Incidentally, the question of gaze is also central to Fajfer's work. As a theme it features in the titles of his individual and collaborative books: Oka-leczenie, (O)patrzenie, Spoglądając przez ozonową dziurę, Powieki, and Widok z głębokiej wieży; which mean respectively: “healing/hurting of the eye,” “(over)looking,” “looking through an ozone hole,” “eyelids,” and “a view from a deep tower.” It is also at the heart of his programmatic, emanational poem “Ars poetica,” whose “invisible” lines spell out the urge “to see with your eyes, differently, to have other (different) eyes, to go, to see but with your and my eyes” (Fajfer 2007b) as if to erase the distance between different individual selves in order to merge them into hybrid I's/ eyes. So perhaps it was no coincidence that the poet turned his gaze towards literature's Other.

Whoever should be cast in the role of coloniser and colonized here, it so happened that Fajfer spoke from a position of in-betweenness. Although he has always considered himself a creative writer, by provocatively entitling his essay “Liberature. Appendix to the Dictionary of Literary Terms” (1999) he ventured into the foreign land of theorising. The title suggested it was to be a scholarly text, a gloss of critical terminology, and an addition to the toolkit of analytical concepts. But the essay opens with a truculent tone, full of colourful comparisons, sweeping statements, emotive vocabulary, and a rhetorical question concerning the alleged “exhaustion of literature” (Fajfer 2010b: 23–24). Stylistically, it resembles an artistic manifesto rather than a restrained scholarly article. It has no apparatus, no footnotes, nor bibliography. Only after a passionate introduction does the argument move to more critical and philosophical reflections in which the author poses a series of questions concerning the medium of literature, form, space and time of the literary work, and the book.

Employing definitions from a popular, comprehensive dictionary of literary terms as a foil, Fajfer argued for an acknowledgement of what he believed had been overlooked by scholarly analyses, namely the semantic potential of the materiality of language.