Examining Genealogy as Engaged Critique

Abstract

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire is a rich text. Its analyses range across two centuries in the histories of terrorism at the same time as it makes an important contribution to methodological debates taking place among those working in Foucault’s wake. While I very much appreciated and learned from the careful genealogical work that Erlenbusch-Anderson does in tracing the various meanings and functions that terrorism has had in France, Russia, Algeria, and the United States, I will restrict my remarks in this brief intervention to questions of method that the book raises, specifically regarding genealogy as a method and its use as a tool of critical intervention. Towards the beginning of Genealogies of Terrorism’s concluding chapter, ErlenbuschAnderson very helpfully classifies recent scholarship on Foucault into three different kinds. First, there are the interpreters of Foucault, i.e., those scholars for whom Foucault’s work is the object of their analysis. Such scholars have, in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s words, “done much to advance our understanding of Foucault’s place in contemporary philosophy, the development of his thought, the viability of his methodological innovations, and perceived tensions between different periods of his intellectual production and activist engagement.”1 Second, there are other scholars who take a Foucauldian concept, “like biopolitics, governmentality, or subjectivation,”2 and use it to analyze a contemporary issue that Foucault himself may not have examined. Third, there are scholars who, rather than take up concepts from Foucault, use his methods or practices of inquiry, also to analyze issues or topics outside of Foucault’s own purview. These scholars show us a different way of “staying truthful to what Foucault did by being users of his work rather than mere readers”.3 In terms of its relation to Foucault, Genealogies of Terrorism does in fact mobilize certain Foucauldian concepts to advance its claims (“biopolitics” and the “dispositif” are two