The corporal. About Stefan Napierski

Abstract

Deviations from normative behaviour form an image of a man whose activity is reduced to irregularities. Writers who knew him record many such irregularities in the behaviour of Stefan Napierski (b. Mark Eiger) in their memoirs. In their script of aversion, they record irrational arguments, tending towards the somatic, corporal. It is a social construct of corporeality shaping Napierski’s creative imagination that is the subject of analysis in this article. The author refers to the category of disgust not only as affect, rejecting what is disgusting, but also as a defence mechanism implemented by social perceptions. She analyses recurring themes in Napierski’s oeuvre (mice, rats, ties, wardrobe). She describes the disgust shaping ideas about the body, interprets the consequences of such an approach for Napierski. The writer, who started the game of restrictions involving self-stigmatisation, who took over social perceptions and through them modelled the phantasm of corporality betraying the power of fathers – the Semitic race.