ABSTRACT The present article extracts the normative and the crypto-normative from the polemical contexts in which they have been deployed as charges to study them in their more affirmative dimensions. Polemics increasingly contribute to a disabling dismissal of normativity that ultimately blocks nuanced re-conceptualizations of normative operations. Against this backdrop, the article attempts a first theorization of crypto-normativity as a concept in its own right independently from the Habermasian-Foucauldian polemics that initially framed it. However, instead of emerging as an escape (...) route from normativity, crypto-normativity is defended as part and parcel of a broader set of normative “technologies” that assist human beings in their critical reshuffling of themselves and of their realities. (shrink)