What is genealogy?

Michel Foucault, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Michel Foucault answers

Genealogy is grey — documentary, relentless in its erudition, attentive to the singular and the accidental rather than to the grand arc of meaning.1 What it refuses, above all, is the search for origins in the metaphysical sense: the Ursprung, the pure point of departure, the moment when a thing was most itself before history had touched it.2

That refusal is not mere methodological scruple; it is the central gesture. A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for origins — it will cultivate instead the details and accidents that accompany every beginning, attending scrupulously to their petty malice, awaiting their emergence as the face of the other.3

The vocabulary matters here. Nietzsche's own usage distinguishes, when it is precise, between Ursprung on one side and Herkunft and Entstehung on the other. Herkunft — provenance, descent, ancient affiliation to a group — refers to the proliferation of events, the dispersal of a thing across its multiple and discontinuous appearances. Entstehung — emergence — is not a point of origin but the scene where forces arrive, where dominators and dominated play out their game, always at a remove from any first moment.456

What emerges from this distinction is that the different emergences we locate are not successive figures of an identical meaning; they are effects of substitution, replacement, displacement — disguised conquests.7 Genealogy demands patience and a vast accumulation of source material; its monuments are built from discreet and apparently insignificant truths, never from large and well-meaning errors.8

It does not oppose itself to history the way a philosopher's lofty gaze opposes the molelike perspective of the scholar — on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies.9 What I called genealogy in the lectures of 1975-76 is the coupling of scholarly erudition with local memories — a way of constituting a historical knowledge of struggles and making use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.10

It is not an empiricism, not a positivism, not a scientism that validates itself by contrast with speculation. It is, more precisely, an insurrection of knowledges — not against the contents or methods of science as such, but against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization of any scientific discourse.11

Genealogy plays local, discontinuous, disqualified knowledges off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to filter, organize, and hierarchize them in the name of a true body of knowledge held by the few.12 History is the concrete body of becoming, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its feverish agitations, its fainting spells; only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin.13

Sources

  1. Foucault begins by describing genealogy as grey—a quotation of Nietzsche taken from a phrase by Goethe quoted by Hegel: 'theory is grey.' Genealogy is documentary, relentless in its erudition; it locates the singularity of events where it was thought there was no history.
    Lectures on the Will to Know, College de France 1970-1971, p. 274
  2. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for 'origins.'
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 415
  3. A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their 'origins,' will never neglect as inaccessible all the episodes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 418
  4. In Nietzsche, we find two uses of the word Ursprung. The first is unstressed, and it is found alternately with other terms such as Entstehung, Herkunft, Abkunft, Geburt.
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 415
  5. Provenance refers to the proliferation of events, that is to the 'disparate' of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
    Lectures on the Will to Know, College de France 1970-1971, p. 274
  6. Emergence, on the other hand, is the placeless theater where the same play of dominators and dominated is repeated.
    Lectures on the Will to Know, College de France 1970-1971, p. 274
  7. The different emergences that we may locate are not the successive figures of an identical meaning; they are so many effects of substitutions, replacements and displacements, disguised conquests.
    Lectures on the Will to Know, College de France 1970-1971, p. 274
  8. Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its 'cyclopean monuments' are constructed from 'discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method'; they cannot be the product of 'large and well-meaning errors.'
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 415
  9. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies.
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 415
  10. If you like, we can give the name 'genealogy' to this coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.
    Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 31–32
  11. They are about the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.
    Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 31–32
  12. It is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few.
    Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 31–32
  13. History is the concrete body of becoming; with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin.
    Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 418