| Abstract: | Neighbors ignited a fierce debate in the Polish press over the remembrance of a WWII pogrom of Jewish Poles by gentile Poles. There were three different responses crafted by media commentators to recuperate the nation. I argue that the debate demonstrated an aphasic structural disorder that rendered knowledge of the past violence and its victims unrecognisable and its implications incomprehensible. My psychoanalytic reading shows that misrecognition of that knowledge to protect the fiction of the Polish gentile Self was the fundamental dynamic in the media commentaries. I examine the aphasic mechanisms of misrecognition and metonymy for insights into how ignorance is repeatedly legitimated and disregard is diffused and how the Self dependency on the Other is barred from recognition. I explicate how aphasia shapes memory and responses to a national rupture and subsequent recuperation. |
