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The value of New Humanities. Taking a Stance, Negotiating Autonomycannot be overstated. The book closes the period of individual, scattered turns in the humanities, between the fading post-structural paradigm of the textual word, in which humanities scholars, 'textologists' in the broad sense, enjoyed a hegemony of their sub-disciplines at university, and today, when, in the words of Ryszard Nycz, 'a forcing of humanist scholars into a depressive position' has taken place, which allows for 'an instrumental take-over of their tools and fields of activity, while at the same time burdening them with responsibility for the mental and social results of those actions'. When this instrumental take-over, hostile in its essence, is used not, as Nycz would like it, 'to form critical self-knowledge and sensitivity, as well as agential creativity of individuals and communities', but to something quite opposite, which was addressed by Bruno Latour, the second most-quoted author in this volume (aside from the Polish scholar), as 'a desperate task'. As stated by Latour on 26 February 2014 at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, 'it is a desperate task to still think, when the powers of intelligence are devoted to closing thought and marching onwards with eyes wide shut'. The answer to this is the building of bridges, breaking of walls, connecting of humanists with non-humanists, in order to reclaim lost agency. (Prof. Krzysztof Kłosiński)

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