Elements of Michel Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject in the Post-War Correspondence of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jerzy Lisowski

Abstract

The article analyses the phenomena occurring in epistolary, namely the exchange of letters. The newly published correspondence of Jerzy Lisowski with Anna and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, during a very specific period, when, just after the war, the imposed socialist-realist regime was taking shape, will serve as an example. However, the practices connected with disciplining public order in Poland are not the subject of the article, but people with completely different aesthetic desires. Politics in this correspondence gives way to the plan of, for example, fascination with Romance studies and the achievements of Western culture, which not only united the authors of the epistolary dialogue, but also significantly shaped it for the rest of their lives. This is particularly important if one looks at the professions of both participants in the correspondence. The author of the article takes as a paradigm elements of Michel Foucault’s claims from the collection of lectures entitled Hermeneutics of the Subject from the College de France from the turn of 1981/1982. The correspondence is analysed in terms of claims related to the practices of the self, the exchange of letters between friends in the age of antiquity, and parrhesia. References to fragments of an elementary work on epistolography, namely Theory of a Letter [Teoria listu] by Stefania Skwarczyńska, are also an important element. One of the inspirations for writing the article was also New Theory of a Letter [Nowa teoria listu] by Anita Całek, who also proposes to look at the correspondence through the prism of the theorems of Foucault and Skwarczyńska. The aim of the article was to present not only the essential features of a letter in the context of the formation of interpersonal relations, but also the maturation of personality and to understand to what extent letters may become a testimony of rich autobiographical narratives.