Corpus Christi, corpus delicti – nowy kontrakt narracyjny. Pokłosie (2012) Władysława Pasikowskiego wobec kompromitacji kategorii polskiego świadka Zagłady
Corpus Christi, Corpus Delicti: A new narrative contract. Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012) and the invalidation of the category of the Polish Witness to the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 feature film Aftermath recapitulates and works through the existing resources in documentary cinema that deals with the Polish context of the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann, Paweł Łoziński, Marian Marzyński, Agnieszka Arnold). It is also founded on the knowledge amassed in the wake of the countrywide debate about the 1941 Jedwabne massacre (2000–1). As such, it rejects the majority narrative of the Holocaust, one told under the banners of the Righteous Among the Nations (the paradigm of innocence), the Polish witness to the Holocaust (triggering an unjustified identification of the Jaspersian paradigm of unimputable, metaphysical guilt with unwarranted guilt), and the alleged collective Polish trauma of the Holocaust. Aftermath is analyzed as a treatise on antisemitism which problematizes and narrativizes phantasms that are central to this socio-cultural pathology, visualizing the mechanism whereby the phantasm of the Jew is constructed and imposed on actual individuals. It also touches upon the Christian roots and identitarian dimension of antisemitism, alongside its central figure: the Crucifixion. Antisemitism is a matter of religion as a doctrine but also religion as an institution. By displaying a plexus of discourses and practices, attitudes and behaviors, Pasikowski defends the great quantifier as a legitimate category to describe the Polish context of the Holocaust. He debunks the essential differentiation between pre-modern and modern antisemitism (including notions about the secondary nature of Polish antisemitism in relation to the German Nazi exterminatory projects targeted at the Jews).

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