Grotesque Possible Worlds

Abstract

The author of the articles shows that the grotesque is one of the most interesting ways of diagnosing changes and crisis in the anthroposphere (as a continuation of thinking about the subject from the middle of the seventeenth century through to postmodernity). According to Thomas Mann, the grotesque is one the most active notions in contemporary art. Its productivity results from the subject’s tendency to self-fulfilment, self-cognition, and self-definition; it is an independent vision and position in the “me – the world”, “me – community” relations. The grotesque is a strongly philosophical proposition, which bases its discourse on a conscious protest against present values and on transgressing all limiting and oppressive conventions. Therefore, the grotesque enhances the status of the subject, but it neither defends nor affi rms the subject in a direct manner. Apart from the social dimension, the grotesque also has numerous metaphysical references, the expression of which can be found in Kierkegaardian understanding of the metaphysical crisis as despair. Facing piercing emptiness, the human being tries to find some support and resorts to anything only to make a leap into the future. Laughter is only a manifestation of horror vacui, a specific dialectic moment devoid of any prospect of purification or comfort. What dominates a grotesque work is its open structure. The motifs which shape the spatiotemporal order do not always form a cause-and-effect system. Deliberately incoherent themes (logical coherence is not an aim) seem to be rather “deconstructors”, not constructors of the plot; they are intermittent, provoke the impression of a secret, a gleam, the absurd.