This article is a review of Ethan Kleinberg’s Haunting History. For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, 2017). I focus on three issues related to that work. These are: historians’ attitude towards the deconstruction; the idea of ontological realism and its critique; the role of young historians in modern academia. This text is based not only on the book reviewed but also on its different analyses and ways it was used in other research. In the conclusion, I present how Haunting History can be used as an emancipatory tool by scholars who are starting their academic careers now.

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.