Oczy trylobitów wciąż patrzą. Przyczynek do autobiografii kopalnej
The trilobite’s eyes are still watching. Contribution to a fossil autobiography

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses the issue of the existence of fossil autobiographies that go beyond the frame- work of the anthropocentric understanding of writing, treated here as their ichnofossils or traces of the life activity of fossil organisms. Therefore, the author raises the question of the existence of animal writing based on the philosophical concept of a trace (Derrida) on the one hand and the idea of a fossil record in the field of palaeontology on the other. As a result of the above con- siderations, the author, introducing the concept of “interspecies co-authorship” after D. Herman, focuses on the fossil autobiography of trilobites, marine arthropods finally became extinct during the Permian extinction, presenting both the history of their discovery and the literary represen- tations of the Victorian era, whose common point become the eyes of trilobites. The fact of hav- ing eyes makes trilobites ancestral witnesses of the evolution of life on Earth and allows them to include in the optics of human experience. In this sense, the trilobites become co-authors of literary fossil autobiographies alongside the figure of the author of the text.

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