Beyond Pure and Impure Form. Form, Language, and Posthumanity in S. I. Witkiewicz's The Shoemakers

This dissertation studies Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s final play The Shoemakers (1934) as a key moment of internal transformation of his own discourse. An author often deemed either graphomanic or intransigent, the dissertation posits that these traits are two sides of an internal unworking [désœuvrement] and that this unworking reaches a critical moment in the play, one that reformulates internal heterodoxy, particularly as regards his aprioristic view on the end of humanity, to one with potential for anthropogenesis, in the same process deconstructing his formal-autonomous framework of Pure Form. The unworking is performed by exploiting a number of latent potentialities in the Pure Form framework: The end of humanity, an axiom in Witkacy’s historiosophy, is taken as a starting point rather than an end point, reformulating it into a horizon of posthumanity; similarly, the many revolutions of the play refocus the temporality from an imminent catastrophe to a horizon of catastrophes. Furthermore, the play has a surreptitious second tier, connecting linguistic and ontological fragments through paronomasia and aligning with profound boredom (Heidegger), making for a pure-form layer. As the linguistic and ontological disintegration of the play is motivated by its diegesis, the pure-impure form distinction underlying Witkiewicz’s Pure Form framework has been rendered an inoperable; what remains is an aesthetic of “Unimpure Form.”