On possibilising genealogy

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against (unmasking) genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• political philosophy
• Foucault/Habermas debate
• critical attitude
• normativity

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at the International Conference ‘Michel Foucault’s Turn to Antiquity: Reasons and Consequences’ at Saarland University (29-31 October 2018), the Workshop ‘Foucault at Warwick’ and the Philosophy Postgraduate Welcome Conference at the University of Warwick (13 November 2018 and 27 September 2019), and the International Workshop ‘Critical Works: The Frontiers of Critical Theory’ at Columbia University (19 April 2019). For illuminating conversations that informed the content of this paper I am indebted to Arnold Davidson and Sabina Vaccarino Bremner. I am also grateful to Miguel de Beistegui, Bernard Harcourt, Jae Hetterley, Stephen Houlgate, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Peter Poellner, Federico Testa, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The vindicatory/unmasking distinction was coined by Williams (2002) and then widely used in the literature (see e.g. Hoy 2008; Koopman 2013; Srinivasan 2019).

2 See also Habermas (1986): ‘[Foucault] contrasts his critique of power with the “analysis of truth” in such a fashion that the former becomes deprived of the normative yardsticks that it would have to borrow from the latter’ (108). Earlier in the book, Habermas addresses an analogous criticism to Nietzsche, who ‘owes his concept of modernity, developed in terms of his theory of power, to an unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason’ (Habermas 1990, 96). For a response to Habermas’s criticisms of Nietzsche, see Geuss (1999, 1–28); for a critical discussion of Habermas’s reading of both Nietzsche and Foucault, see Biebricher (2005).

3 See Foucault (1984a):

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered […] as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. (50, emphasis added)

On this point, see also Hoy (2008): ‘Genealogy’s ability to unmask power relations is […] an effective means for writing the kind of critical history that can lead to experimentation and transformation’ (294).

4 Foucault no doubt had methodological reasons to always refer to ‘our’ society, for which he has been widely reproached (see e.g. Stoler 1996). Indeed, as Saar (2002) rightly argues,

All genealogies have in common a structural reflexivity, a self-implication in the fact that whoever enacts a genealogical criticism does this by criticising aspects and elements […] of his or her own culture or background. […] Genealogical criticism is therefore always self-criticism. (236)

5 With the exception of Folkers (2016) who, however, reduces Foucault’s genealogy of critique to its mere problematising dimension and thus misses its specificity: ‘Genealogy is not only a means of exercising critique, but also a way to reflect on critique’, that is, a ‘critique of critique’ (4) that ‘contributes to and expands the current problematisations of critique’ (18).

6 This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

7 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this example.

8 On the necessary connection between the unmasking of values and the debunking of the self, see Saar (2008) and Prinz (2018).

9 It should therefore not be chronologically confined to the development of modern governmental mechanisms of power, as many scholars have argued (see e.g. Kelly 1994; Schmidt and Wartenberg 1994).

10 This genealogy is not vindicatory, since it (also) shows that critique, far from being universal and ahistorical, cannot exist unless embodied in a series of concrete and historically situated practices. Thus, the genealogy of the critical attitude possesses an unmasking dimension insofar as it does not ‘search for some “immobile form” [of critique] that has developed throughout history’, but reveals that ‘there is no essence or original unity [of critique] to be discovered’ (Davidson 1986, 224). As a result, it also possesses a problematising dimension in that it is a ‘critique of critique’, or a ‘metacritique’ (Vaccarino Bremner 2019), that is, a critical investigation of the conditions of possibility of the practical exercise of the concept of critique itself (Allen 2003; Folkers 2016).

11 Benjamin’s conception of the proletarian Revolution is nevertheless different from Marx’s. For Benjamin, such a Revolution can only ‘redeem’ the past by interrupting historical evolution rather than completing it: ‘Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’ (Benjamin 2006, 402).

12 For one of Foucault’s clearest criticisms of the idea of the ‘ideology of the return’ and of ‘a historicism that calls on the past to resolve the questions of the present’, see Foucault (1984b, 250).

13 Consequently, the possibilising dimension of Foucauldian genealogy cannot be found in fictional genealogies nor in any other fictional narrative, including novels, even though Foucault was also highly interested in the transformative powers of fiction (see e.g. Foucault 1977, 1991, 32–42). Putnam (1976) interestingly claims that literature allows us to imagine other possible ways of life, but Foucauldian genealogy is about real lives and actual struggles (Foucault 1979, 79). Its ethico-political force is therefore different, and much stronger, than the one connected to fictional narratives.

14 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this kind of objection.