The Uncanny Effect of Telling Genealogies (original) (raw)
Related papers
In Foucault’s later works, experience and embodiment become important for explaining the normative constitution of the subject: for norms to be effective, discourses are insufficient – they must be experienced and embodied. Practices of “discipline” inscribe power constellations and discourses into subjective experience and bodies. In his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he turns this “violent” form of normative embodiment into an ethical perspective by referring to the Stoic tradition. Even though Foucault never developed a notion of experience and embodiment himself, his ideas can be re-read and complemented from a phenomenological perspective. The article tries to investigate the role of bodily experience and practice in Foucault’s Genealogy and to bring it into dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the lived body. It will attempt to show that concepts like sedimentation and habituality can help to explain how cultural norms not only influence the way we think about, but also how we perceive and are affected by the world. This operation of norms happens already at the lowest stages of experience, where embodied experience leaves its traces, in sedimentation and habitualization. These passive layers of experience are permeable to historical discourses, so that norms are literally inscribed in the body. These are the foundations for what I seek to define as normative embodiment.
The Genealogy of Genealogy: Foucault’s 1970-1971 Course on The Will to Know
2012
As a thinker, Michel Foucault was fond of discontinuities and ruptures. He once joked that his entry in the Petit Larousse dictionary read: "Foucault: A philosopher who founds his theory of history on discontinuity." 2 Yet Foucault was not only a student of ruptures; he was also a practitioner. Indeed, his intellectual career is characterized by at least two major breaks, when he succumbed to new interests, retooled his methodology, and tackled a fresh set of theoretical questions. Between 1969 and 1975, Foucault traded in the philosophical project he called "archaeology"-which endeavors to trace the contours of possible knowledge at specific historical periods through an examination of shifting discourses and "historical a prioris"-for what he called "genealogy," which chronicles the ways in which successive power configurations govern bodies and populations, create forms of subjectivity, and weave themselves inextricably into systems of knowledge. Between 1977 and 1984-in the very middle of writing his history of sexuality-genealogy, in turn, gave way to an exploration of the historical construction of individuality, which he alternately dubbed "techniques of the self" or the "hermeneutics of the subject." 3 Shortly before his death, Foucault expressed no regrets about this penchant for philosophical self-reinvention: "There are times in life," he mused, "when the 1 Helpful insight on this article was provided
‘Method’ is usually a ‘means’ towards an ‘end’ (a ‘way’). As such, method stands midway of an assumption/hypothesis and an end. For example, one may start with the hypothesis that there is an increasing tendency for individuals to commit suicide in modern societies and that individual decisions to give an end to one’s life are affected by the different forms of social solidarity in different societies. One would then need a ‘method’ whereby to test the above hypothesis. Accordingly, one may proceed by using and analyzing the suicide statistics of different societies. The goal would then be to identify different types of suicide. These turn out to be four; namely, “egotistic”, “anomic”, “altruistic” and “fatalistic” suicides (E. Durkheim, "Suicide"). Can genealogy operate in the same way? This paper discusses what Foucauldian genealogy consists in, while showing Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche. A simple definition of Foucauldian genealogy would be that it is a type of history. However, it is a specific type of history. Foucault’s genealogical history seeks to deconstruct what was previously regarded as unified (i.e. history as a chronological pattern of events emanating from a mystified but all-determining point of departure), while also attempting to identify an underlying continuity which is the product of “discontinuous systematicities” (OD*, p. 69). Moreover, in contrast to the Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history, ‘genealogy’ is not an holistic project but a perspectival enterprise. Foucauldian genealogy is an history of tracing ‘origins’ and, as such, it questions the idea of origins or deeper meanings. It unearths the force relations operating in particular events and historical developments. Foucault describes his genealogy as an “effective history” (NGH**, pp. 87-90). Foucauldian genealogy debunks the assumption underlying conventional historiography that there are ‘facts’ to be interpreted; rather, facts are themselves constructed out of the researcher’s ‘will to truth’. Furthermore, Foucauldian genealogy shows how ‘subjects’ are constituted in discourses ("Discipline and Punish"; "The History of Sexuality", Vol. 1). The paper also discusses Foucault’s “analytics”*** of power and the extent to which genealogy is a critique. * “The Order of Discourse”, in R. Young (ed.), "Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader" (Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). ** “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). *** Foucault insisted that he did not offer a “theory” but an “analytics” of power.
Explanation and evaluation in Foucault's genealogy of morality
European Journal of Philosophy, 2022
Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative conclusions can be established. Although such methods provide diverging ways of pursuing genealogical inquiry, they typically con- verge in eschewing historiographic methodology, in favor of a uniquely philosophical approach. In contrast, one genealogist who drew on historiographic methodology is Michel Foucault. This article presents the motivations and advantages of Foucault's genealogical use of such a methodology. It advances two mains claims. First, that Foucault's early 1970s work employs a distinct genealogical method, which borrows from contemporary historiographic models of explanation to expand the range of objects that are proper to genealogical accounts of historical change. I demonstrate how Foucault modifies two central commitments of Nietzsche by broadening the dimensions of genealogical inquiry and explanation. Second, that historical method has normative relevance for genealogy, insofar as different historiographic choices can lead to different normative conclusions. I motivate this second claim by explaining how Foucault's multidimensional genealogical method expands both (a) the range of objects that are subject to evaluative assessment, and (b) the set of possible prescriptive recommendations that follow from such assessment.
What is a “history of the present”? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions
Punishment & Society, 2014
In this article Michel Foucault’s method of writing a “history of the present” is explained, together with its critical objectives and its difference from conventional historiography. Foucault’s shift from a style of historical research and analysis conceived as “archaeology” to one understood as “genealogy” is also discussed, showing how the history of the present deploys genealogical inquiry and the uncovering of hidden conflicts and contexts as a means of re-valuing the value of contemporary phenomena. The article highlights the critical observations of present-day phenomena from which a history of the present begins, paying particular attention to Foucault’s concept of “ dispositif” and his method of problematization. Foucault’s analyses of Bentham’s Panopticon, of the disciplinary sources of the modern prison, and of the technology of confession are discussed by way of illustration.
Genealogy and history: From 'Discipline and Punish' and after
This paper deals with the question of method in Foucault with his work ‘Discipline and Punish’ as the vantage point. While it is true that the Foucault we have read in the postcolonial world is the import through American Academia which has given it to us with the complementary attachment of an individualistic level of analysis. And American Feminist writings are to blame for this individualist Foucault who is advocating for identity politics. We need to ask ourselves, is this the same militant Foucault of May 1968, France uprising?
Foucault’s ‘philosophy of the event’: genealogical method and the deployment of the abnormal
2007
And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (Foucault, 1980b, p. 117) This chapter can be read in at least two ways. It is first and foremost a close-text exposition of Foucault's approach to genealogy, undertaken so as to avoid the shortcomings of many standard forms of discourse analysis as practiced within psychology. 1 It is also, more generally, a commentary on the strategic value of 'effective history' as it might inform qualitative research as a mode of critique. Foucault offers us less than a structured 'methodology' of genealogy; his late genealogical works create a methodological rhythm of their own, as Tamboukou (1999) puts it, ensuring no certain procedures of analysis. What Foucault does offer is a set of profound philosophical and methodological suspicions towards the objects of knowledge that we confront, a set of suspicions that stretch to our relationships to such objects, and to the uses to which such related knowledges are put. Foucault's genealogical method, in short, is a methodology of suspicion and critique, an array of defamiliarizing procedures and re-conceptualizations that pertain not just to any object of human science knowledge, but to any procedure (or position) of human science knowledge-production. Following the style of the previous chapter, my discussion here will take the form of a reading of Foucault's most pertinent single document regards the question at hand, in this case Foucault's (1977b) 138