According to the famous statement by Robert Musil, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as monuments, attention runs down them without stopping for a moment.’ However, the moment when they suddenly become visible as the centre of intense social conflicts, it is difficult to believe they had been invisible for so long. This article analyses practices of contemporary iconoclastic gestures directed at monuments, examining the differences between recent iconoclastic acts in the United States and in Poland. Contrary to progressive anti-racist iconoclastic practices in the United States, the authors argue that the recent wave of attacks against monuments in Poland, connected to the state-sanctioned politics of ‘de-communization’, derives from a conservative vision of history and the public sphere. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of ‘paranoid reading’, the authors show how the ‘de-communization’ project activates a particular ‘way of seeing’: paranoid looking, through which public spaces are turned into environments filled with objects that need to be suspiciously examined and assessed. The paranoid look works against the invisibility of monuments, aiming to extract objects from the landscape in order to further examine them in search of any suspicious elements – formal and stylistic features, more or less intelligible symbols and so on that will shed light on their under-acknowledged capacity for both culpability and criticality.

中文翻译：

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偏执狂：关于去共产化

根据罗伯特·穆西尔 (Robert Musil) 的名言，“世界上没有比纪念碑更隐形的事物，注意力从它们上流下来，一刻也没有停止。” 然而，当他们突然成为社会激烈冲突的中心的那一刻，很难相信他们已经隐形了这么久。本文分析了当代针对纪念碑的反传统手势的实践，研究了美国和波兰最近的反传统行为之间的差异。与美国进步的反种族主义反传统做法相反，作者认为，最近对波兰纪念碑的袭击浪潮与国家批准的“去共产化”政治有关，源于对历史的保守看法和公共区域。借鉴 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 的“偏执阅读”概念，作者展示了“去社区化”项目如何激活一种特殊的“观看方式”：偏执看，通过这种方式，公共空间变成了充满需要阅读的物体的环境可疑地检查和评估。偏执的外观反对纪念碑的不可见性，旨在从景观中提取物体，以便进一步检查它们以寻找任何可疑元素 - 形式和风格特征，或多或少可理解的符号等将揭示它们的底层- 公认的罪责和危急能力。通过它，公共空间变成了充满需要可疑检查和评估的物体的环境。偏执的外观反对纪念碑的不可见性，旨在从景观中提取物体，以便进一步检查它们以寻找任何可疑元素 - 形式和风格特征，或多或少可理解的符号等将揭示它们的底层- 公认的罪责和危急能力。通过它，公共空间变成了充满需要可疑检查和评估的物体的环境。偏执的外观反对纪念碑的不可见性，旨在从景观中提取物体，以便进一步检查它们以寻找任何可疑元素 - 形式和风格特征，或多或少可理解的符号等将揭示它们的底层- 公认的罪责和危急能力。