REPARATIVE CRITIQUE, CARE, AND THE NORMATIVITY OF FOUCAULDIAN GENEALOGY

Abstract

The normative status of Michel Foucault’s critical method of genealogy has been the topic of much debate in secondary scholarship. Against the criticisms forwarded by Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that genealogy is not a normatively ambitious exercise insofar as it does not aim to judge its objects of critique. Rather, genealogy ought to be understood as reparatively concerned with the task of marking out possibilities for transforming those practices that constitute problems for our present selves. To clarify this feature of genealogy, I take up Foucault’s late writings on care to show how this affect informs his critical practice. Care is important, I suggest, for highlighting the intimacy between critique and transformation. Once we understand how care guides genealogical inquiry, we can begin to see how Foucault’s method of critique is reparative rather than robustly normative.