20 III 1986

BWA Gallery in Lublin

manifestation – lecture during the exhibition and meeting Registration 2 (June 9-13)

Photo by Czesława Herda

Description of the manifestation:

BWA Gallery in Lublin, a large hall on Narutowicza Street. The audience sits on chairs and on the floor; some people stand. A table for the lecturer is placed in front of the audience, with cups of paint on it.
Action: The author enters naked, approaches the table, and places two books on it: Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Walking before the gathered audience, he begins his lecture (lecture transcript in [V/16]). In the first part of the lecture, he periodically paints segments of a white vertical line and a red horizontal line on his back. He continues speaking while walking naked with the red-and-white cross on his back. In the second part of the lecture, he paints segments of a serpentine white line on his chest and stomach, next to which he then adds a red line. By the end of the lecture, a red-and-white question mark emerges on the front of his body. The author concludes the lecture and adds a red-and-white dot of the question mark on his penis. A discussion follows, and then the author leaves the room.

Jerzy Bereś, “The Dispute about the Highest Values, part II”, 1986

The second part of the lecture was accompanied by painting a serpentine white line on the front of my body, then drawing a bold red line alongside it. Continuing to walk naked before the audience and occasionally painting a section of the serpentine line on the front of my body, I said: Neither the tragic hero, dissolved in the generality, nor the solitary knight of faith, immersed in paradox, is capable of entering into a dispute over values. In life, the hero, focused on a clearly defined goal, moves directly toward it, and all dialogue is excluded. After the tragedy, his subjectivity, absorbed by the generality, ceases to exist. People at large, possessed by the hero’s ideal, are unable to converse and can at most agitate for their own ideal. When such a community encounters another community centered on a different ideal, mutual agitation arises, ultimately leading to conflict. This is the origin of the nationalist, ideological, and religious wars that mark human history. Today, such solutions are coming to an end due to fear of universal totalitarianism or perhaps total destruction.

Thus, based on the tragic hero’s stance, there is no possibility of a fruitful debate because there is no subject: the hero, sacrificing himself for others, objectifies himself, and the community, in turn, objectifies itself before the ideal. By contrast, the knight of faith is a personality, but a solitary one, trapped in paradox and gazing at the trembling of his own subjectivity. He cannot enter into contact with anyone. The purely subjective stance developed by Kierkegaard, later interpreted in various ways by existentialist philosophers, has become so widespread that broad human communities, almost purely individualistic, have emerged.

Today’s world thus appears as a mixture of nationalist, ideological, and religious generalities, more or less in conflict with one another, and individualistic collectives, atomized subjects lacking mutual contact. The dangerous nature of this mixture is demonstrated by the very existence of terrorism. Examples include the terrorist attacks at the airports in Rome and Vienna: the ideologically objectified terrorist, acting in a purely subjective manner, rolls a bomb toward a queue of passengers, treating them as objects, killing and injuring many. The height of senselessness!

At this point, let us return for a moment to Kierkegaard and Abraham, who is walking with Isaac up the mountain. At one moment Isaac asks: We have the wood and the tools, but where is the sacrificial lamb? Abraham replies: God will provide the sacrificial lamb. Kierkegaard focuses on Abraham’s subjective drama – whether he lied, concealed the truth, and so on. We will try to interpret this differently. With his response, Abraham did not lie; rather, he initiated a dialogue with God about responsibility for Isaac’s life. At this moment a dispute began between the two fathers – the divine and the human – over the value of Isaac’s life. A dispute arose over the meaning of the sacrifice. And the effect of this dispute, in the form of not killing one’s son to validate one’s faith, continued in subsequent generations and became a lasting value, a component of national identity.

However, the difficulty of reaching dialogue is shown by the fact that only the voice of Isaac, the chosen victim, became the catalyst for the dispute. Yet difficulty does not mean impossibility, and transcending existentialist solitude not only does not deprive the individual of subjectivity but proves that this subjectivity has reached a stage of inalienability. Thus, not on the basis of the tragic hero, who objectifies himself, but on the basis of the knight of faith, an open dispute about values can arise, and the tradition of responsibility for these values can become a component of national identity. Such an anti-nationalist, non-ideological, non-religious national entity is, in my view, the highest value, alongside language, faith, and art. All the values I have called “highest” contain a subjective element.

The presence of a subjective factor determines a language’s status as a living language, unlike dead languages which, even if perfect, remain objects. Hence, the widespread use of Esperanto is impossible, because this language is merely a highly practical object, a tool. Leaving aside faith, where the presence of a subject is self-evident, let us consider art. The subjective factor enables us to connect with a work of art, even one created in the very distant past; such a work feels alive to us, while others, equally technically perfect, remain dead. Through these works we can enter into a dispute – a dialogue about the highest values, with personalities and authors living even in the most remote epochs.

The subjective factor is most strongly embedded in the highest value, which is an anti-nationalist, non-ideological, non-religious national entity. I maintain that our national identity has reached a state of inalienability, has become an indestructible value, and thus enables the initiation of a free, internal dialogue among Poles, as well as an external, international dispute over the hierarchy of values in today’s world. Therefore, I believe that waiting for authentic dialogue makes sense.

The serpentine line painted on the front of my body during the second part of the lecture formed a white-and-red question mark, with a white-and-red dot on the phallic organ of my body.