Powrót (nie)Realnej. “Piękna Żydówka” i przemoc filosemicka w najnowszej polskiej eseistyce

Return of the (un)Real. “Beautiful Jewess” and Philo-Semitic violence in recent Polish essay writing. The “narrative shock” caused in 2000 by Jan Tomasz Gross’s "Neighbors" and by the public discussions around the extermination of Jews by Poles resulted in an increase in well documented scientific knowledge about the attitudes of the majority of Poles towards Jews during and after the Holocaust. In this study, I try to focus on the specific form of domestication and neutralization of return of the Lacanian “Real” and on the constant negotiation of the “Polish guilt” in the context of the Holocaust, commenting on the books by Mirosław Tryczyk and Jarosław Mikołajewski. The subject of reflection are, thus, substitute narratives, the protagonist of which is exotic, and at the same time, in a colonial and masculine dominating way, “our”, unattainable, desirable, and phantasmatic Other – a Polish “beautiful Jewess”, murdered by schematically portrayed and clichéd Polish perpetrators, while the speaking subject represents the multi-level dominant majority spinning his fantasies around the murdered body of a Jewish woman: a gender binary, white ethnic Pole.