## **Foucault’s Genealogical Method** ![[foucault.jpg.webp]] Foucault adopts the term “genealogy” partly from [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], but reshapes it into a distinctive way of [[Writing]] history—not a search for origins, but an inquiry into **how certain practices, forms of knowledge, and types of person came to be**. ### **1. Anti-origin and anti-essence** Genealogy rejects the idea that phenomena have a single, pure, or foundational origin. Foucault emphasises instead a tangled field of forces, accidents, struggles, and contingencies. In _Nietzsche, Genealogy, History_ he calls this: - **“a history of the present”**—a way of revealing how what feels natural or inevitable is in fact the outcome of past battles. ### **2. Knowledge and power are inseparable** Genealogy examines the **power/knowledge** formations that produce particular truths. It shows how institutions, scientific discourses, administrative techniques, and everyday practices shape what counts as normal, pathological, healthy, criminal, or moral. Genealogy therefore focuses on: - medical classifications, - prison and disciplinary mechanisms, - sexuality, - psychiatry, - norms of behaviour, - techniques of self-examination and confession. Each is treated not as an objective truth but as a **product of power relations**. ### **3. Focus on practices, not ideas** Rather than starting with concepts or doctrines, Foucault tracks the small, often mundane practices that accumulate into historical formations. Examples include: - early prison timetables, - school examinations, - hospital record-keeping, - administrative statistics, - early medical and moral taxonomies. Genealogy is therefore concrete, [[Empirical]], and archival. ### **4. Discontinuity instead of smooth historical development** Genealogy highlights **ruptures**, shifts, and discontinuities. It resists the idea that history is a linear progression toward enlightenment. Instead, it uncovers how new forms of power arise through breaks, crises, and reconfigurations. ### **5. The production of subjectivity** Perhaps most importantly, genealogy shows how power produces forms of **subjectivity**—the way individuals understand themselves and govern their own conduct. This includes: - the “delinquent,” - the “homosexual,” - the “madman,” - the “moral self,” - the “normal” subject. Foucault treats these as historical constructs, not timeless human types. ### **6. Critique by historicising** Genealogy is a mode of critique. By showing that current norms emerged from contingent and often violent processes, it destabilises their authority. What seems necessary becomes visible as **historically produced and therefore changeable**. This is the critical function: not to judge the past, but to free the present from the illusion that its forms are natural. --- ## **Summary** Foucault’s genealogy is: - a **history of the present**, - tracing how power and knowledge create norms, truths, and selves, - emphasising [[Index/Dictionary/contingency]], conflict, and discontinuity, - aimed at revealing the constructed nature of what feels inevitable. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`