Theorizing the Human Sciences in the Age of Absolute Disruption: Historical Criticism and Its Remainders

Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm's trilogy, *The Myth of Disenchantment* (2017), *Metamodernism* (2021), and *The Genealogy of Genealogy* (2026), can be read as standalone theoretical interventions or as parts of a singular project. In this essay, I argue that when read together, the books explore four questions: whether a thing exists, how it arose and why it persists, what grounds our claims about it, and whether it is desirable. I will argue that the project is strongest where its concrete analyses keep those questions distinct (the Frazer and Crowley chapters of *Myth*, the social-kinds ontology of *Metamodernism*, the Nietzsche and Jean Wahl reception history of *Genealogy*) and at its most interesting when doing a careful reading of Weber and about genealogy's institutional hegemony along with its eugenic inheritance. Its proposals do not stand or fall as a system; they work as nodes in the network of humanities theory after critique, and I follow each into its reception. Moving beyond the glib sort of relativism, of to every person their own truth, the books defend fallible inquiry after critique without treating historical situatedness as a condemnation of knowledge.