January 20th, 2025

I guess achieving consistency takes seeing oneself as one develops, which is thinking, which is reflection, which is my favorite piece by Brian Eno.

January 16th, 2025

When I started working on the concept of the world and world-making more systematically, I had this idea of thinking about the world around a line from one of the songs by Queens of the Stone Age. The song is If I Had a Tail and the line goes: “When you own the world, you’re always home.” One of the reasons why this line stuck with me is that this song has been special to me ever since I first heard it almost twelve years ago. I experience music as a basic form of sense-making, meaning that things open up to me through it (or that it opens things up for me). And the world, as I understand it following Hanna Arendt, is also about making sense of how things appear to you by relating to others.

A response to “When you own the world, you’re always home” is: “You don’t, so you’re not.” As Arendt writes in a passage cited by Malcom Ferdinand in his Decolonial Ecology, the world is something “we have in common without owning it.” How do we arrive at some sense of being at home in the world without aspiring to own it – without seeing everybody and everything around us as extensions of ourselves?

In this way, the concept of the world is tied to my first proper research interest, Martha C. Nussbaum’s book, Upheavals of Thought. This book is important to me because I’m interested in the category of wonder Nussbaum discusses there, albeit very briefly. Upheavals inspired me to write a doctoral thesis on Nussbaum’s philosophy, in which I focused on the role of cultivating emotions in politics – that is, on what you have called an ethos of democracy. My finishing the thesis coincided with the beginning of the crisis of democratic institutions in Poland brought about by the right-ward shift in political power. I realized then how easy it is, especially in relatively young democracies such as those in Poland and Central Europe generally, to underestimate the role of an ethos. And yet institutions only make sense – only work – when they are expressions of an ethos.

I think this ethos is primarily concerned with relating across differences. This is what Nussbaum’s concept of wonder suggests. In your own work, Jeremy, you have shown how wonder works against narcissism, where you understand narcissism as the tendency to see the wills of others primarily as a threat to oneself. I would say that wonder is non-appropriative, meaning that it responds to a difference as a difference rather than trying to “own” it – to reduce it to what is familiar to oneself. 

This is where the concept of the world comes in. I think about world-making as refusing to be offended by somebody’s differences. In The Human Condition, Arendt compares the world to “a table located between those who sit around it,” “relating and separating [people] at the same time” (52). Sitting at a table can be very difficult – but if we’re willing to take a seat, rather than turning our backs on those who differ from us, we make the first step to creating something “common without owning it.”  As such, the world provides an alternative to thinking about politics in terms of either consensus or conflict. In fact, both of these strategies are like lining up chairs so that they face the same direction, the difference being that in the first case, the ordering is presented as spontaneous, “natural,” and in the latter, it is admitted that the ordering cannot but be an imposition.

I always think about the tail-y critter from If I Had a Tail as a big cat, say, a snow leopard – majestic but also vulnerable and goofy, as all felines are. Could it be that accepting the vulnerability – the exposure – of speaking from one’s own place while relating to the differences of others can help us feel a bit more at home with others and ourselves?

January 20th, 2025

Recently, after a class on Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” somebody told me they were impressed by how Butler’s ideas had been discussed in a way that hadn’t felt intrusive to those disagreeing with them. An unoffending difference.

There are many reasons why questions such as gender roles and sexuality may seem controversial in Poland: the rapid – and often brutal – systemic transformation, during which adjustments to liberal economy were prioritized and political and personal freedoms were construed as inextricably connected to, even dependent on, capitalist economy (here I find Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of neoliberal hegemony useful); the reaffirmation of more traditional values and lifestyles as a response to the alienation this caused; the historical and ongoing importance of the Catholic Church; the distrust of left-wing politics as part of the post-communist legacy, and possibly many others. But apart from the obvious fact that different people in Poland do think about issues such as gender and sexuality differently, as a teacher, I often experience that students want to – and can – talk about divisive topics. After all, if the class about Butler went well, it was the students’ achievement as well as mine. It seems to me that often students appreciate the space in which they can slow down, listen to each other, and consider things – that is, as you would probably say, wonder.

Now, obviously, there is a major question of scale. How do we move from a limited site of a class to democratic ethos? And how do we even ensure that classes are always spaces for wondering? On the other hand, whether one is ready to wonder in class depends to an extent on what they come to class with, that is – on other settings in which they function.

For this reason, the question of institutionalization is crucial. But I honestly admit I’m not ready to address it in a thorough way. If I can do it, this will be once I have figured out what I’m after. My starting point in this is the experience of relating as difficult and urgent.

I’m aware this choice is partly idiosyncratic. But by thinking through it, I want to come up with a certain understanding of differences – I call it, “plurality as relatable diversity.” Moving between the idiosyncratic and the sharable harks back to the question of world-making. More specifically, what is involved here is the world-building faculty of judgment (see Linda M.G. Zerilli), which, as Arendt put it, creatively developing Immanuel Kant’s concept of reflective judgment, is about “being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.” What can I share from how things appear to me to contribute to the making of a world between us?

But are we thinking of a world or the world? Granted, the right-ward turn isn’t a malaise specific to my region. But what Central Europe arguably dramatizes is that different groups, nations, ethnic and religious communities can be worlds apart, having completely different patterns of interpreting the same events. To a considerable extent, this is still the case in Polish-Ukrainian relationships, despite Polish solidarity with the Ukrainian people in view of the Russian aggression. Who should invite whom to the room, and is there the room or a pluriverse, to use Arturo Escobar’s term, of rooms?

January 23rd, 2025

My starting point is intimate. As such, it may seem relatable, but the obvious challenge is how to “magnify” the starting point, so to speak, to political scales, especially since I’m interested in thinking not only about what happens between humans but also about politics on a planetary scale. At this point, I think about politics and plurality as co-extensive. By this, I mean that whereas plurality – or, more specifically, relating across plurality – defines a political norm, it requires politics itself if politics is understood as involving nomoi – reflectively construed arrangements. We cannot assume that relating across plurality happens spontaneously, although it certainly can, and caring for such relating requires scrutinizing existing relationships, including sensitivity to bad kinds of oneness.

This is probably why, when thinking about acceptance (which is indeed important to me), I would add taste to touch and listening. That is partly related to my interest in reflective judgment, which, for Kant, was the judgment of taste. It is interesting for me to go beyond the conventional meaning of taste here and try to think about it as a sense as well. Arendt hinted at this possibility, and her recent interpreters, Kimberly Curtis, and Cecilia Sjöholm, followed up with further comments. Taste can suggest a dangerous fusion, an incorporation. But it also means letting oneself be affected, changed by that which we taste. And there is also an element of voluntariness involved – of accepting somebody/something as that who/which will affect me. Maybe taste could help us think about good types of oneness?

It’s easier for me to say what this framework excludes than what it requires. Let me use the example of the current Polish government. It is a coalition of parties spanning the spectrum from conservatives through centrists (the biggest segment) to left-wing parties; their joining forces played a pivotal role in the shift in power you witnessed here in Poland in the fall of 2023. This could be a chance for achieving a mature kind of oneness based on the productive exchange between differences. But the way this usually works (or doesn’t) is that, as the major force in the coalition, the centrists let the conservatives and left-wingers play out their differences and then push their “uncontroversial” agenda, basically perpetuating the status quo. They seem happy to base their mandate on their not being the previous ruling party, presenting unity in the coalition as the only means of preventing the other party’s return to power. This is not a good type of oneness; there is no genuine relating across plurality, and the conflict has become instrumentalized.

But perhaps my region – Lower Silesia, located in the southwestern corner of Poland – is a good place to rethink oneness. I thought about it the other day as I was listening to my colleague, Maciej Manikowski, lecture on a 17th-century Silesian mystic, Angelus Silesii, often, but apparently wrongly, referred to as Angelus Silesius. There is a great tradition of Silesian mysticism – Jacob Böhme is another important figure. Whereas mysticism definitely isn’t my area of expertise, it struck me how important unity/oneness is in this tradition; I also imagine that this type of reflection values quietness.

But, of course, Angelus and Böhme were German. Whereas Lower Silesia was under the rule of the first Polish princes and kings at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries when we locate the beginning of Poland, Lower Silesia changed hands over the centuries, finally becoming Prussian and being included in the German Empire – before becoming Polish again only in 1945 as a result of the Yalta Conference. The German population was made to leave, and Polish people arrived, many of them from the pre-war East of Poland, which was then included in the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania). This is a difficult part of history for everybody involved, and yet here we are, talking to each other – for example, about the legacy of Silesian mysticism during conferences that involve both Polish and German scholars. I like to think that Lower Silesia, where I was born and have lived most of my life, is a good starting point to think about and practice world-building with all its difficulties and promises.

The Awkward One (January 24th, 2025)

It occurred to me that the experience of not quite fitting in can bring some interesting insights – existentially and politically. Yet awkwardness is ambivalent. When does one’s sense of awkwardness translate into responding to the world in a certain way rather than closing the world off? Now, I would say that awkwardness is not relational in itself. I think one of the questions I’m really concerned with in my research is how to develop awkwardness into a form of relating. It animates my work on such concepts as plurality, the world, non-appropriative relating, wonder and reflective judgment.

The technical language aside, I think such relating is about being oriented toward another person (being) as they are. It is about seeing and hearing them and about being seen and heard oneself. While this may feel cozy, it need not be so. To accept you as you, I have to be ready to accept your mystery – for the simple reason that I am me and not you. An awkwardness remains. What would it be like to embrace another person and at the same time respect their difference; what would it be like to feel embraced by another person and at the same time feel respected in one’s difference? I admit these questions are very difficult for me – not only as a researcher but also as a person. But I feel that this is the right direction in which to go.

There is also something awkward about living in and being from my part of the world, which is Central Europe. Neither strictly within the centers of power nor peripheral to them, as my colleague Dorota Kołodziejczyk shows, my region doesn’t sit easily with categorizations. Part of the experience of awkwardness I’ve grown up with is doubting whether one has something interesting to say from here (“Surely not, since it’s quite literally, neither here nor there?!”). So, for me to take awkwardness as the starting point of thinking about relating, I need to recognize how relating should include learning how to value one’s own standpoint and home. In terms of geopolitics, this means resisting implicit assumptions about who has more to say than whom. Do you think that this task is highly relevant, given the shift in U.S. politics?

Finally, there is something awkward about living in Lower Silesia, the southwesternmost part of the country, wedging between Germany and the Czech Republic. To feel awkward can mean feeling decentered, realizing that things are otherwise for others. And things have been otherwise in Lower Silesia, as the region changed hands throughout the centuries. Things are still otherwise, too, with borders being so close that many people divide their time between two or even three nations. To appreciate how weird this is without being weirded out is to experience relating in a decentered way.

It doesn’t need to feel cool, but it’s worth caring for – like the nonintrusive beauty of my neighborhood on a sunny afternoon late in December 2024.

Best, 

Urszula

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