Writing as a trace and as a gift. On Witold Wirpsza's “Attempts at writing“

Abstract

The article attempts to interpret the Attempts at writing series of poems in Witold Wirpsza’s volume of poetry entitled Superstitions. This has been read as something of a poetic and philosophical treatise dealing with nature and also the ontology of writing. Two thematic motifs, namely trace and gift, which appear in this series regularly and in numerous variants, are interpreted in the context of contemporary post-metaphysical philosophy (Derrida, Blanchot, Lévinas, Ricoeur) and presented metaphorically as writing that blurs or eradicates presence: being, subject, meaning.