The Trace of Political Theology in Stanisław Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Abstract

The article focuses on Stanisław Lem’s novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub which is discussed in the postsecular contexts of the Jewish theology and its political implications. The interpretation is supported by the latest biographical research on Lem’s life which implies that his Jewish identity, concealed by the author in the communist reality, and experience of the Holocaust have been ignored or at least insuffi ciently articulated in Lem criticism. The article analyzes Lem’s novel as an attempt to rethink the main categories of Jewish theology, such as creation, revelation and salvation, as a theoretical frame of this Kafkaesque anti-totalitarian satire. In this work, the writer not only identifi es the theological axis of a modern politics, but also tries to point to a possible – unobtrusively subversive – line of fl ight by adumbrating the “Messianic” strategy of escaping from the Mythical closure of the biopolitical necessity.