Dualisms and the concept of the political: theoretical reflections on the political significance of binary thinking

The article discusses the relationship between different kinds of thinking based on binary oppositions in the context of the political. The main assumption of the article is based on the claim that the notion of the political requires a reworking of different kinds of dualisms. The verification of the initial assumption has been carried out in two – opposing – directions. On the one hand, there are sphere dualisms of the public–private type, which in practice support the political/ non-political opposition. Such divisions turn out to be a source of erasure of important political problems of collective life. On the other hand, no conceptualisation of the political, understood as a fundamental political relationship, can do without dualistic assumptions. Different conceptions approach this issue differently. For example, the biopolitical theory of M. Hardt and A. Negri promotes the abolition of dualisms, but ultimately the dichotomous logic in it returns, although as a manifestation of inconsistency. The concept of the political that seems most realistic appears in the agonistic theory of Ch. Mouffe and E. Laclau, in which the political is immanently associated with fundamental antagonisms based on the us–them relationship.

“We are trying to be a multicultural family...” – dualistic transmission of cultural heritage (a research report)

In this article, intercultural education in a mixed family (in Catholic-Jewish marriages) is explored. In particular, my focus is on the construction of various secular and religious patterns of bicultural family life and the possible forms and content of intergenerational family transmission in the adult generation of Jews. The research conducted in 2018–2022 was based on the biographical method – a total of 15 in-depth interviews were carried out. In the article, only a part of a broader project is presented. The biographies of four women of Jewish origin are explored – three of them are representatives of the third post-war generation. All of them try to combine ethnic and dualistic education, due to the type of bicultural marriage or the attitude to the dominant culture. The analytical part is a short reconstruction of the type of family origin, self-identification, cultural definition of one’s own family and opinions regarding the transmission of the Jewish heritage of each woman. Statements of the participants of the research about the ways of celebrating double holidays are collected in a table. The narrators create a culturally open type of their own family and in one case a culturally declared type (according to Alicja Szerląg’s classification).

Considerations on the Polish Translation of Arrigo Boito’s Short Stories

The paper discusses some translation problems in the Polish version of four fantasy short stories by Italian writer and composer Arrigo Boito: ‘Iberia’ (1868), ‘L’alfier nero’ (1868), ‘Il pugno chiuso’ (1870), and ‘Il trapezio’ (1873–1874). The book with their translations by Aleksandra Cypko and Klaudia Sarafin was published by the Cracow-based publishing house Austeria in 2021. The challenges faced in translation work were manifold, starting with the reproduction of Boito’s stylistic and poetic peculiarities in contemporary Polish. In this paper, I first survey the salient features of Boito’s literary Italian and style to focus subsequently on the Polish translators’ solutions for rendering loanwords and technical words and to examine the functions of the notes and the paratextual apparatus of the translations. In the final part of the paper, I address the issue of translating the antinomies underlying Boito’s writing. In this sense, his four short stories represent an ideal expression of the dualistic conception of Scapigliatura, an important artistic movement in which the young Boito was involved. To find metaphors and similes through which to adequately reproduce this dominant feature of Boito’s writing was one of the most difficult challenges for the Polish translators.