by prof. Zbigniew Mikołejko, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

May, 24, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

vicolo Doria 2

Zbigniew MIKOŁEJKO – professor, philosopher of religion, historian of ideas, and essayist. Head of the Centre for Studies in Religion at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, member of the American Academy in Rome (1996). His research interests centre on thanatology, the relationships between the sphere of the sacred and violence, the significance of the biblical tradition for contemporaneity, and apocalyptic and catastrophic themes in culture. His publications include: Emaus oraz inne spojrzenia do wnętrza Pisma (Emmaus and other insights into the interior of the Scriptures, 1998), Żywoty świętych poprawione (The lives of the saints corrected, 2001); Śmierć i tekst. Sytuacja ostateczna w perspektywie słowa (Death and text. The final situation in the context of the word, 2001); W świecie wszechmogącym. O przemocy, śmierci i Bogu (In an omnipotent world. On violence, death and God, 2009); We władzy wisielca, t. 1: Z dziejów wyobraźni Zachodu (In the hanged man’s power, vol. 1: From the history of the West’s imagination, 2012); We władzy wisielca, t. 2: Ciemne moce, okrutne liturgie (In the hanged man’s power, vol. 2: Dark forces, cruel liturgies, 2014)

SUMMARY

The figure of the drowned woman is one of the salient images of death in the culture of the West. This archaic myth, which constitutes a foil for a fusion of woman and night, Eros and Thanatos, water and the moon, is coming back to life in the modern era with surprising force. First, then, thanks to Shakespeare and his Ophelia; by largely destroying medieval images of death he created what is now essentially the binding paradigm of aestheticization of the dead. In the nineteenth and twentieth century – in numerous works of literature (from Alfred Lord Tennyson to our own contemporary Martha Grimes) and painting, in particular from the pre-Raphaelite school, and also in photography and film – there is a veritable ‘explosion’ of such unsettling and fascinating motifs. And the drowned woman in these new incarnations on occasion becomes, as in the case of L’inconnue de la Seine, a central myth in popular culture, symbolising both the mystery of death and the provocative autonomy of the woman – the inaccessibility of her mind and body to the analytical male gaze.

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