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After Writing
An essayistic journey around the most fascinating issues of contemporary civilisation
The technology of writing has created human civilisation. Thinking through writing means thinking in symbols, ideas and categories. It gives the direct access to what’s others’ innermost: their emotions, experiences and the sense of “I”.
In the essays in After Writing Dukaj describes humanity at the edge of a new era. New technologies for the direct transfer of experiences – starting with a phonograph to television, the Internet and virtual reality – lead us inexorably out of the domain of writing. Step by step, unnoticeably, we get disaccustomed from a human as we knew him from literature – from a subjective “I”.
What are the consequences of this process? How to create art, philosophy, politics, science without an “I”? Is religion – and therefore an idea of transcendence – possible for people unable to think about what they can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch?
After Writing is an essayistic journey around the most fascinating issues of contemporary civilisation – all the way to its limits and the limits of humanity as we know it.
The book After Writing (Po piśmie) confirms that Jacek Dukaj – here as an essayist – is an attentive observer of contemporary reality and cultural changes, particularly those taking place under the influence of the dynamic development of information technology. […] After Writing may be a sign that Jacek Dukaj, a representative of the middle generation of writers, has taken over the intellectual baton from Stanisław Lem.
Joanna Kapica-Curzytek, Esensja.pl
The ultimate provider of digital disembodiment remains our bodies – condemned to hunger, suffering or destruction. This is probably not what the defenders of the metaphysics of writing expected – including Jacek Dukaj, who in After Writing (Po piśmie) is precisely such a metaphysician, and perhaps even a mystic.
Michał Tabaczyński, Dwutygodnik
