Polish Humanities, French Theory and the Need for a Strong Subject

• Authors: Ewa Domańska

Abstracts

EN

This article explores the reception of French Theory in Poland after 1989. I argue that post-modern tendencies entered the Polish humanities in a distorted form, having travelled via the USA. I propose the hypothesis that the transplantation of the concept of power‑knowledge, which was central to the US‑American take on Michel Foucault, led to something that I term “the Foucault Effect.” It became entangled in the processes of democratization and political and economic transformation taking place in the 1990s, meaning that on the one hand it “raised consciousness” of power mechanisms, while on the other hand promoting a sense of subjecthood that was a product of power relations and thus was deprived of agency. I argue that regardless of the critique of anthropocentrism that is prevalent in the contemporary humanities, the socio-‑political situation in the world today demands a return of the strong subject, whose figuration would take into account lessons learned from French Theory.

Keywords

EN

French Theory; postmodernism; Poland; political transformation; “the Foucault Effect”; postdependency syndrome; agency; strong subject

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk
• Journal: Historyka Studia Metodologiczne
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 51
• Issue: Spec. iss.
• Pages: 17-37

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Ewa Domańska

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

• https://orcid.org/000000030875976X

Identifiers

DOI

10.24425/hsm.2021.138877

Biblioteka Nauki

20311950