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106 Chapter Four Gombrowicz, Philosophy, and Culture Gombrowicz's Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes While Gombrowicz never produced a conventional work of philosophy, his entire work is deeply engaged with the history of philosophy, particularly those currents leading to and beyond the philosophy of existentialism. Unlike Witkacy, who did actually produce such a work outlining his philosophical system of "Biological Monadism," going so far as to invent his own terminological language (see Witkiewicz , "Concepts and Theorems"), Gombrowicz wrote instead in relation to philosophy and its history, while continually asserting his originality and distance from its contemporary practice. As Francesco Cataluccio and other critics have pointed out, Gombrowicz's philosophy is not located solely in his nonfictional works devoted to philosophical themes, such as certain passages of his Diary or the Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes but throughout his work, especially in the novels Ferdydurke and Cosmos, as well as in the play The Marriage. Before turning to these works, however, it is worth looking at Gombrowicz's course on the history of philosophy itself, as it reveals in a condensed form Gombrowicz's engagement with the history of philosophy, as well as suggesting links between Gombrowicz's reading of this history and the contemporaneous development of poststructuralist philosophies including that of Deleuze and Guattari. The Guide to Philosophy has to be read in the context of its production which was as follows: as indicated by the citation with which this chapter began, Gombrowicz 's friends Dominique de Roux and Constantin Jelenski encouraged Gombrowicz to give a series of lectures on the history of philosophy, in order to distract himself from his illness and obsessive thoughts of suicide. This set up an unconventional dialogic situation that nevertheless bore a strange resemblance to the inaugural scene of Western philosophy; the dialogs conducted by Socrates and transcribed by Plato, in this instance played by Dominique de Roux. Even the shadow of mortality would Gombrowicz, Philosophy, and Culture 107 not be out of place considering the philosophical discourse around the death of Socrates . However, what is surprising about these lectures is that despite their dialogic situation they appear at first glance as a coherent and almost pedagogical reading of the history of philosophy that might not be out of place in the academy, barring a few references to the specificity of their context. Each lecture concerns either a particular philosopher or school of thought and they follow a coherent historical sequence. Even the selection of significant philosophers and movements seems uncontroversial , given the contemporaneous context in which philosophy was embroiled in disputes between existentialism, structuralism, and marxism, all of which are treated in the final parts of the course. Certainly, there are few obvious indications of a reading of this history through the prism of Gombrowicz's own philosophy of form, or even more generally from his perspective as an artist rather than a philosopher, as can be found in his Diary, for example. Nevertheless, that this is no merely pedagogical elucidation of various philosophical systems is given through various asides and digressions, in which the truly critical nature of Gombrowicz's project emerges. As Cataluccio puts it, these lectures are at once "a recapitulation of the thought of the other as well as his own. Or better: of his own thought through that of others" ("Une récapitulation de la pensée d'autrui et de la sienne. Ou mieux: de sa propre pensée à travers celle des autres" ["La Philosophie de Gombrowicz" 9]). In other words, it is not so much a question of a Gombrowicz's interpretation of the history of philosophy but rather a staging of the becoming of philosophy, which Gombrowicz participates in through a becoming-philosopher. At the same time, through this process, philosophy becomes something other than itself. If, in the end, these lectures are no less concerned with the relations between philosophy and artistic creation than his Diary or novels, this is not through a reading of philosophy from the position of an artistic outsider. Rather, Gombrowicz inhabits the becoming of philosophy and extracts from its creation of concepts and systems, forces that are capable of animating other practices, including , but not limited to, those of literary creation. For Gombrowicz what is at stake in this process is always the relation between a given philosophy and the life of which it is both the expression and betrayal. In this sense Gombrowicz's approach to the history of philosophy...

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