ABSTRACT
Traditional political theory treats language as referential, and the utopian impulse is an impulse toward an ideal as opposed to an interest-laden referent. Seeing language as a stock of discursive assets that constitute sets of enabling and disenabling human identities and enabling versus disenabling social locations, genealogical writing is oppositional. Embracing non-absolutist notions of the real, the good, and the true, Habermas envisions the possibility of a form of Utopian politics that can only be approached within a conversational space that exists outside of the impositions of partisan forms of power on language. Genealogical interpretation is most familiar as an approach to power in the later historical investigations of Michel Foucault. The construction of the "body" as an object-effect of discursive practices rather than as an independent referent of statements effects a powerful reversal. In the Middle Ages, the spaces of European societies were imaginative constructions produced within the dominant religious discourses of the period.
