Fantazyjne objawy zmysłowe Wiktora Feliksa Szokalskiego – projekt obserwatora z połowy XIX wieku [Fantazyjne objawy zmysłowe ['Fancy Sensory Symptoms'] of Wiktor Feliks Szokalski: a Project of the Observer from the Mid-Nineteenth Century]

The author analyses Fantazyjne objawy zmysłowe [‘Fancy Sensory Symptoms’] by W.F. Szokalski in the context of changes of the nineteenth-century observer. Full of contradictions synthesis of Polish ophthalmologist is a register of transformations in the visual field observed by other researchers (Jonathan Crary), but also the concept of embodied and active look does not fulfil its depth. In the article Szokalski will be treated as a representative of the late-idealist formation, which is aware of restrictions that “disenchantment of the world” causes (epistemological subjectivism resulting from contemporary knowledge of the nervous system, modernist reflections on the contingency of science). However, the ophthalmologist exceeds perceptual distortions and dilemmas of psychophysiology by means of recalling the romantic spirit, which acting on the body backwards, brings the man closer to the Truth. Szokalski turns out to be a representative of the formation that Agata Bielik-Robson called “modernity with anxiety”. This formation is looking for a new sacrum that in the name of the new subject deals rhetorically with entanglement in the body, but also – paradoxically – still remains under its influence.