asymmetry applies to ANCHORING. A detailed study of truncation reveals that Left Anchoring is preferred over Right Anchoring. The source of this asymmetry is sought in left-to-right processing (Hay 2002). I argue, against Nelson (2003), that in spite of this preference, RIGHT Anchoring cannot be replaced by other Anchor constraints, such as Anchoring to head foot. Another issue addressed in this dissertation is the type of material that can be aligned. I con...
A large proportion of Machine Learning (ML) research focuses on designing algorithms that require... more A large proportion of Machine Learning (ML) research focuses on designing algorithms that require minimal input from the human. However, ML algo- rithms are now widely used in various areas of engineering to design and build systems that interact with the human user and thus need to “learn” from this interaction. In this work, we concentrate on algorithms that learn from user interaction. A significant part of the dissertation is devoted to learning in the bandit setting. We propose a general framework for handling dependencies across arms, based on the new assumption that the mean-reward function is drawn from a Gaussian Process. Additionally, we propose an alternative method for arm selection using Thompson sampling and we apply the new algorithms to a grammar learning problem. In the remainder of the dissertation, we consider content-based image re- trieval in the case when the user is unable to specify the required content through tags or other image properties and so the system...
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2007
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2007
But there is a crack in the wall. Jordan's Prince Hassan visited Auschwitz, and remarked t... more But there is a crack in the wall. Jordan's Prince Hassan visited Auschwitz, and remarked that the Holocaust provides warnings for all mankind. In Nazareth, the Israeli Arab Emil Shofani has founded the first Arab museum and research center devoted to study of the Holocaust. ...
PhaenEx, 2012
Looking at Holocaust testimonies, which in her view always involve some form of translation, the ... more Looking at Holocaust testimonies, which in her view always involve some form of translation, the author seeks to develop an ethics of translation in the context of Levinas’ hyperbolic ethics of responsibility. Calling on Benjamin and Derrida to make explicit the precipitous task of the translator, she argues that the translator faces an ethical call or assignation that resembles the fundamental structure of Levinasian subjectivity. The author relates the paradoxes of translation in Holocaust testimony to Levinas’ silence on the problem of translation—puzzling if one considers Levinas’ focus on the ethical essence of language, his multilingualism, and the fact that he wrote his texts in a second language. She proposes that the trace of the philosopher’s displacement from his linguistic community can be discerned in his exilic conception of ethical subjectivity and in the testimonial impetus that animates his work. Thus, although Levinas’ Saying is posited as a translinguistic horizon...
German History, 2020
Although far more women than men are sexually violated in conflict settings, the records indicate... more Although far more women than men are sexually violated in conflict settings, the records indicate that sexual violence against men and boys has been routinely practised as a weapon of war and genocide. Sexual violence against men and boys during the Holocaust was likely a regular occurrence, but it has remained undocumented and under-researched. Sexual violence against men, because it does not conform to prevalent gender norms and expectations, has been subjected to cultural and epistemic erasure. As a result, it is construed on the model of female rape, making it difficult to recognize male-victim specific forms of assault. Moreover, normative and legal frameworks developed to address it do not take into account the role that the stigma of homosexuality plays in male sexual violence. This article is based on oral testimonies by male heterosexual-identified Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. I focus on the survivors’ self-presentation as adult men in light of their past abuse and on...
In a transcript of a public conversation with Glowacka, including questions and comments from the... more In a transcript of a public conversation with Glowacka, including questions and comments from the audience, Markiewicz discusses her work’s relationship to the Holocaust, and addresses notions of trauma, mourning and memory. Glowakca’s essay recounts her experience with the installation and concludes that the work shifts its reception into ethical contexts. Bio-bibliography 5 p., 22 bibl. ref.
Essays on Levinas and Law, 2009
After the war, the surviving remnants of Polish Jewry were coming ‘home,’ often in the hope that ... more After the war, the surviving remnants of Polish Jewry were coming ‘home,’ often in the hope that they might find family members still alive. Returning from the death camps, from places of hiding and from exile in the Soviet Union, they were, in the words of a witness, a sad, incredible spectacle: ‘gloomy, quiet, like after the funeral.’2
Culture Machine, Apr 28, 2008
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1994
... with dramatic works of "universal genius" and itself aspire to that realm (... more ... with dramatic works of "universal genius" and itself aspire to that realm (Gombrowicz often remarks that The Marriage is a parody of Faust ... improbable than this farcical march of phantoms in a fog of illusions?" (61) (Czy mozna wyobrazic sobie cos dziwniejszego/ Niz ten figlamy ...
Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holdin... more Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days!... .......Erich Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar". But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty youngster that was his child. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son he would change on his way into Don Quixote... An Abraham who should come unsummoned! .......Franz Kafka, "Mount Moriah".
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Papers by Dorota Glowacka