“Redemption Is Not Impossible”: The Dialectical Vitalism of Witold Gombrowicz

Abstract

This article argues that the notion of redemption constitutes a central, yet largely overlooked, organizing principle of Witold Gombrowicz’s oeuvre. Taking as its point of departure Gombrowicz’s statement that “redemption is not impossible,” it reconstructs his literary project as a sustained exploration of the possibility of rescuing singular life from the forces that constrain and petrify it. Drawing on modern theories of messianicity, particularly the works of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Agata Bielik-Robson, the article interprets Gombrowicz’s writings through the category of messianic vitalism. It argues that Gombrowicz develops a secular and immanent conception of redemption, understood not as transcendence beyond the world but as the renewal of life within finite existence itself. Through readings of Trans-Atlantyk, Pornography, Operetta, and the Diary, the article demonstrates how Gombrowicz repeatedly stages conflicts between life and death, singularity and collective identity, while seeking forms of liberation from social, political, and symbolic domination. By situating Gombrowicz within broader debates on messianicity and modern literature, the article reveals the redemptive horizon that underlies his dialectical vision of life.

1. Introduction

In one of the entries from his Diary in 1958, Witold Gombrowicz noted: “At times, my hopelessness is haunted by a spark of conviction, an almost tangible certainty that redemption is not impossible” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 389; sligthly modified translation). This confession may appear surprising, given that it comes from an author who devoted a considerable part of his work to the systematic pursuit of various sobering disillusions. And yet, it seems that the remnant theology expressed in these words is far from marginal; indeed, it may constitute the principal driving force of his oeuvre. This is why more attentive commentators have situated Gombrowicz among the greatest theologians of Polish literature (Jarzębski 1997, p. 17), and have even discerned in his work affinities with major “renewers of religion” who proclaimed a form of individual “redemption” (Komendant 1986, pp. 173, 177).

By bringing together in a single sentence the triad of “hope,” “redemption,” and the question of modality, Gombrowicz inscribes himself within a major debate in contemporary philosophy. From Ernst Bloch’s conception of possibility as the “not-yet,” through Giorgio Agamben’s endorsement of potentiality, to Jacques Derrida’s figure of the im-possible, the aforementioned triad has functioned as a key nexus in discussions shaped by the radiating force of messianic intuition. Obviously, the “redemption” at stake here is not a measure of any religious community, nor a sign of divine presence or living sacrum. It does not offer a consoling vision of future heavenly harmony. The idea of “a life removed from the dominion of death, that oldest of messianic fantasies,” does not refer to any transcendent illusion, but is instead fulfilled within the horizon of finite immanence, “endowing life here and now, under conditions of material immanence, with a new meaning” (Bielik-Robson 2012, p. 450). It is not bound to any naïve promise of immortality in the afterlife, but rather to the possibility of “a truly free life” (Bielik-Robson 2012, p. 451).

Messianicity, then, proceeds from the recognition of the “structure of this world prison” (Taubes 2009, p. 9), that is, from a life trapped in herd-like identifications and relations of total belonging—forms that fully determine it and thus eliminate even the very possibility of possibility1. Hence: “«to revive life once more» (Adorno); “recover «that which is the most living of life»” (Derrida); to make the concept of «life in the vital sense» (Kafka) the sole theme of a new thinking—this is the program of messianic vitalism that would unite many Jewish thinkers of modernity” (Bielik-Robson 2012, p. 39). Gombrowicz’s project resonates strongly with this program.

It is therefore no surprise that the notion of “life” is one of the most obsessively recurring concepts in his work. The singular life of which Gombrowicz was an uncompromising apologist is, in his work, neither “bare life,” reduced to the “zero level” of existence and stripped of symbolic mediations into a merely biological being, nor a life defined exclusively through cultural distinctions and structures. Rather, it is an excessive, energetic remainder that precipitates out of the dialectical struggles within each of these fields, and that finds space for existence only in the movement of breaking away from all totalizing structures, refusing them any final integration: “life would not be life if it did not exceed us” (W. Gombrowicz 2004a, p. 320–21).

Gombrowicz’s entire oeuvre can be understood as a vast, multi-volume project of what might most literally be called a re-vitalizing correction—one that the writer himself explicitly names “redemption.” Taking as its point of departure the recognition that “life does not live” (Adorno 2005), Gombrowicz persistently stages attempts to render it alive once more. In this sense, the graffiti slogan from a street in Buenos Aires—stylized as revolutionary motto—must be taken quite literally: “Gombro o muerte,” “Gombrowicz or death” (Kobyłecka-Piwońska 2017). The initial thesis of this essay thus holds that Gombrowicz’s literary project should be understood as a site for the performative enactment of an authorial conception of a subtly dialectical form of messianic vitalism.

2. Game of Two Vitalisms

Of course, unlike Kafka—whose writings have repeatedly served as a point of departure for discussions of messianic motifs in contemporary philosophy—but also unlike a whole group of eminent Marrano figures in Polish literature (Sadzik 2022), Gombrowicz formulated his idea of redemption without any knowledge of the Jewish tradition.2 Moreover, it would not be unwarranted to associate Gombrowicz with the influences of Lebensphilosophie. In this perspective, Gombrowicz’s thought—who, like Freud, counted Schopenhauer among his favorite philosophers—would be torn apart by a contradiction between messianic intuitions and a strictly tragic vision of life. At the same time, however, Gombrowicz introduces revisions to his apparent affinity with the “philosophy of life,” complicating this relationship.

It is characteristic that, for Gombrowicz, the time of war becomes the moment when the foundations of his original conception of vitalism are formulated, as well as the backdrop for the plots he uses to stage his messianic intrigues. Under these conditions, in We and Style, one of the few texts published during the global conflict (in 1944), Gombrowicz, in Argentine exile, called for the catastrophe to be used for the sake of the “complete renewal of our life” (W. Gombrowicz 2004a, p. 333). Crisis—here Gombrowicz approaches Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Hölderlin’s thought that “where danger is, grows the saving power also”—is not for the writer “something hopeless; on the contrary, it contains serious possibilities for new, energetic development” (W. Gombrowicz 2004a, p. 331).

The publication in the Polish press of the Letter to the Ferdydurkists (1947), the first postwar sign of the writer’s life, caused shock also because it contradicted a rumor that had circulated for several years in the streets of occupied Warsaw—that the writer had died (Walczak 2022, p. 204). Ironically addressed to a quasi-religious handful of followers (“persevere, devotees of Saint Ferdydurke”), this manifesto thus becomes a testimony of survival, opening with the words: “if any of you, Ferdydurkists, are still gasping, let him not lose hope—for I have not died” (W. Gombrowicz 2004b, p. 4). Gombrowicz, styling himself as a prophet, brings his followers a “good news,” a promise of a new life: “and once again it will be said of me that I am a comic madman, and of you, Ferdydurkists, that you believe in a false prophet. Yet sooner or later the decayed walls of the old Jericho will collapse, shaken by the victorious blast of truly living trumpets” (ibid.).3 In another essay, Risum teneatis, Gombrowicz leaves no doubt that the apotheosis of life unfolds here amid the postwar ruins: “after this bloodbath, after so many crushing experiences, after such a catastrophe, we must shake off what in us has died and express what in us has come to life” (W. Gombrowicz 2004a, p. 377).

Gombrowicz, moreover, perceived the war less in geopolitical than in libidinal terms. In the wartime hecatomb he saw a violent eruption of previously repressed drives—forces of life that had assumed a murderous form. The paradox he discerned lay precisely in the fact that the outbreak of an unregulated vital force became a time of extreme subjugation, objectification, and extermination of individual life. It is at this point that the fundamental duality of vitalism became apparent to him. And it is then that the writer becomes an uncompromising critic of Nietzschean philosophy of life. One might venture the thesis that if he invests so much effort in criticizing it, it is precisely because he recognizes that it intrudes his own territory, formulating—so he believes—a mistaken conception of life: “Nietzscheism and its affirmation of life? But Nietzsche didn’t have the least idea about these things, it is difficult to imagine something more tawdry, ridiculous or in worse taste than his Übermensch” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 178; slightly modified translation); “it is here that reason meets, face-to-face, the greatest and most elusive of sneerers, life. […] [Philosophers—P.S.] Grew closer to ridiculousness in proportion to their penetration into the terrain of life and, in this way, Nietzsche is more comical than Kant” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 228).

Gombrowicz, who in his prewar journalism had quite unequivocally regarded life as a force of emancipatory subversion, not far from a fluctuating élan4, now proceeds as if he had realized that the naïve vision of unleashing libido as the motor of vitalism ends in the destruction of life. Thanatism triumphs through the eruption of pure vitalism. In his notes Gombrowicz condenses this conviction into a blunt formula: “Hitlerism is vitalism”5.

The critique of vitalism associated with the philosophy of life thus clearly emerges under the impact of historical experience, which revealed its destructive reverse side. This situation demands from Gombrowicz a revision of perspective: “I see that I have become more cautious in a certain sense. That which in the Nietzsche’s proud day passed for a travesty of a Dionysian life, exactly that careful politics of Catholicism in relation to natural forces has become dearer to me from the time that the will to live, raised to its maximum strength, began to devour itself” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 37). With the wartime cataclysm still in view, we are no longer in “the Nietzsche’s proud day,” free to proclaim a simple affirmation of life—we require a different vitalism. Faced with the “maximum strenght” of the will to life, which led to its rigidification and thus to the paradoxical disappearance of vitalism, one must “retreat when we have gone too far” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 108; modified translation). This “possibility of retreat, this letting up” would restore the “normal ease necessary for life” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 109; modified translation).

Gombrowicz thus opposes—as he writes—the Himalayan, icy, abstract freedom [wolność] that emerges from vitalism as a state of its petrification to a form of ease [swoboda] conducive to individual life: “a freedom that does not want to be anything absolute—easy, that is, arbitrary, easy even in relation to its own ease. […] Man is a being created to live in an atmosphere of average pressures and median temperatures. […] In order to be free one needs not only to be free. One must not want to be free too much. No desire, no thought taken too far will be capable of opposing extremisms” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 140; modified translation)6.

This apology of “letting up,” which does not entail extinguishing but rather a skillful regulation of intensity so as to create life-promoting conditions, also becomes the site at which Gombrowicz outlines his conception of subjectivity. If life can flourish only in the absence of extreme temperatures, individual vitalism finds its freedom only at the price of an insufficient adherence to identity formulas that would seek to describe it. From this perspective, one should also consider Gombrowicz’s brilliant invention of his own modal category, untranslatable niedo. The Polish prefix niedo does not simply denote lack or deficiency. Rather, it is close to the English “not-so-much” and it signals an unfinished process of becoming, a mode of existence that resists full actualization and definitive form. Gombrowicz is thus an apologist of a mode of being that postpones the moment of assuming a definitive form, preserving an aspect of “under-maturity” and “under-formation”. Such deferral does not anticipate a future fitting into identity-based patterns but rather preserves, within the very process of their assimilation, a permanently operative “under-completion” within the subject7.

If in the traditional model of initiation liminality is a temporary suspension of rules preceding entry into a new form and the acceptance of rigid norms of collective life—thus presupposing the “definitive killing of the child in man”—a more subtle liminoid condition (Bielik-Robson 2019, p. 55) would defer the trauma of full socialization as the total domestication of the child’s vital anarchy, in order to make room for an “under-formed,” partially amorphous, and resistant-to-codification singular life. Liminoid existence would thus also be a state of limitrophy (Derrida 2006, p. 29), feeding on a continuous being-at-the-boundary. The Gombrowiczian subject, unlike Kafka’s “man from the country,” would not so much stand, as in Kafka, before the Law as remain within its revolving doors, creating the never-written Book of Deferred Law (Bielik-Robson 2019, p. 55).

The “under-formed” and “under-completed” subject that emerges from this process is thus located neither within the orders that attempt to describe it—which would imply its full assimilation—nor outside them, which would in turn neutralize it as a mere figure of otherness. It activates vital potentials while remaining in a constant state of insufficiency with respect to the cultural codes that might subject it to full, “proper” socialization. A master of subtle dialectical movement, Gombrowicz thus warns against becoming anything too much, against settling into any overly rigid stabilization, and advocates loosening every stable identity through incompletion—any identity that would efface the ease of our idiomatic being. For this reason, Gombrowicz’s successive books become stagings of intrigues aimed at what the writer explicitly equates with redemption: the exodus of life from the space of every possible “Egyptomania” (Santner 2001, p. 45).

3. The Messiah as a Pornographer

In 1943, while living in exile in Argentina, Gombrowicz traveled to La Falda, in the mountains of Córdoba province, for post-illness convalescence. Yet the calm did not last long. Standing before a mirror, he recalled: “I understood, peering at my own face, that this was the end, the limit, finale, point and end point! […] I knew that I was entering death, […] I was entering dying … that I myself was the aging process and a live death, which was pretending to be alive, which still walks, talks, even has fun, a great time, but is really alive only as a gradual realization of death” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 169). This was a moment of thanatic incision, which cut Gombrowicz off from the potential of vital energies.

Only with this scene in mind is it easier to understand why Gombrowicz constructs in Pornography a fantasy of being in occupied Poland in 1943. He undertakes a journey to the turning point of his own biography, which simultaneously marks a decisive moment for the fate of the collective, when it is determined whether it will follow the path of new life or sink into thanatism. Gombrowicz returns to that moment to attempt, at the last minute, to shift the lever of both private and collective history before the lid of the coffin finally closes upon them.8 The central stake of Pornography, then, is the revitalization of life in the most literal sense.

From the outset, however, death is present. In a certain apartment “in former Poland and in former Warsaw,” a circle of “my friends from former cafés” gathers, engaging in “old, former conversations” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 7).9 Despite the pretense of persistently maintained vigor, this group bears the marks of death (the circle is “decimated”), of wartime wounds (“that one scarred”), and of the stripping away of signs of living corporeality (“that somewhat skeletal one”; ibid.). When the narrator Witold goes to the countryside with the mysterious Fryderyk, they end up in the anachronistic stasis of past life, on a landed estate. Ghostly corpse-like presence infiltrates every crevice of this world, spreading across the landscape (“pale topography”), objects (“long-dead vehicle”), actions (“dead riding”), and representations (“dead photograph”), compelling the celebration of “our death” in a morning that is “a repetition of long-dead mornings” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 17). “Decay” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 56) imprints itself both on symbolic forms and on the surfaces of bodies—for instance, the former partisan commander, Siemian, whose appearance is “the appearance of a corpse,” yet a “corpse, nevertheless, with the grace of a cavalryman, […] speaking corpse-like, eating corpse-like, drinking corpse-like” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 170).

Hope for breaking through thanatism is brought by two young figures, Karol and Henia. Their encounter, symbolically, occurs after leaving a church, following a Mass that, due to Fryderyk’s gestural manipulations, had “collapsed in terrible impotence” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 22)10. At that moment, the light “became black as night” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 23), leaving the narrator feeling “alone in absolute darkness” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 24). Gombrowicz associates this failure of the Mass directly with “the denial of redemption, as a result of which nothing could save those brutish mugs” (ibid.). The Mass becomes barely “a human provocation in the darkness” (ibid.), during which the “luminous essence,” with which most religious imaginations identify divinity, is extinguished. For this reason, it is precisely during the Mass that an attempt must occur to construct a new theological order.

The eruption of youth takes the form of a quasi-divine revelation, an ecstatic epiphany, which ignites the senses and fragments words: “at a certain moment my gaze… my eyes… […] yes, something was attracting… eyes… and eyes. […] Wonderfulness. […] I thought dimly, God and miracle! God and miracle!” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 25). When previous revelation proves insufficient, a new, young messiah shatters the stillness: “being divine, he was something exquisitely enchanting and captivating in the immeasurable void of that night, a source of breathing warmth and light. Grace. Incomprehensible miracle” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 26). The poetics of this passage, consistently constructed around the opposition between sinking into darkness and sudden bursts of light, resonates with the mystical experiences of the “dark night.”

In a world hitherto governed by the rule of inescapable corpse-like stasis, Henia and Karol constitute the only potentially living exception. Gombrowicz signals the uniqueness of their position graphically by placing the words “girl” and “boy” in brackets (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 25). The bracket, as a disruption of the continuity of the text through the insertion of an external element, introduces here a quality ontologically foreign to a world mired in deadness, functioning as a kind of graphic Möbius strip through which the potential for life slips into the text.

“I, feverish and nearly sick from yesterday’s ardor, from that fire and radiance—one must understand that it fell upon me unexpectedly after years of piggish, stifled, exhausted, gray, or crazily twisted ones. […] During which there was only the stench of corpses. And now, suddenly, the possibility of a warm idyll in spring blooms before me. […] I no longer wanted anything else! I had grown tired of agonies”.

(W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 38)

Contact with the young creates a chance for engagement with renewal of life that might otherwise be inaccessible. In this sense, Fryderyk’s words—“let me live, children!” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 93)—should be taken quite literally.

It is for this reason that Wacław, Henia’s fiancé, is met with such aversion by Witold and Fryderyk. This “distinguished lawyer” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 48), and therefore, symptomatically, a figure of law itself, brings with his appearance the bitter knowledge that everything will revert to its old course, and that the young will once again be confined within the tight corset of traditional roles. The attempt to pair Henia with Karol, referred to here as the titular “pornography,” thus aims to prevent the vital excess from being metabolized by the zombified organism of the Polish community. The movement operates in two directions. On one hand, the two characters already marked by death hope, through the respirator of youth, to undergo a revitalizing operation upon themselves; on the other, for this to succeed, one must prevent the lid of the collective mega-coffin from closing over the young. The stakes of the “pornographers’” actions are therefore fundamental. They concern the regeneration of suppressed vital forces, directly equated here with redemption: “the victorious passage through the threshold of thanatic initiation is the greatest challenge for messianic thought” (Bielik-Robson 2012, p. 450).

Gombrowicz consistently structured Pornography around messianic lexicon. Redemption, unlike in the Polish Catholic song tradition, does not come through the cross but through the neck—or rather, the cross becomes strictly bodily, as the profane messiah, dissolving the sacred in corporeality, declares: “I am Christ, stretched on a 16-year-old cross. Bye! See you at Golgotha! Bye!” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 138)—writes Fryderyk in a secret note to Witold. It is he who, at the death of the Catholic Amelia, “became more important than Christ” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 99), serving as the final instance (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 102) to whom she turns in her dying moments: “minutes passed and remained unused—that sad, unemployed crucifix” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 99). Fryderyk advises Wacław to experience the mother’s death “as Catholics experience Christ’s Golgotha minute by minute” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 115).11

It should also be remembered that the time of anomie (in the world of Pornography governed by a “strange stench of lawlessness” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 68) is, by definition, also a “messianic time” (Agamben 2005, p. 111).12 Moreover, Gombrowicz stages the messianic arrival within the context of the occupation, thereby mirroring the historical setting of Christ’s activity (during the Roman occupation of Judea).13 The cascade of events leading to Amelia’s death is set in motion by a conversation with Fryderyk, during which the impatient Catholic heiress finally seeks to define the ambiguous stance of her interlocutor: “You are an atheist” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 90).

Fryderyk, however, like Odradek or gestures in Kafka’s parables, is a “cloudy part” of the text (Benjamin 2005b, p. 808), to which no stabilizing predicate applies: “If he was neither believer nor non-believer, what, then, was he? A patch of indeterminacy opened up, this strange ‘otherness,’ in which she [Amelia] got lost, bewildered and dislodged from the game” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, p. 91). Operating within the binary logic of atheism and theism, Amelia proves powerless before this “patch of the indeterminate” that is Fryderyk: “If he had truly been an unbeliever, she could have fought with him, and in doing so would have demonstrated the deepest ‘finality’ of her own reason, ha, she would have fought with him as equals. […] Her faith was not attacked—she did not need to defend it—God became unnecessary in the face of atheism, which was only a facade” (W. Gombrowicz 2011, pp. 91–92).

With all these considerations in mind, one could say that Pornography grapples directly with the central question of the tradition of messianic vitalism: how to extricate life from the dominion of death, how to draw, from the shell of what is dead, a flickering spark of hope for life that finally lives? “Life that does not succumb to the power of Thanatos, but rather uses it for its own purposes,” accomplishing “a leap through death” (Bielik-Robson 2012, p. 450). Such an acrobatic salto vitale would enable an exodus from life to life and, consequently, the liberation of life from the bonds of the not-yet-dead—social, ethnic, and even religious—that constrain the movements of the individual.14

It is for this reason that Konstanty Jeleński concisely stated that the novel’s problem is “‘redemption’.” Perhaps he deliberately enclosed the word in quotation marks to signal the peculiar nature of the messianic strategy outlined here. Similarly, in a letter to Czesław Miłosz, he explicitly linked the actions of the author of Pornography to missions of “messianic character” (Jeleński and Miłosz 2011, p. 29), actions—again placed in quotation marks—“‘messianic’” (Jeleński and Miłosz 2011, p. 174).15

Even if, in this instance, Gombrowicz fictionalizes the failure of the messianic operation, the very impulse that allowed it to emerge remains irresistibly present. He therefore situates himself in the minimally maximal “position of hope” (Lipszyc 2012, p. 305). The more he accumulates figures of a depleted world, the more he stakes a claim to its transcendence.

4. Trans(con)fusions

The first postwar text by Gombrowicz in which the question of redemption is posed so explicitly, however, was Trans-Atlantyk. While commentators have rightly emphasized the pastiche of the Polish noble tale performed here, they have not noticed the second literary tradition with which the text resonates unintentionally—the picaresque. Indeed, Gombrowicz wrote this, his most linguistically idiomatic and most deeply embedded work in the Polish symbolic universe, in Argentina, in a Spanish-speaking environment whose prose tradition traces its origins to early modern stories of the picaro—a figure unassigned to any identity, freely wandering on the social margins (Yovel 2009). A variant of the picaro is, of course, Gombrowicz’s narrator, sharing the author’s personal circumstances, who arrives almost penniless and without knowledge of the language on the streets of Buenos Aires as an anonymous pariah lost in the crowd (Suchanow 2017, p. 22).

Trans-Atlantyk thus begins at the zero hour of global anomie, which for its author was linked to radical social and material degradation. A landed child, sustaining himself in Poland from the revenues of his family estate, collecting rents from tenants of the tenement the Gombrowiczes owned, with his own servant whose labor enabled him essentially unlimited dedication to social life and writing, now lives day to day, in the permanent uncertainty accompanying his precarious position. His days are spent wandering, repeatedly changing addresses, renting shabby rooms, and often staying in crowded lodging houses for the homeless (conventillos), sharing a room with several others. The loss of his privileged class position and the distinction derived from the role of writer is accompanied by dramatic material hardship—Gombrowicz comes close to starvation, begs for food, survives on charitable meals and occasional labor such as carrying heavy loads in the port. Meanwhile, the war unfolding across the ocean destroys his country, ultimately granting Gombrowicz refugee status: “It was exhausting, terrible, desperate. The war crushed my family, social position, homeland, future, I had nothing, I was nothing… And yet. And yet Argentina… What a relief! What liberation! […] With the fall of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War, everything, all the order in which I had lived, collapsed. Form loosened! An exceptional opportunity! Blessed occasion, the only one! […] Alone. Free. Lost” (W. Gombrowicz 2012c, p. 80); “It was catastrophe that sustained me. My catastrophe, that of Poland, of Europe” (W. Gombrowicz 2012c, p. 73); “Having lost my social rank, my family, my habits, and having gained in return anonymity, I felt ten times better, I felt liberated” (W. Gombrowicz 2012c, p. 69).

Gombrowicz had thus attained the state his philosophy had advocated: the chance to exist as a singularity freed from collective obligations. The war ripped him from a life tightly encrusted with predetermined qualities, shaped by the laws of community, group, nation, society, or milieu, and brought him closer to “bare life” (Agamben 1998). Yet if Gombrowicz saw in this deprivation a unique opportunity, it was not because he accepted the zero-state of existence proper to “bare life,” an extremely passive vegetative persistence, but because he recognized in the situation a chance to live life differently bare.

If such life falls outside the symbolic sphere, it is not in order to mechanically replace bios with zoe, but to complicate their relationship. The nakedness of life that Gombrowicz pursues is not a simple deprivation of symbolic veils, but their excessive transgression. It is neither a return to some Rousseauian figure of supposedly authentic, pre-symbolic existence, nor an Agambenian “whatever-being” persisting in a state of deactivated law. The Gombrowiczian exposed subject is at every moment fully concrete and individual, yet dialectically turns apparent deprivation to its advantage. It does not move toward some dubious beyond-symbolic realm, but rather reformulates the conditions of the symbolic so that the constraining “garment” of the symbolic becomes a garment suited to its movements.

Only a reading undertaken from this perspective allows one properly to appreciate the messianic threads present in Trans-Atlantyk. The individual whose life is at stake here is the young Ignac. Gombrowicz stages this agon through the antinomy of the Homeland and the Synczyzna.16 The former is embodied in Tomasz, the solemn father-patriarch figure and Polish patriot; the latter in the variously non-normative Gonzalo, an ethnic, gendered, classed, and sexual hybrid, for whom Tomasz’s son becomes an object of sexual fascination. Tomasz interprets Gonzalo’s attempts to seduce his son as a shame that can only be washed away with blood. However, not with the scoundrel’s petticoat blood … Here a Weightier blood is called for!” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 90), “With God’s help I shall wash it off with blood, and the blood will be weighty, it will be terrible, because it will be my Son’s!” (Ibid.).

Following the biblical schema of the sacrifice of Isaac, Tomasz explicitly calls this “Weightier blood” a “Sacrifice” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 109). Gonzalo does not remain passive. On the one hand, he responds with a frenzy of parricide, while on the other, he plots patricide, which would liberate sons from the father’s authority and establish a new form of communal coexistence.

In this way, Gombrowicz, very perceptively anticipating by decades the insights of biopolitical scholarship,17 identifies the keystone of the community in the sacrificial spilling of blood, which—as Derrida also observed—constitutes the core of religion.18 The false memoir that is Trans-Atlantyk addresses “kin” in its opening sentence, that is, family members linked by blood. In a wartime context, the socially honored role becomes that of the citizen–soldier willing to sacrifice blood for the bleeding nation. This is why, when the novelistic Gombrowicz enters the embassy building, he falls to the Minister’s feet: “my services, my blood, my possessions offering, I begged him to use me at this sacred moment, according to his sacred desire and discernment, and to take my person under his command” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 20). Here, Gombrowicz locates the biopolitical core of managing the life of the individual, whose rights must yield to the command to offer a sacrifice of one’s own blood.

From a Freudian perspective, the seeds of the community might be seen in the sons killing the father, a death subsequently imitated in repeated acts of offering sons to the father (Esposito 2002). In this sense, the violence that establishes the community does not occur in the archaic past of myth but resides within the social body itself. The sacrifice, incorporated into the mechanism of continually renewing social bonds, must be reactivated in successive acts of violence that sustain the community. From this perspective, only the shedding of blood endows the community with its cohesive keystone.

This is clearly illustrated in the Almighty Legion of Cavalry, who, feeling their own weakness, aspire to “Terrible we must be” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 103), to commit “a Most Terrible Deed!” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 106), plunging into a fury of killing. In this obsession with sacrificial blood as the cement of communal life, the strictly religious—or more precisely, theological–political—dimension of the community is revealed, imparting it with an indelibly thanatotic character. The community here exposes its vampiric aspect: it feeds on blood while keeping its subjects in the liminal state of life–death proper to the undead (“for many days between Life and Death I lingered”; W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 108). Polish communal life takes on the form of a monster, ensnaring life and suspending it between living and dead: “Oh, Jesus, o, God, in this Life of mine they’ve caught me again, like a vixen in a trap! Will I ever be free of this Fate of mine? Or must I repeat my Eternal Fate, this Imprisonment of mine?!” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 28).

Communal bonds have become a prison (“I understood the entire abyss of my Imprisonment”; W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 104), and the space of collective being resembles a great coffin. Comparing himself to a corpse (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 100), the despairing Witold cries out: “Will I ever make my way out of this empty coffin? Will I be forever dying among these people, sunken into their preprimeval times, will I ever emerge into the dearie sun, walk out into freedom? Is my life forever to remain subterranean? […] I wanted to escape” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 105). Diagnosing this vampiric aspect of the collective, the aim of Trans-Atlantyk becomes the interruption of this mechanism of community formation and its replacement by a community of a different kind. Thus, any attempt to transcend the paradigm of sovereignty as a thanatotic monster feeding on the spilling of blood must involve the abandonment of the founding act of violence as the original scene consolidating the community established by it.

The novel’s plot twice seems inevitably poised to erupt in violence. Twice, however, the shedding of blood is averted. The first instance occurs during the duel between Tomasz and Gonzalo. Witold’s sabotage lies in the fact that the opponents unknowingly aim at each other with unloaded pistols. It is the “Blood of the Heart” (transl. modified) that is awaited during the duel, whose spilling is supposed to bring it to an end: “Death, Death, Death, certain bloody Death, here Death, there must be Blood!” (transl. modified). Yet “there would be no end to this and the Duel couldn’t be concluded: because forsooth blood must be drawn, but how could blood issue when the pistols were without bullets?” (W. Gombrowicz 2005, p. 80).

The unresolved conflict, replaced instead by the “Empty Pistol Shot”, will prompt a renewed attempt to unleash bloody violence. This is when tension escalates, stemming from the two opposing murderous schemes—filicide and patricide. Gombrowicz drives the murderous plans to the very brink of eruption; we are at the threshold, moments away from an orgy of blood that would drown all participants. Yet it is precisely at this moment that a sudden, genuinely messianic turn occurs.

Gombrowicz very precisely defines the stakes of his operation: its purpose is the redemption of life. It is this halting of the sterile dialectic of both forms of sacrificial violence that he directly designates as “redemption”:

“bang, bang and boom, bang and boom bang, and boom, boom, bang, bang, Bangboom, […] I thus wanted to shout, this is Filicide, Filicide! But no, ’tis Patricide! […] Let there be what must. Let the Son murder the Father! But what’s this? What’s this? Oh, perchance Redemption! Oh, what’s this, how so, what is this? Oh, perchance Redemption! Because, as Ignatio is thus in haste with his Bang arriving, flying, and everyone stands Dead-still, he bursts out laughing. And instead of his Father with a Bang Banging, he Ha-ha-ha’s into laughter and, having Ha-ha-ha’ed with laughter, he leaps over his Father, and, thus having leapt aside, he Ha-ha-ha’s with laughter, he Ha-ha-ha’s! […] They Bust with laughter. […] And on from Laughter to Laughter, Ha-ha with Laughter, ha-ha with Laughter, they ha-ha, ha-ha, they Ha-ha-ha!”.

(W. Gombrowicz 2005, pp. 118–19)

In this way, Trans-Atlantyk ends not with an outbreak of violence but with a universal outbreak of laughter. “Buchbach,” previously connoting gunshots, evokes the sounds of play (manifested in the novel in the game of palant), etymologically resonant in Polish with redemption (zbawienie). Instead of the sounds of a blood-spilling explosion, what remains is a word imitating it, which thereby suspends it and softens its force. As a result, the onomatopoeia becomes an instrument of messianic correction, transforming a community founded on death (śmierć) into a community of laughter (śmiech).

This laughter becomes quite literally the only exit from the impasse of a situation without escape. Such laughter, in Gombrowicz, is the reaction of humanity suddenly and unexpectedly saved.19 A “blast without an explosion,” a burst of laughter instead of gunfire—this is Gombrowicz’s version of Benjamin’s “divine violence,” which destroys without bloodshed.20 It is one of Gombrowicz’s most potent para-messianic images: instead of a community of bodies condemning others to be torn apart by bullets, a community of concrete, living individuals emerges, who, if they burst at all, burst out of laughing.

5. Life Otherwise Bare

It is significant that Gombrowicz’s entire oeuvre concludes with a similarly affirmative image. The pivotal figure of his last published book, the play Operetta, is nakedness. As we have already seen, Gombrowicz was highly attentive to its dual nature. If “bare life” represents a depersonalized, vegetative, and passively subordinate product of sovereign power, Gombrowicz seeks to transform it into a “messianic remainder”—a figure of singular life “which returns to haunt those who wield power in the world” (Bielik-Robson 2010, p. 161). Nakedness thus becomes, for Gombrowicz, a figure of messianic condition, a point worth remembering in the context of the excerpt from the Diary already cited in note 13, where he explicitly identifies Christ as an ally “in the struggle to attain nakedness and simplicity.” This operation, in keeping with the messianic tradition, is tied to the breaking of the prison-like structure of the world: “The only thing that can save us/Is escape from this prison/In which we are locked” (W. Gombrowicz 2012b, p. 415). It is precisely in this context of the emergent traces of “redemptive” action that Jeleński, guided by his characteristically astute intuition, discerned in Gombrowicz’s work a “mission of messianic character, which he is to undertake in the dimension of history” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 445).

Operetta acquired its final form after Gombrowicz’s return to Europe. At the same time, the writer, now living in France, records in his Diary a series of jeremiads against “Paris, which adores clothes” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 613). All of France “fell apart into Proust and Sartre” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 611). In contrast to the former, “sometimes in tails, sometimes in a bathrobe” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 348), the latter initially appears as a discoverer of individual corporeality. For this reason, Gombrowicz stylizes him as a “sinister Messiah,” although born “in apartments, behind curtains, amid bibelots,” he nonetheless brings “redemption” in the form of a cylinder hat broken (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 611). Ultimately, however, Gombrowicz forms only a temporary tactical alliance with Sartre; the pursuit of subjective nakedness is undertaken on his own terms.

In the finale of his oeuvre, Gombrowicz returns to childhood, setting the action just before the First World War. The “count dressed from head to foot” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 6), Szarm (an obvious allusion to the French charme, meaning “grace”), resolves to seduce Albertynka (a clear reference to Proust’s heroine). Yet whereas the girl “will dream of nudity,” Szarm “is ashamed of nudity, he adores clothes, […] he does not wish to undress her, but, on the contrary, to dress her” (ibid.). The girl’s dreams are shattered by the fact that “Clothes, Fashion and Chic begin to reign supreme under Fior’s command” (ibid.). Fior (a name suggesting both floral connotations—Italian fiore—and allusive references to Dior) is the dictator of fashion, announcing the revue of costumes that will dictate trends for the near future.

At the ball, however, a revolutionary outbreak of violence occurs. Two world wars follow in its wake. In the historical tumult, everyone believes that Albertynka—and with her, the dreams of nakedness—has been raped and killed.

Through the metaphor of dress, Gombrowicz attempts to capture the status of historical experience, in which fashion becomes a reflection of the dominant forms of a given era. He demonstrates how humanity overlays itself with forms of identity or ideological orders just as one puts on clothing.21 It is for this reason that Fior is necessary as a dictator—so as to reveal the ambiguity inherent in the word itself, a duality referring to sovereign power.22

The accumulation of these forms culminates in a massive massacre. In Act III of Operetta, among the ruins of the old world, where only the “Wind of History” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 7) blows, the tattered remnants of humanity resolve to lay their defeats in a coffin. Fior curses “man’s clothing, […] the cut of trousers and blouses/they’ve eaten too far into our flesh!” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 103). Social identifications have so thoroughly appropriated life that they have become indistinguishable from it. Transforming into a burden upon life itself, they began to constrain individual movements, like ill-fitting clothing, limiting the possibilities of action solely to the format imposed upon them. In a gesture of despair, Fior “places in the coffin the sacred, ordinary, eternally elusive Nudity of Man” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 8).

Yet, as in Trans-Atlantyk, a sudden reversal occurs—a classical die Umkehr (Rosenzweig 1985, p. 213). The messianic operation unfolds at the moment of absolute triumph of death, when it seems that no undoing of this state is possible. From the coffin rises the naked Albertynka. It is then that Gombrowicz puts into Fior’s mouth an ecstatic defense of nakedness as a form of redemption: “O, redemption!/O hail, nudity, eternally youthfull!” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 105).

The revelation of Albertynka, previously called the “miracle girl”, possesses all the characteristics of a miracle. Yet whereas, in a Schmittian understanding, a miracle is an expression of the arbitrarily intervention of a divine sovereign, in Operetta, where the smoothly functioning theological–political machinery has collapsed, the miracle also loses its supernatural and otherworldly powers. The miraculous act is here derived acrobatically from the very center of a fallen world. In this way, Gombrowicz approaches Benjamin’s daring project in his habilitation on Trauerspiel, where from a “gloomy impasse” he rescues a “miraculous finale,” and “in the sudden reversal, the diagnosis of the allegorical fall of the world itself becomes an allegory of resurrection” (Lipszyc 2012, p. 221).

There is, of course, a paradox at work here, since allegory—pointing to the lack of an organic connection between thing and concept—constitutes a fundamental manifestation of lifelessness. In Gombrowicz, however, it becomes an allegory of resurrection to life. As if only the gloominess of the diagnosis could provide the condition for hope and a source of energy to raise life from the grave. Like Benjamin, Gombrowicz “derives the redemptive act from allegory (so as not to introduce overly positive theology from outside), without deriving it from it (so as not to violate the pure negativity of allegory). He approaches redemption from the side of allegory, from the entirely desolate, powerless world, as close as possible—from the skull of the dead—to the angelic face” (Lipszyc 2012, p. 221).

The coffin thus becomes the locus of the paradoxical possibility for life, acknowledged as a correlate of crisis and hope, of dissolution and metamorphosis. If the fundamental product of history’s labor is indeed the corpse, the life-stripped body, which history has objectified and subsequently disposed of at will, then should one not also see in it the potential for a revitalizing turn? As if only through the power of negation does a minimal reference to redemption become possible.

In the face of the power of death, the quasi-resurrection of Albertynka becomes evidence for the very possibility—possibility of life despite the catastrophe of history—where clothing no longer constrains nor condemns to death: “From the grave she raises!/On the coffin she dances!/She wants to have fun!” (W. Gombrowicz 1971, p. 107). Gombrowicz’s intent is thus the distillation of life that embraces nakedness on its own terms—not as a product of sovereign power, but as an expression of vitalist freedom.

A similar shift manifests most clearly in the treatment of the word pas. Gombrowicz discovers its aporetic nature on his own, from which conceptual usage—drawing, of course, on the polysemy of French—would later be taken up by Derrida. The word pas is responsible for the musical rhythm of Operetta, recurring roughly a dozen times throughout the text, with a refrain-like regularity, thus establishing the organizing axis of the work. Initially appearing as an innocent exclamation, by the play’s conclusion it closely corresponds to its central concern: the question of the messianic suspension of history.

As long as pas, drawing on Operetta’s metaphor of clothing, functions as a part of the wardrobe (it means a belt in Polish), it is merely a sartorial element. Yet in the context of halting history, the noun evokes another of its senses. Pas, as an expression of withdrawal from further play, becomes an instrument within the game, suspending its continuity, motivated by the rules of play themselves. It brings an end to the round or closes one of its sections. Unlike the analogous model of declaring a state of exception—reserved for the discretionary power of a sovereign—the pas is enacted by the losing player, making it a kind of grassroots variant of authority.

For this reason, the operetta pas carries inescapable ambivalence: by passing, the player withdraws from further bidding, acknowledging a weaker position in the competition, or even defeat itself, while simultaneously exercising the privilege of interrupting the game in which they would inevitably lose. If history, from Gombrowicz’s perspective, becomes an unending succession of defeats for singularity, then saying pas need not be a concession to the victors of history, but a renunciation of history itself as a game in which failure has become a sentence of fate. Therefore, only its interruption—the suspension (French pas also meaning “not”) of the historical procession of garments as the haughty steps of perpetrators of massacres—can constitute a redemptive renunciation, finally allowing singularity to live.

The finale of Operetta, as an allegorical scene of life’s resurrection, also marks the suspension of historical continuity, when the stage of hope is wrenched from the catastrophic unfolding of events. The time of the drama’s conclusion, looping in successive exclamations of “pas!”, is more “the time that time takes to come to an end” (Agamben 2005, p. 67). The escalating arias become the remnant of both the operetta and history itself, in which only a little more time is required to exhaust the prevailing conception of temporality. History, conceived as a system of repetition that merely perpetuated structures of subjugation, halts within the interrupting repetition of the messianic pas. In this way, the dying down of the action in Operetta becomes indistinguishable from the extinguishing of history itself, which until then marched forward in an endless procession of garments.

In the play’s finale, Gombrowicz brings us to the triumph of subjective nakedness, a figure of finally free existence. And though he raises it from within the coffin, this act only serves to emphasize the significance of resurrected dreams of vitalist nakedness. Albertynka in the finale “Dreams without pause!/Dreams without paaaause!/Dreeeams without paaaause!” (transl. modified). It is with this image—imbued with a para-utopian dream of the emancipation of singular life—that Gombrowicz leaves us at the conclusion of his work, making us the custodians of this still unrealized dream.

Let us return to the sentence cited at the beginning of this text: “At times, my hopelessness is haunted by a spark of conviction, an almost tangible certainty that redemption is not impossible.” The conceptual density, stemming from the precision with which Gombrowicz threaded successive figures of his messianic thought along this line, is matched by the particular condensation of his dialectical method. Gombrowicz does not deliver a definitive soteriological thesis. His parade of words begins with the loosening, underweighted absolute of “sometimes.” Although we struggle with the sense of “hopelessness,” it is sometimes not entirely annulled but haunted by redemptive alternatives. These do not fully dispel the darkness, yet they illuminate it at specific points—not through the fire of living faith, but through a “spark of conviction,” transforming into a completely tangible certainty.

The object of this certainty is not the possibility of redemption, but rather redemption which appears not impossible. Bearing in mind the quotation marks Jeleński employed in the context of Gombrowicz for the terms “redemption” and “messianism,” it is worth noting that Gombrowicz similarly disrupts their status here. The thought that redemption is not impossible is rendered in italics. In the Diary, he refers to this as a “redemptive idea”: the exchange of an actualized existence (i.e., the life that a person has made) “for that passive, natural life” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 465).

While the latter might resonate with a somewhat un-dialectical tone, Gombrowicz emphasizes that what interests him is the opening of a space for negotiation between these two modes of existence, shattering any claim to totality. Once again, the extremity, which he associates with heavenly, abstract regions inimical to life, is tempered by the conditional mood: “if truly there existed […] any possibility of redemption… was it not precisely in this that it consisted?” (ibid.); “if there is any possibility of redemption, it can lie only in this!” (W. Gombrowicz 2012a, p. 458).

In this dizzying dialectical contredanse, the bitterness of the diagnosis prevents the thought from being burdened by excessive positivity, while simultaneously demanding a decisive counter-move: the salvaging of a pure “attempt at affirmation” (Segre 1973, p. 277). In this way, Gombrowicz successfully resists both the pull toward an “integral atheism” (Salgas 2004) and the paradoxical “Christianization” that might have placed his texts within the horizon of the death of God in its strictly post-Christian guise (Tischner 2013). He navigates a narrow strait between the Scylla of renouncing any theological reference and the Charybdis of a positively fideistic project of possible redemption.

Unlike Kafka, who famously wrote that hope is infinitely abundant, but not for us, in Gombrowicz it is my, and thus strictly individual, hopelessness that is pierced by the premonition of redemption, which is not impossible. Its promise is carried by the haunting of the subject—the spectral spark of hope that never allows it to reconcile with the established order, with the factum brutum of the laws of reality. It is in this sense, and in this sense alone, that Gombrowicz remains one of the greatest messianists of twentieth-century literature.