Philosophical and literary two-handedness: The case of Dobrosław Kot

The possibility and the ways of articulating subjectivity is the main theme of both the philosophical books and essays of Dobrosław Kot as well as his fiction, written under the pseudonym Wit Szostak. His approach is grounded in ‘the relational subject’, a notion which has been developed in numerous philosophical treaties and in literature. This article examines the ways and means of the constituting the textual subject in Kot's philosophical books, Subjectivity and Loss (2009), Dramatic Thinking (2016), and Odyssseus' Raft: An essay about migrants (2020) and tries to position his thought with regard to similar studies of the relational subject in contemporary humanities. The discussion ranges from second-person narration and the semantics of personal pronouns in the structure of literary works (i.e. points of contact between philosophy and literary discourse) to the functioning of implied and thematized information in literary narratives. Crucially, the tensions between these two forms of communication offer the textual subject an opportunity to articulate his position. Finally, all the analyses point to the conclusion that loss is indeed at the heart Dobrosław Kot’s work.