Jana Kotta "Kadysz. Strony o Tadeuszu Kantorze". Komunikat

Jan Kott, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Tadeusz Kantor – four antimodernes of the end of the twentieth century... The theatre of Tadeusz Kantor seen through the book: Kadysz. Strony o Tadeuszu Kantorze by Jan Kott, the last work by this author issued during his lifetime. It remains up to this day one of the most poignant records of what we may describe as “experiencing Kantor” and conceals a fundamental philosophical question: “What can salvage the memory of the theatre: image or Logos–Word? What can save Tadeusz Kantor’s “Theatre of Death”?. The answer proposed by Jan Kott in his Kadysz is: the Tadeusz Kantor theatre can be saved in its essence, while its meaning – only in Logos–Word. This is a truly Biblical solution. Kantor and his Theatre of Death are, and remain up to this day, at odds with all mutations in the domain of art, including performance and video art. One could resort to a formidable abbreviation claiming that Kott’s Kadysz and Kantor outright went against those tendencies. From this vantage point The Dead Class and Wielopole, Wielopole are, to cite Barthes, “the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms: let us abolish the images, let us save immediate Desire”.