Sociologist „Sketching Eternal Signs”. Jan Szczepanski's Distracted Self-Portrait

The subject of this article are the strategies as well as paradoxes of creating by Jan Szczepański his self-portrait in various genres of texts. The authoress displays how the sociologist gives a signature to his articles and essays, generalizing his personal experience (peasant roots, the Protestant primacy of a duty), and also how complex relations appear between his publications and diary. In that scattered self-portrait a key issue turns out to be the repetitions and transformations of several leitmotifs, and moreover their involving in rhetoric, which, like autocreation, both disturbs and helps with recounting “who I am”. With reference to the conceptions of i.a. Lejeune, Beaujour and Ricoeur, the authoress analyses how Szczepański arranges the project of his life and how in his works he contends with frustration resulted from (apparent) not carrying that project out. The destination of this article is to show that despite evident dissonance between the word and life in the sociologist’s writings, the imperative of creation of “work” remains his biography’s axis and the creating of selfportrait does not mean imposing an artificial order on life