This is a critical analysis of the war discourse in a two books, a volume of philoso-phical essays and a a work of fiction. They are Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) by Judith Butler and People of August (2016), a novel by the contemporary Russian writer Sergei Lebedev. Both authors see war not as an discrete event on a timeline, but as a network of events that accumulate in time. This is especially evident in Lebediev's palimpsest of Russia's 20th-century history. The article examines closely the spatial ele-ments of the novel as well as its take on the relationship between human history (Russian totalitarianism) and nature.
This is a critical reading of two Polish science-fiction novels of the post-Apocalypse subgenre, Cassandra’s Head by Marek Baraniecki and The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj, with the help of concepts borrowed from the philosophical toolkit of Jacques Lacan. Each of the two books envisages an apocalyptic catastrophe and its consequences as well as the subsequent attempts to rebuild human civilization. The action in either novel is shaped by tensions between the Symbolic and the Real. The latter, though suppressed and shut out, keeps resurfacing, usually when it is least expected, leaving an indelible marks in the life of the survivors. An analysis of the handling of this conflict in the two novels offers a number of insights into the way these two fundamental modes (or, Lacanian orders) of human perception are integrated into the worlds of post-Apocalyptic fiction.