Table Of Contents
I have a new essay that reads Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm's three books side by side: The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), Metamodernism (2021), and this year's The Genealogy of Genealogy. The essay, "Theorizing the Human Sciences in the Age of Absolute Disruption: Historical Criticism and Its Remainders," went up at Religious Theory on September 28.
The argument #
Read together, the trilogy works through four questions: whether a thing exists, how it arose and why it persists, what grounds our claims about it, and whether it is desirable. The human sciences tend to collapse them. Once an object has been shown to be constructed, or tangled up with power, the rest looks already answered. Josephson-Storm keeps the questions apart, and I think the books are strongest where he does that most carefully: the Frazer and Crowley chapters of Myth, the social-kinds ontology of Metamodernism, and the Nietzsche and Jean Wahl reception history in Genealogy.
One line carries most of the argument:
Contingency does not dissolve the object; it poses a question about it: what made this outcome possible, and what keeps it in place?
I also argue that his proposals (metarealism, process social kinds, hylosemiotics, zetetic epistemology) don't stand or fall as a system. They work better as separate nodes in the network of humanities theory after critique, so I follow each one into its reception.
Read it #
The essay has a DOI through Knowledge Commons, 10.17613/g2gh8-fkx92, and you can download a PDF and the citation (RIS or JSON) from the article page. There is also a copy on my Gemini capsule at adjb.smol.pub (more on that experiment).
The timing is good. Josephson-Storm is the featured speaker at JCRT's online conference, Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare, which starts tomorrow. If you read the essay and disagree with where I landed, write to me. I'd like to hear it.
Tags : notes publication jcrt critical-theory religious-studies
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