On 'The Continent of the Third Day of Creation':Gombrowicz and Keyserling

This essay is an attempt at comparing Witold Gombrowicz's and Hermann Keyserling's views on the Latin American identity. While the Estonian philosopher, whose work Gombrowicz praises in his Diary, blends depth psychology, philosophy and biology to produce in his South American Meditations a kind of phantasmatic, palaeontological psychoanalysis, Gombrowicz is skeptical of genetic and cultural conditioning and focuses instead on interpersonal relations, which are driven by the desire for power and domination. Both writers point indirectly to the limitations of racist, nationalist and postcolonial premises of theories of national character.