Seks i trwoga, czyli autorytet w estetykach zgrozy i afirmacji

Sex and Terror: Authority and the Esthetics of Terror and Affirmation What is substantively important for this text is its “proximity” to a book by Pascal Quignard Sex and Terror, as well as the cultural vision of the symbolic authority postulated by Lech Witkowski (among other works in the book Challenges of the Authority). Both contexts have become a decisive impulse to start the argument, which essentially boils down to showing two aesthetics of perceptions of authority: horror and affirmation. The first part of discussion is, therefore, devoted to the description of the “dark colors”, which usually take the form of narratives treating sacrifice, pain and (self-)destruction as the dominant nature of authority and of being “towards” it. In the second part of the text, in the form of a counter-attack to the “dark” theses, there appears a description of the “bright colors”, which are founded on, among other things, the derridean image of deconstructive affirmation, Michał Paweł Markowski’s vision of the phenomenon of understanding, or Steiner’s libido sciendi. In order to show the “practice” of the aesthetics of affirmation, in the end the text recalls the five manifestations of symbolic authority.