What Does It Mean to Diagnose the Present?

I argue that, in Michel Foucault's work, archaeology and genealogy both have a diagnostic function, and in fact that they depend on each other to implement it. They should therefore be construed as the two aspects of the same method whose aim is to diagnose the present. I claim that, in turn, diagnosing the present does not consist in describing “what is happening” as a journalist would do, nor in a hermeneutical or therapeutic endeavor, but in showing that our present is characterized by difference and rupture. It is a laborious task that requires careful historical-philosophical work in order to “fragilize” our present—which, far from being stable and immobile, is revealed to be a site of perpetual change, actual and possible. The aim of Foucault’s archaeological-genealogical method is, I conclude, precisely to awaken us to the live possibilities for transformation that our present harbors.