It is with those words of Goethe that the young Friedrich Nietzsche, barely twenty-nine years old, opens his untimely meditations on history, or more specifically on the value of history (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 59). It is those words that guided Nietzsche, in his early writings, toward the concept of “critical history” as one among other ways to use history to transform ourselves—to help “implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature” (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 76). It is those words of Goethe that would lead Nietzsche, fifteen years later and shortly before he lost his mind, to craft the term “genealogy” and to crown it in the title of one of his last great works, On the Genealogy of Morals (1967 [1887]). It is also that spirit that stirred Gilles Deleuze to return to Nietzsche in the early 1960s and to identify in Nietzsche’s writings, not those of Kant, the “true” source of critical philosophy (Deleuze, 2006, p. 88). It is those ideas as well that inspired Michel Foucault to birth the “genealogical” method of critique (Foucault, 2024, pp. 17–29).

Today the genealogical method has proliferated so widely within critical circles that it has become practically hegemonic.Footnote 1 Anyone with a critical theoretic bone in their body, who conducts historically inflected critique, refers to their work now as “genealogical” rather than simply as “historical.” In homage to Foucault, critical thinkers still use the term “history of the present” (Foucault, 1977, p 31). But it has become practically flat-footed today to merely write history. Critical theorists no longer do that; they write genealogies. The genealogical method of critique, born with Foucault in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has triumphed, at least within critical thought.

As genealogy has become hegemonic, critical philosophers have conducted important research distinguishing different types of genealogical critique. Amy Allen (2016, 2018), Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018), Colin Koopman (2013, 2016), Daniele Lorenzini (2020, 2022), Mathieu Potte-Bonneville (2004), Martin Saar (2002, 2007), and Bernard Williams (2002), among others, have clarified the different mechanisms and operations of the leading forms of genealogy, distinguishing between four major types: first, those that serve to validate or vindicate their object of study by tracing its origins to noble or valuable roots (often associated with Williams, 2002); second, those that debunk a practice or institution often by unearthing, by contrast, the dark origins of those words or things (often associated with Nietzsche and called subversive or, in Saar’s words, “demystifying, denaturalizing, and desubstantializing” historical critiques (Saar, 2002, p. 233)); third, those that serve to “problematize,” in the words of Allen (2016, pp. 190–193), Koopman (2013, pp. 93–103, 140–148), and Potte-Bonneville (2004, pp. 239–281), in other words, to raise questions about objects that we had come to accept and no longer question (mostly associated with Foucault); fourth, as an alternative interpretation of problematizing genealogy proposed by Daniele Lorenzini, those that are “possibilizing” (Lorenzini, 2020, pp. 2; 2022, p. 551) in other words, those that open possibilities of different ways of being and thinking, and generate political commitment in the reader. The taxonomies of genealogy have generated a robust philosophical debate (Craig, 2007; Davidson, 2011; Fricker, 2007, 2017; Hoy, 2008; Jaeggi, 2009; Medina, 2011; Srinivasan, 2019).

These taxonomies have helped clarify the different ways that genealogical work can operate. But they have, too often, pitted one type of genealogy against another; too often, as well, served to cabin philosophers within one delimited category; too often, finally, asked us to take sides in a methodological competition. They have led some critics to denounce certain types of genealogical work (such as debunking genealogies) as deficient uses of the genealogical method that evidence fallacies or failings; and to charge some genealogists with falling into common error because of the type of genealogical work they do. It has also led critics to narrowly contain philosophers and methods within one taxonomic type, as if, for instance, a Nietzschean genealogy could only debunk. The resulting debates, though helpful in ways, have had the detrimental effect of displacing the true ambition of critical philosophy away from critical praxis and pushing the conversation in a scientistic, taxonomical, nosological direction.

Rather than sorting critical philosophers into these taxonomies or essentializing the different modalities of genealogies, or asking us to take sides, the critical task today should be to deploy the different types of genealogy in combination, together or at different times, to achieve the objective of critical philosophy: namely, to augment and nourish our praxis in a valuable manner. In the same way in which the young Nietzsche developed different modalities of historical analysis—monumental, antiquarian, and critical—and in the same way in which Nietzsche did not argue that any one of those three types should prevail, but rather that we should willfully, consciously, intentionally deploy those different modalities in combination to do effective historical work that brings about action, critical thinkers should now focus on how the different types of genealogy can work together to invigorate our actions and activism.

It is time to take a step back and, instead of impugning types of genealogy or typecasting critical philosophers, to ask rather the question of the value of genealogical work. The proper metric against which to evaluate genealogical work is whether it contributes to transforming ourselves, others, and society in a positive direction. With only a slight alteration, we might say, with Nietzsche, that “We want to serve genealogy only to the extent that genealogy serves life” (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 59). Otherwise, we turn our philosophical inquiry into a scientistic, rarified, professionalized discourse that defeats the critical enterprise. We begin to engage in a type of Linnaean taxonomy in search of the true essence of the genealogical method, when in fact, we should be drawing on its multiplicity and variety, combining and deploying the different types, mixing and matching them, using them to nourish critical praxis.

In effect, the triumph of genealogical critique today demands that we return to Nietzsche’s untimely question and now ask, once again, in a reformulated way, the question of the value of genealogical work. It is time to ask ourselves: What good is genealogy for praxis? And the candid answer is that not all genealogical work, nor all philosophical debates on the genealogical method today, encourage critical praxis. They can sometimes be debilitating. The genealogical work of demonstrating how a particular way of life has become dominant (such as neoliberalism, or white nationalism, or authoritarianism, for instance) can itself become oppressive. It can sometimes feel overbearing, as if there’s no way out and no way forward. It is urgent that we now knock on those genealogies to determine which are hollow and which are robust—which discourage and which encourage action. It is time for us to do, not just genealogical work, but critical genealogical work.

The genealogical method as a form of praxis

In his book Genealogy as Critique, Koopman distinguishes between different types of genealogy and argues that problematizing genealogy, by contrast to vindicating or debunking genealogies, is essentially neutral and, therefore, preferable. “It is a form of genealogy that is neither for nor against the practices it inquires into,” Koopman writes, “but is rather an attempt to clarify and intensify the difficulties that enable and disable those practices” (Koopman, 2013, p. 60). Vindicatory genealogies are “for,” whereas debunking genealogies are “against” their object of inquiry, he writes; by contrast, problematizing genealogy, like that of Foucault, is conducted “under a critical modality that aims to be neither for nor against” (Koopman, 2013, p. 60). Foucault aimed for a certain kind of neutrality, Koopman maintains. “No philosopher can be neutral about everything,” he concedes, but “there is still room for the philosopher to aim to remain neutral about some things” (Koopman, 2013, p. 60). Koopman argues that the correct type of genealogical work—problematizing genealogy, which he associates with Foucault—does not take sides for or against its object of study.

However, the proper measure of genealogical work is not whether it is neutral, nor whether it takes sides, but whether it advances critical praxis—whether it contributes and invigorates activity in a valuable way. Foucault’s genealogical work, for instance, was never neutral. It was always practice oriented. As Foucault made clear in his work on the prison—a book aptly subtitled Birth of the Prison—the genealogical impulse is oriented toward willful transformation of self and others. Foucault wrote his book on prisons for users, for actors, for those who seek to change the world. “The little volume that I would like to write on disciplinary systems,” Foucault explained, “I would like it to be of use for a teacher, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for a public, I write for users, not readers” (Foucault, 1994b, p. 524). The book was intended to spur action in the finest tradition of Nietzsche’s views on history. It was the written accompaniment, the textual complement to the organizing and activism of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (“GIP”) (see Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 2021). It was intended to augment action by exposing the western “carceral archipelago” by contrast to the “gulag archipelago” (Foucault, 2015b, p. 1463 and n. 3; Solzhenitsyn, 2007).

At the heart of Discipline and Punish, at its core, what pulsed was the relationship between critique and praxis. The book itself was born of activism (Foucault, 2015b, pp. 1470–1471; Foucault, 2014, pp. 274–283; Harcourt, 2020, pp. 439–445). As Foucault underscored in the published book, “That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present. In recent years, prison revolts have occurred throughout the world” (Foucault, 1977, p. 30). Foucault was indexing his own praxis with the GIP, their work to dismantle the prison, and the ensuing prison riots (Artières et al., 2003). Conversely the book was intended to lead to action. As Foucault stressed, a few years after its publication, “what I wanted to write was a history book that would make the present situation comprehensible and, possibly, lead to action. If you like, I tried to write a ‘treatise of intelligibility’ about the penitentiary situation, I wanted to make it intelligible and, therefore, criticizable” (Foucault, 1988, p. 101). I interpret the word “possibly” there as a form of modesty and reflexivity, of self-awareness—not of hesitation. Foucault wrote for users and actors, and what proved for him that his work had value was when it resulted in action. The “success of the work,” Foucault told Duccio Trombadori, what “proves that it worked as I had wanted it to,” is that it produces “an experience that changes us” (Foucault, 1991, p. 41). As you will recall, Discipline and Punish ends with these words: “we must hear the distant roar of battle” (Foucault, 1977, p. 308).

Foucault never chose his objects of study in a non-normative or value-free way.Footnote 2 Most of the time, he was seeking what he called a form of “de-subjectification” that would lead him, and possibly his reader, to think and evaluate differently ways of being, practices, and institutions that we take for granted—sexuality, or criminal punishment, for instance (Foucault, 1991, p. 31). In each case—the prison, sexuality, the modern subject—there was an ethical, political, and personal motivation for Foucault’s critique that had normative dimensions. In each case, his critique was oriented toward changing his own and others’ ways of thinking. In explaining why he wrote historical non-fiction, Foucault said that he aspired to create transformative experiences that would change the reader and change him, the author. Experiences, he explained, “that might permit us to emerge from it transformed” (Foucault, 1991, p. 34). His point was that the genealogical enterprise was intended to have normative effects—to change us, to establish new relations, to bring us to action, to make us think differently about the common sense of words and things that he found problematic, like current discourse around sexuality. In his usual modest way, he added, “no matter how boring and erudite my resulting books have been, this lesson has always allowed me to conceive them as direct experiences to ‘tear’ me from myself, to prevent me from always being the same” (Foucault, 1991, p. 32). Foucault was not just engaging in neutral or descriptive genealogical work. At its best, genealogy involves a practice of critique and praxis that is normatively engaged and leads to action.

The writing that Foucault chose to publish and make public at the apex of his genealogical work—the only work he chose to publish as monographs in the 1970s (Foucault, 2015a, 2015b), which was a deliberate, strategic choice that we should never minimize despite all the brilliant work that has been published posthumously—was writing that was oriented toward practice, transformation of self and others, changing the world. Those two books, Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know, are motivated genealogies, their objects of study chosen with deliberate normative intention that succeeded in bringing people to action. In Nietzsche’s words, or rather in Goethe’s, they augmented and directly invigorated our activity (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 59).

In fact, when one looks back at the totality of Foucault’s work in the early to mid-1970s, at the peak of his genealogical investment, it is stunning how practice-oriented it all was: the organizing and activism of the GIP, the publication of the Intolerable inquiries, the writing of Discipline and Punish—the fact that the GIP published on 10 November 1971, less than three months after the homicide of George Jackson, a 64-page pamphlet called “The Assassination of George Jackson,” with a preface by Jean Genet, two translations of interviews with George Jackson, and three essays, including the essay “L’Assassinat camouflé (“The Masked Assassination”) written by Foucault, Catherine von Bülow, and Daniel Defert, just three months after it happened, with the leading French publishing house, Gallimard, gives a sense of the militant activism that accompanied his genealogical method (Groupe d’information sur les prisons, 1971). While Foucault, Genet, von Bülow, Defert, Deleuze, Jacques Donzelot, Danielle Rancière, and others were conducting these inquiries, writing these tracts, publishing prison writings, exposing prison conditions, publicizing the words of those inside the prison, Foucault was also writing his book on the prisons, Discipline and Punish, which would eventually be read, debated, critiqued, torn up and passed through the vents and cracks of prison cells around the world.

The experience of the Short Corridor Collective at Pelican Bay State Prison during the 2010s reflects the impact of this genealogical approach. The men of the Collective—held in solitary confinement in the SHU (Security Housing Unit) at Pelican Bay in California for allegedly being leaders of racially identified prison gangs—formed a reading group to discuss the works of Foucault, Bobby Sands, Cesar Chavez, the Black Panthers, and others (McLeod, 2019; CCCCT, 2022). Although they were in isolation, the men managed to pass ripped-up pages of Discipline and Punish and other books through the cracks in the walls and vents, and to read, discuss, and critique the writings, as they formulated a new understanding of their own situation and the way in which the prison administration was using their racial identities to control them. It was a journey that ultimately led to the country’s largest ever prison hunger strike in 2013 (Law, 2018), involving more than thirty thousand women and men throughout California prisons who refused to eat, as part of a series of prison hunger strikes that began in July 2011 (Fischer, 2013).Footnote 3

More than thirty-five years after Discipline and Punish was published, Foucault’s genealogy of the prison would become, literally, prison contraband and would contribute to the men of the Short Corridor Collective, detained in isolation and solitary confinement in the SHU, in their theorizing and acting against their torturous conditions, planning political mobilizations of tens of thousands of incarcerated persons. Militating with the GIP, publishing pamphlets, while writing a genealogy that contributes to those revolutionary cycles—that may well be a model for critical thinking.

This takes us back to Nietzsche, to his Untimely Meditations, to the opening passage by Goethe, to the question of the value of history. With respect to that passage, the young Nietzsche wrote: “its intention is to show why instruction without invigoration, why knowledge not attended by action, why history as a costly superfluidity and luxury, must, to use Goethe’s word, be seriously hated by us” (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 59).Footnote 4 Some, but not all, genealogical work today continues to have the effect of invigorating our activity. One brilliant exemplar is the genealogical work of Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie in their new book, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022). Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie conduct what they call a “critical genealogy” of today’s social movements for abolition and Black lives. I will come back to their formative work later; for now, though, as a more contemporary epigraph for this essay, I would propose a paragraph from Abolition. Feminism. Now.:

We frame this book as a critical genealogy rather than a manifesto, one that emphasizes how important it is to trace political lineages … Our work proceeds genealogically to address subjugated histories of organizing that must inform and strengthen our present mobilizations … And we contend that genealogies should always be questioned, because there is always an unacknowledged reason for beginning at a certain moment in history as opposed to another, and it always matters which narratives of the present are marginalized or expunged (Davis et al., 2022, pp. xiii–xiv).

Theirs is a paradigm of genealogical work that invigorates our activity and nourishes our practice—specifically, the praxis of abolition feminism. It is a true exemplar of critical genealogy.

Dimensions of critical philosophy

Critical philosophy has multiple dimensions as it critiques our existing historical and political condition, identifies alternative paths forward, and motivates critical praxis. One dimension highlights the reflexivity of the critical theorist, who must constantly question their politically situated and historically contextual position, and epistemological understandings. Another dimension underscores the influence of ideational constructs on materiality, whether we call those ideologies, illusions, knowledge-power, or regimes of truth that shape the way people interpret their environment and act. Another stresses the immanence of critique: often (but not always) critical thinkers enter the objects of their analysis, the internal logic, in order to understand them on their own terms and to find within them tensions or contradictions that prove productive to critique. Still another dimension involves unveiling illusions, which is often called de-fetishizing or ideology-critique. A further dimension emphasizes the relationship between theory and practice: that nexus is at the core of critical philosophy. Finally, another dimension highlights the goal of human emancipation or liberation: the activity of critical philosophy is oriented toward the values of equality, solidarity, social justice, and emancipation (Harcourt, 2020, pp. 162–171).

The different types of genealogy—vindicatory, debunking, problematizing, and possibilizing—should be understood not as competing or mutually exclusive modalities, but rather as different ways of pursuing these multiple dimensions of critical philosophy. Problematizing genealogy, for instance, emphasizes the importance of mental constructs that govern how we understand the world—the second dimension described above. What problematization does is to show that something we take for granted, something that is common sense or received wisdom, something we have come to think of as inevitable, in fact, is something that has been constructed over time, often by happenstance, and that may lead us astray. It seeks to make a given concept or practice problematic by showing that it emerged, historically, from another contingent problematization (Allen, 2016, p. 190). It turns what used to be received wisdom into a problem. Debunking genealogy, as another example, serves to unveil illusions, revealing that our commonsense understanding is detrimental, in such a way as to stimulate judgment and action and to lead us to reject that illusion—the fourth dimension of critical philosophy discussed above. Debunking cannot be reduced to or dismissed as a “genetic fallacy”—the idea that because something has poisonous roots, it should be abandoned—because the genetic fallacy is not a “fallacy,” but rather a modality of critique.Footnote 5 The discovery of dark origins is a powerful reason to problematize a practice or institution. In current debates over PIC (prison-industrial complex) abolition, many have traced the roots of policing to slave patrols. That raises a legitimate question about policing that should (and does) debunk the institution and practices. We should be prepared to use dark histories to raise questions about contemporary relations of power.

The different types of genealogy can be deployed, in combination or singularly, to nourish our activity. To draw an analogy, we should conceive of them in a similar way as Nietzsche thought of the different styles of doing history: monumental (focused on the great moments of individual human achievement that connect over history to form a “range of human mountain peaks” and inspire others to great action); traditional or antiquarian (focused on preserving and revering the past, in such a way as to show love, loyalty, piety, veneration, and thanks for those earlier moments); and critical (focused on critiquing, breaking up, and dissolving parts of the past, confronting and condemning past injustices and violence in order to “implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away” (Nietzsche, 1997, pp. 68, 72–73, 76). Like those, they represent different modalities of genealogical analysis that should, and are, used in combination for purposes of praxis— “for life,” as Nietzsche said. They should be deployed in strategic combination rather than in mutual exclusion.

And truth be told, they were each deployed, in combination or at different times, by many of the critical philosophers with whom we have individually, uniquely, and separately identified them. Foucault, for example, was not only engaged in, say, problematizing genealogy. He also productively used a form of debunking genealogy in his study of the prison: he showed that the common origin story (a vindicatory genealogy) that the prison was born of reason and Enlightenment values, of a desire to soften and rationalize punishment, was an illusion, and that, instead, the prison was born of, among other things, a desire to punish better and more effectively. “Not to punish less,” Foucault wrote, “but to punish better,” or as he said, “to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body” (Foucault, 1977, p. 82). Foucault unveiled the illusion of Enlightenment punishment and thereby debunked disciplinary power. And there is no doubt that the element of debunking can serve to motivate our assessment of the prison and to nourish our action. Foucault also engaged in vindicatory genealogies of resistance, for instance regarding the Nu-pieds rebellions in Normandy in 1639 or Herculine Barbin (Foucault, 1980, 2019). As Allen notes, correctly, “there is an important if often underappreciated vindicatory element to his problematizing genealogical method” (Allen, 2016, p. 191). Nietzsche as well was not only engaged in debunking. That was just one facet of his philosophical practice. Nietzsche was also constructing: he was advocating an ethic of life, of vitality, of health, of action—for a philosophy of the will. He was not debunking Christian morality tout court but using the genealogical method to validate a Zarathustrian morality centered on the will to power and achieving a future beyond the present human condition. At times, in Twilight of the Idols for instance, he was vindicating the lineage of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Dostoyevsky, as men of stronger, healthier character (Nietzsche, 1990, pp. 96, 104, 108, 110).

None of these modalities of genealogy should be set aside. Each of them is useful. So, for instance, Samuel Moyn’s work on the history of international human rights is a powerful use of a debunking genealogy in the sense that he shows that the emergence and eventual dominance of the human rights paradigm effectively sapped the revolutionary and radical leftist potential from the movement (Moyn, 2014, 2018). This is a debunking move because it then makes us question the value or potential of the paradigm, and it makes us want to act. There is nothing inherently wrong with debunking, no genetic “fallacy,” as long as the debunking nourishes our action. To argue otherwise is to use an inappropriate metric to judge the genealogical work. The metric should not be some scientific, taxonomical standard, but rather, with Nietzsche and Goethe, whether the genealogical work nourishes our activity. Debunking genealogies cannot simply be reduced to the taint of a poisonous origin; they also move us forward to praxis and emancipation—a key dimension of critical philosophy. The same is true for the other modalities of genealogy. Possibilizing genealogical approaches are themselves integral to critical philosophy: they can open normative possibilities for resistance and change. Validating genealogies can serve to recuperate practices or institutions and, thus, advance the ambition of emancipation. In fact, that is precisely what Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie do in their genealogical work: they vindicate earlier practices of organizing associated with abolition feminism.

The bottom line is that we should stop impugning certain types of genealogical work as deficient and instead think of the different modalities of genealogical work, in combination or in sequence or apart, as promoting different dimensions of a critical philosophy oriented toward the objectives of praxis. The metric must always be whether the genealogical work nourishes action in a valuable way. And in fact, many of our greatest genealogists did just that: mix and match different types of genealogy to motivate action.

The normativity of genealogy

This raises, then, the perennial question: What is the source of normativity in genealogical work? There has been a long-standing debate surrounding this question, born of a well-worn critique of Foucault, namely that Foucault’s genealogical method offers no internal ground for normative assessment or valuation—a critique most frequently associated with Nancy Fraser (1981) and Jürgen Habermas (1981, 1987) in the ensuing philosophical debates (see for example, Allen, 2016; Koopman, 2013; Lorenzini, 2020).

In an article titled “On Possibilising Genealogy” published in 2020, Lorenzini offers a compelling answer and way forward, one that avoids the dual pitfalls of the two dominant responses, namely that either genealogy is not normative and we must adopt a non-foundationalist approach, or that it is internally normative and advances particular values like autonomy or freedom. Lorenzini demonstrates convincingly that both conventional responses are ultimately inadequate to the challenge and proposes instead that Foucaultian genealogy is “normatively significant” and has “normative force” in a unique way: it creates a framework within which the readers form a sense of community and develop political commitment to continue the struggle (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 16).

Lorenzini’s point of departure is to identify the unique Foucaultian type of genealogy that, he argues, has gone ignored in the scholarship: namely, genealogies of forms of resistance by subjugated persons, of their counter-conducts, of their ways of challenging structures of power. Lorenzini calls this mode “the genealogy of the critical attitude” or “possibilising genealogy” (Lorenzini, 2020, pp. 2, 8). He locates this, for instance, in Foucault’s work on the Nu-pieds rebellions in Normandy in 1639, on the “infamous” women and men from Herculine Barbin to Pierre Rivière, on the scandalous cynics of antiquity, and more (Foucault, 2019, 1980, 1975; Lorenzini, 2020, pp. 9–10; Lorenzini, 2024). This type of genealogy reveals struggles within relations of power that generate a sense of “we” among the readers and places them in a community of struggle. It invites readers to recognize themselves as part of a “we” who are struggling against forms of subjugation, against what he calls “the arbitrariness of the power/knowledge formations [that Foucaultian genealogy] reveals” (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 7).Footnote 6 This process then generates a normative commitment on the part of readers, as Lorenzini writes, “a commitment to carry on their struggles, albeit in a different form, in the present” (Lorenzini, 2020, 14). According to Lorenzini, all of Foucault’s genealogies operate in this mode (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 11). Thus, the genealogical method more generally has this “normative force”: “Foucauldian genealogy does possess sui generis normative force: it constitutes a concrete framework for action (a political ‘we’) aiming to instill in its readers a sense of political commitment” (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 17).

Lorenzini’s proposal is a compelling contemporary resolution of the normativity critique. It highlights the centrality of the knowledge-power mechanisms within which practices and institutions emerge. It offers a framework for how readers can be sensitized to the relations of power within which they are situated. That experience can build a sense of shared fate and instigate political action. All of this is possible with some genealogies—those that could be described, elegantly, as “possibilizing.” Indeed, some genealogies can inspire solidarities and political engagements that reflect normative aspirations and value judgments.

Now, some aspects of Lorenzini’s proposal are less convincing than others. His argument that “every genealogy that Foucault traces can also be read as a genealogy of the critical attitude” is too homogenizing of the different work that Foucault did in the 1970s and 1980s (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 11). There was far more variation. There is an arc to Foucaultian genealogy, with an apex at the publication in 1975 of Discipline and Punish. Following that, there are transformations of his way of philosophizing, some of which he discusses in the “Modifications” introduction to Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1985, pp. 3–13). The history of truth and truth-telling that he develops at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, at Louvain in 1981, and thereafter—a remarkable history of truth, of truth-making, of truth-telling that dispenses with Kantian criteria of truth (Harcourt, 2020, pp. 107–121)—should not be subsumed into the genealogical method of Discipline and Punish. Foucault crafted a different method, what some critics have called, following Foucault, an “alethurgical” method, drawing on the ancient Greek term alēthes, meaning that which is true (Foucault, 2014, pp. 273–274, 301). Moreover, although Foucault stressed that power and resistance are twinned, some of his genealogies were primarily focused on the (productive) aspects of repression; in fact, that is a common and not unreasonable critique of Discipline and Punish, namely that it focused too much on forms of disciplinary power and not sufficiently on the resistance of prisoners. It has succeeded, remarkably, at generating widespread abolitionist praxis, but that was largely out of frustration, or even anger at the unveiled forms of discipline in Western society. Empathy or solidarity is not the only impetus to action. Frustration, anger, even rage at forms of oppression—at the intolerable—are powerful instigators of political action.

These quibbles, though, are less important, perhaps even a distraction from the more important point: namely that Lorenzini persuasively identifies one process by which certain Foucaultian genealogies directly augment our activity—and that is key. Lorenzini is identifying some genealogies that succeed and showing us how those succeed: namely, by drawing the readers into a common project and shared community of struggle. He is describing one way in which genealogy can work when it works. But not all genealogical studies, nor all genealogies of the critical attitude, necessarily stimulate action that is valuable; some of them fall flat. A lot will depend on factors such as the genealogists’ selection of the object to study, their choice of lineages to pursue, their archival discoveries and narrative skills, and importantly, their reception by readers and critics—whether, in effect, readers form collectivity with the subjects of those genealogies. Moreover, even when they do generate commitment, not all political action that ensues is necessarily valuable. It will be necessary to normatively assess the political effects. In the same way, not all philosophical debates over the genealogical method are productive or stimulate action. Many are distractions that take time away from the most important thing: augmenting or directly invigorating our activity. In fact, much of the debate over the normativity of the genealogical method itself distracts us from the task at hand—to augment critical praxis.

Another way to say this is that it is not so much the genealogical method that has normative force, but the genealogist’s choice of objects and the actions of the readers forming a collectivity of struggle at its reception. Insofar as many of Foucault’s genealogies inspire a sense of solidarity, it is because of the objects of genealogy that Foucault chose and because many readers and critics, attracted to resistance and political struggle, responded and militated for abolition or liberation. Foucault chose those objects. It is those decisions that drive the normative force of Foucault’s projects, as well as the readers’ choices upon reception. Those choices of objects are what bring about the resulting effects on the readers, in terms of the experiences that make them feel part of those movements of resistance and struggle, that make them want to change themselves or society. What we need now is to distinguish those successful genealogies from the many genealogies (and many philosophical debates surrounding genealogy) that fall flat or distract or fail, in order to critically engage in genealogical work going forward. The distinction will turn on the genealogist’s choice of objects and on how readers and critics collectively receive the work and act on it. Now that the genealogical method has become hegemonic in critical philosophy, we need to better deploy different types of genealogies to achieve the ambition of critical praxis.

To take but one example from the pandemic, anti-vaxxers were actively engaged in counter-conduct. They exhibited a deeply critical attitude. And they were in the distinct minority. In terms of relations of power, they were crushed by forms of discipline and biopower which dominated the political scene. They were the abnormal. They were transgressive. But that does not justify their position or give it normative force. The automatic reaction to be “against” forms of discipline, or biopolitics, or authority—which, I confess, I often have and share—must be scrutinized and critiqued itself; and an imbalance in relations of power, or even a claim of “the arbitrariness of the power/knowledge formations [that genealogy] reveals,” as Lorenzini suggests (2020, p. 7), does not resolve matters handily.

Giorgio Agamben’s missteps in this regard are telling. Agamben is without doubt one of the most brilliant genealogists of our times. In formative work, Agamben has traced current modes of biopower back to the Nazi regime and its associated forms of “bare life” and, even further back, to the Roman legal category of homo sacer, and then forward to the torturous practices at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the “War on Terror” and, more generally, the unconscionable American treatment of Muslims in the post 9/11 years (Agamben, 1998, 2005). This is powerful, even brilliant genealogical work that has inspired and motivated many people to protest and resist, no matter how much one might critique elements of Agamben’s argument (Harcourt, 2018, pp. 213–232). More recently, though—and more controversially—Agamben extended his genealogical work to the COVID pandemic and governmental anti-pandemic measures, leading him to compare vaccine-passes to the yellow Jude stars forced on Jews under the Nazi regime, to treat pandemic administrators as little Eichmanns, and to denounce masks as eviscerating our humanity (Agamben, 2021).Footnote 7

How could such brilliant genealogical work lead to such misguided normative conclusions, you might ask? How could such a brilliant genealogist produce arguments that were embraced by the farthest fringes of the far-right in Italy and elsewhere? The answer, I would argue, is that neither the normativity, nor the “normative force,” is contained within the genealogical method itself, but is introduced by the critical philosopher who chooses the object and conducts the research, and by the readers and critics who act on the work. The critical thinker is the one who injects their values into the assessment of similarities and differences, into the evaluation of whether the past enlightens the present—sometimes by the choice of objects they study, at other times by the normative inflections they infuse in the genealogy. But it is always the authors and critics who are responsible for the normativity; it is not the method itself.

Agamben’s writings are the true test—the hardest case—to assess the relationship between critique and normativity. Regarding COVID related and other forms of regulation, there are going to be continuities in forms of governing and there are going to be differences. The challenge of genealogically inflected critique is to detect the continuities and differences, and then decide how they relate, how important they are, how they offset each other, whether they help understand the present, what is their historical context, what is the political situation. The genealogical method helps us see those continuities and differences but does not evaluate them for us. That is our work, as authors, as critics, as readers, and that is where the normativity enters the analysis. Agamben may be right to continue to use his unique Foucaultian genealogy of biopolitics to better understand our condition during the pandemic; but this does not necessarily imply opposition to all anti-pandemic measures (masks, vaccines, remote communications, etc.). It could, possibly, vindicate some of those measures. It could debunk others. It would, surely, allow us to think through them more critically. It might also enlighten us on the ways in which the pandemic and anti-pandemic measures have transformed our interpersonal relations, our subjectivity, our relation to the digital age and the expository society. It could allow us to assess and critique different measures to see whether any of them went too far. Some, for instance, may have been excessive in sacrificing the well-being of younger generations; others may not have been strict enough in protecting the lives of the most vulnerable.

The concept of counter-conduct does not guarantee success. I confess that, just like Arnold Davidson and Lorenzini, I am drawn to that concept (Harcourt, 2020, pp. 191–198). Like Foucault as well, I am drawn to the idea of counter-conduct that de-subjectivates. I am partial to the hommes et femmes infâmes, to Herculine Barbin, to Pierre Rivière. It is not for nothing that I have dedicated my life to men and women on Alabama’s death row. But counter-conduct must be placed in historical context and in political situation—witness, the January 6th taking of the Capitol. The central point, of course, is that genealogies are never unidirectional: they do not always lead to rejection of the objects studied, to debunking, or to counter-conduct. Rather, they enable normative choice by the readers and critics. Two aspects are key then: the choice of object and normativity that the critical theorist injects into their genealogies, and the way the genealogical work is normatively received by readers and critics who then take up the task of political action.

Evaluating and grounding those normativities must be approached from a contextualist and situated perspective, taking into account historical trajectories, political conjunctures, relations of power, material circumstances, and ways of knowing the world. It can build productively on Allen’s theory of metanormative contextualism, which she develops in her book The End of Progress, and on the values that have long shaped critical philosophy, carefully calibrating and balancing them within a punctual analysis of historical and geopolitical circumstances. I call this a “counter-foundational” approach, not anti-foundational, nor non-foundational, but rather contextual, situated, and attuned to relations of power. It calls for a reconstructed critical philosophy—or what I call “a radical critical theory of values” (Harcourt, 2020, pp. 261–266).

To return to Fraser and Habermas, then, the proper response to the skeptics of the genealogical method is not to seek to ground the normativity in the method or to cede the ground of normativity, but rather to embrace a counter-foundational philosophy that allows us carefully, through a contextual and situated analysis, to evaluate the political commitments and praxis that genealogical work generates. Philosophical methods cannot independently or internally ground values. Methods do not have internal normative direction. The potential normativity is injected into the work by the choices of the critical philosopher and is realized by the critics and readers acting collectively. This is true for the genealogical method. It is equally true for Fraser’s form of historically updated Marxism, as well as for Habermas’s theory of communicative ethics. They too inject the normativity into their methods, and whether it has an effect will depend on the readers and their reception. In effect, the proper response to Fraser and Habermas is not to get defensive and try to sanctify Foucault or the genealogical method, but to get honest and demonstrate, first, that no philosophical method—including Fraser’s or Habermas’s—possesses its own internal normative grounding and, second, how the genealogical method can fulfill the ambition of critical philosophy.

The search for a normative grounding internal to a philosophical method is like the quest for the Holy Grail. It is like asking for the proof of God. It lies in the domain of faith and religion, not philosophy. To believe that we could ground the normative force of our work on something other than our own choices is a vain effort to transcend our human condition and to achieve a kind of divine existence. Here, once again, we can turn back to Nietzsche: “Moral judgement has this in common with religious judgement that it believes in realities which do not exist” (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 66). But the unattainability of it is not something to be embarrassed about, rather to embrace—and with it, our fallibility, our fragility, our human condition, human, all too human. All for the better, I would say. It places responsibility squarely on our shoulders. It is up to us to reveal our values and our ethics—to show our mettle. In the end, we are responsible for our choices, each and every one of us. Our values cannot be grounded elsewhere than in ourselves in a counter-foundational manner.

It is important not to turn critical methods into a religion and to always remember that what we are trying to do is to use critical genealogies to promote praxis—or, humbly, to achieve a just society. The genealogical enterprise is born of a desire for critical action. It uses history as a radical form of critique. For Nietzsche, as Saar reminds us, it “was born out of an interest in a potentially critical historicization of something that until then wasn’t historicized, namely moral attitudes and values, ideals, norms and institutionalized modes of thinking and acting” (Saar, 2002, p. 232). This is the important dimension of “Genealogy as Critique” (Saar, 2002, p. 234; Koopman, 2013). It is also born of a critique of historicism, a critique of what Nietzsche called “the historical sense,” which leads so often to neutralize historical research and push history toward scientism. It is precisely against those tendencies, Foucault stressed, that Nietzsche originally wrote his Untimely Meditations and developed the notion of a critical history as one form of historical method that privileges judgment and critique (Foucault, 2024, pp. 18–29).

Conclusion

We are at a time now, more than ever, when we need to question and push genealogical work forward toward praxis—toward concrete, realizable utopias. There are many models and exemplars to learn from. Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie’s book, Abolition. Feminism. Now. is one such exemplar of what genealogical work can achieve. Their ambition is to nurture and encourage social movements, and to do so, they show how the abolitionist movements today had their origins in the feminist abolitionist organizing that took place over the past few decades. In part, they spotlight, highlight, and underscore all the work of activist women—work that often felt at the time like a failure. Even though a lot of the organizing fizzled out and is now forgotten, it gave life to a remarkable movement that is so vibrant today. As they write, those early movements “deserve to be recognized as harbingers of a radical shift” (Davis et al., 2022, p. 160). And by contrast to other ways of recounting the genealogy of the movement for Black lives and abolition (which often emphasize Black male leadership, such as George Jackson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X), they trace the movement back to feminist organizing. In the process, they bestow value on those earlier forms of activism and encourage, foster, and nurture more feminist abolitionist activism.

Davis and her colleagues use the term “critical genealogy,” adding the word “critical” before the term “genealogy” in their book, to emphasize that theirs is a genealogy of praxis, of movement work, of action that is intended to nourish praxis. Notice that the object of their critical genealogy is their praxis. They are not tracing the genealogy of the prison-industrial complex to underscore the contingency of our punitive society. They are not doing a genealogy of moral norms to show the heteropatriarchy of today’s society. Their purpose is not to debunk an institution. Their purpose is to vindicate and promote action—to nurture praxis. And they achieve that goal by inspiring people to act.Footnote 8 That, I would argue, is the true ambition of genealogy.

It is important to remember that Nietzsche, Foucault, and other genealogists were writing against the professionalization of history, of philosophy, of critical thought, because that professionalization so often saps the potential for critical praxis and social change. They aspired to a new way of thinking historically and philosophically, one that would have practical effects. Their genealogical methods were born of a deep commitment to deploying critical philosophy to change ourselves and the world. Theirs was a philosophy of action, and the genealogical method they used was oriented toward activity. We fail them when we start cabining them into Linnaean taxonomies that end up limiting our own use of the genealogical method. Instead, we need to think practically and strategically about how to deploy each and every one of the modalities of genealogy in order to change the world. This calls for critical genealogies.

“If Foucault is indeed perfectly at home in the philosophical tradition … his project could be called the Critical History of Thought” (Foucault, 1994a). Surprisingly, those are the words of Foucault himself, writing under a pseudonym the entry for “Michel Foucault” in a dictionary of philosophers. I would propose that we add action. The project should have been called “the Critical History of Thought and Practice.”Footnote 9 That gets us closer to critique and praxis. It represents the kind of genealogical work that remains true to the ambition of critical philosophy.

To close, then, the critical task is to self-consciously, deliberately, and carefully engage in critical genealogies that directly invigorate our activity—critical genealogies, with the emphasis on the qualifier “critical,” in honor of Nietzsche’s invention of “critical history,” in homage to Foucault’s development of the “critical history of thought,” in tribute to the “critical genealogy” of Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie.

… for those who employ critical history for the sake of life.

Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 1997, 76–77)