Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Turning genealogy back on itself, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm investigates how it became a dominant paradigm for doing history—and what it means that scholars now routinely historicize everything but their own tools. Blending intellectual history with philosophical analysis, the book offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, situating them in their historical contexts while challenging familiar narratives about their relationships to theory, method, and critique. It also charts the intertwined development of history and philosophy as academic disciplines, reconstructing genealogy’s surprising entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. A method often wielded to criticize authority, Storm shows, has long carried unexamined legacies of its own. Yet this is more than a critical project—it is a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. As genealogy has hardened into a default genre of scholarly suspicion, The Genealogy of Genealogy calls for rethinking its epistemic foundations and political stakes. It also recovers a lost possibility: an insurgent, joyful counter-knowledge glimpsed primarily in Foucault’s private writings. The book thus ultimately opens a path toward alternative historiographies, encouraging scholars to imagine new methods and possibilities.

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines' founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism. Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication. Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.