Redefinicja kategorii świadka. Przypadek Poematu o miejskiej rzeźni Tadeusza Śliwiaka

Redefining the Witness Category. The Case of Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse by Tadeusz Śliwiak

In the article the author reconstructs critical judgments about the Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse of Tadeusz Śliwiak (Andrzej Kaliszewski, Konstanty Pieńkosz, Jan Pieszczachowicz, Artur Sandauer, Stanislaw Stabro, Piotr Sobolczyk), and interprets it using posthumanistic instruments to prove that it is ecological and pacifist. The main idea of the author is to see both animals transported to the Municipal Slaughterhouse in Lviv and jews working there. It is the poetic volume of Śliwiak that meets the demand of Éric Baratay, who wrote that the animal could not continue to be a white spot of history. The poet emphasizes that animality is a state devoid of human aggression and desire for domination, while what human it values negatively (if there is a prohibition of murder among people, it is due to fear of spreading violence to human actors). In Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse, the strategy that prevents animals from being brought into the role of raw materials is the prospect of a child for whom animals die like humans. Until now, the reception of the poem was dominated by views on the domination of turpistic and expressionist aesthetics, reducing Śliwiak’s testimony to the role of “great metaphor of war”. The author proves that the poet emphasizes the stigma of violence (the victims’ people were forced to work in the management of the bodies of non-human victims), which invalidates the hierarchy of victims, preventing comparison of suffering. In addition, the author describes two situations from the Poem about a municipal slaughterhouse, using a category of excess (by Wolfgang Sofsky) in which human life could be taken away as a result of the whim of the overseers.