Marta Figlerowicz thinks Maria Janion’s political insights are key to navigating our present chaos

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child.

Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos.

Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism