This book reconstructs fundamental assumptions on weak thought, a crucial tendency in contemporary hermeneutics. Some motifs of weak thought serve to reinterpret the concept of mimesis and that of the textual subject as a trace. The book also describes tendencies in modern literature in which weak being is expressed by the motif of the trace.

The author asks questions like «Can a Jew be both a Jew and a Pole?», «Are we right to talk of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ death in the Holocaust?» and «What are the implications of Adam Mickiewicz’s philo-Semitism?» and offers answers tracing the history of anti-Jewish stereotypes in early nineteenth-century Poland (and beyond).

This is a reader’s book about Wisława Szymborska’s poetry. She holds the Nobel Prize in Literature of 1996. The Contents of the book are the Nobel Lecture held in Stockholm at the official ceremony by the poet in December 1996, a choice of Polish essays about Szmyborska’s poetry and translations of her works into German, English, Spanish and French.