Form and Power On the Disciplinary Coding of National Identity in “Pamiętnik Stefana Czarnieckiego” by Witold Gombrowicz

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse Witold Gombrowicz’s short story entitled “Pamiętnik Stefana Czarnieckiego” in the context of the convergence between the writer’s worldview and the philosophy of Michel Foucault. Nietzschean motifs inspired both authors to formulate a similar constructivist anthropology and a similar criticism of the concept of discipline. The themes of form and creating a human being by a human being – central to Gombrowicz’s writing – correspond to Foucault’s notion of the production of the subject. In such a perspective, “Pamiętnik Stefana Czarnieckiego” can be read as a record of the experience of an individual subjected to social practices of disciplinary embarrassment, aimed at producing a subject defined by nationality and heteronormativity, as well as the experience of rebellion against an imposed identity. Such a reading reveals the political stakes of the literary output by the author of Ferdydurke: expressed in the deconstruction of authoritarian forms of empowerment and in the pursuit to replace them with forms of subjectification based on irony, fluidity and distance.