PARTISAN GENEALOGY: FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF PENAL POWER
My book manuscript constructs and applies a model of what I term “partisan genealogical critique.” A scholarly consensus holds that genealogy should not generate evaluative judgments because the latter necessarily rest on unstable normative foundations. Through a major reinterpretation of Foucault’s political thought, I instead demonstrate that genealogy can deliver grounded normative conclusions, but only when evaluative standards are located in already existing political struggles. On this view, genealogy does not independently generate normative conclusions, but instead borrows evaluations from outside. I draw on pragmatist models of problem-solving to explain how genealogy is thus intended for a specific audience, and aims to further some emancipatory struggle by refining agents’ articulations of the political problems they are addressing. Whereas philosophers contend that evaluatively robust genealogy can only be bought at the price of normative confusions, I draw on Foucault’s recently published work of the early 1970s to construct a genealogical model that is both politically partisan and normatively secure.
My manuscript illustrates one of the many possible applications of this model by using it to reconstruct Foucault’s genealogical analyses of penal power. It demonstrates how these genealogies aid struggles against state violence by identifying the penal system’s political functions within capitalist society, and by thus helping to transform critiques of penal institutions, narrowly construed, into critiques of broader social structures. I underline the importance of materialist historiography to this model of genealogy, as it permits the linking of agents’ normative concerns to broader economic and social systems that provoke such concerns. By historically and philosophically placing Foucault in relation to his contemporary Marxist interlocutors, I demonstrate that he sought not to overturn Marxist thought, but to nuance it, and thereby provides resources for theorizing the interrelations between capitalism and other forms of domination, including racism. Commentators have long debated the possibility of reconciling genealogy and more normative strains of critical theory. By reconceiving genealogy as a species of immanent critique, I demonstrate why genealogical projects are in no need of supplementation by normative theory and may instead contribute directly to struggles for emancipation.
VIOLENCE, HISTORY, AND LEGAL FORM
My second book project expands my use of genealogy to explain how history can be used to critique the violence of legal form. Political philosophers have long characterized the very form of law as violent, because the application of law presupposes the threat of coercion. To minimize such coercion, Frankfurt School critical theorists have sought to contain legal violence through legal means, while other philosophers have advocated for the disempowerment of law tout court. Yet each of these approaches arguably allows violence to persist: the first, in its reluctant endorsement of law’s coercive character; the second, because the disempowerment of all law permits the resurgence of unchallenged social violence. This project draws on Foucault, Marx, and critical philosophy of race to propose an alternative genealogical strategy for critiquing and overcoming law’s violence. I argue that merely formal analysis of law fails because it is unable to account for the specific kinds of violence exercised over different subjects; I argue further that: (1) the critique of law should be construed as the critique of laws and legal strategies; (2) such a critique requires not just an analysis of law’s form but also an analysis of its social content; and (3) an analysis of content requires a turn to history. By turning to history we may determine which laws have acquired permanent functions of racial and class-based domination, and which laws may still be used for emancipatory purposes. This historical perspective generates differentiated normative attitudes towards law, in which law is neither wholly endorsed nor rejected, but instead assessed within concrete legal and political contexts of contestation.