Dogs, People, and God: Ecotheology in the Plays of Mariusz Bieliński and Jarosław Jakubowski
Jacek Kopciński
Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5347-9006
Abstract
Mariusz Bielinski’s Księga Psa (The Book of Dog) and Jarosław Jakubowski’s Pies (The Dog) are two dramatic texts portraying the relationship between humans and animals in an original way. In both plays, the dog is an entity in its own right, a representative of the “companion species” to the human being (Haraway), “member of the family group” (Baratay) and the “zoe-egalitarian” community as understood in contemporary posthumanism (Braidotti). The author of the essay evokes these categories and then transcends them by exploring the metaphysical concept of human-animal relations depicted in the plays under discussion. Bieliński’s and Jakubowski’s protagonists turn to retrospective, which takes the form of writerly and existential mourning rite for a dead dog, leading to a profound transformation of their consciousness. By juxtaposing the fate of the suffering animal with the Passion of Christ, both authors deconstruct the petrified truths of Christian faith, renewing and incorporating them into the space of their own experience and discourse. Therefore, the proposed interpretation of the dramas combines the ecological perspective with theology. The author refers to Linzey’s concept of “animal theology” (the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a model of interspecies relations) and posits, drawing on Gadamer and Lévinas, that both plays are centred around the hermeneutical question of whether the “spiritual distance” that has arisen between God and humans in our era can be overcome by modern humanity by turning towards the animal in order to “assimilate” its “strangeness” and thus open up to the “strangeness” of God.
Keywords:
Polish drama after 2000, poetic drama, hermeneutics, ecocriticism, theology, ecologyReferences
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Authors
Jacek KopcińskiInstitute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5347-9006
Jacek Kopciński - Associate Professor of Literature and Drama in the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, and at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. Head of the Centre for Research on Contemporary Polish Drama. His research interests include: history and theory of drama, history of literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, theater criticism, radio and television theater, anthropology of performances.
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