Genealogy as a Philosophical Method: A Radical View

Abstract

Genealogy has fractured and multiplied. The recent interest in genealogy has brought us affirmative, conceptual, debunking, pragmatic, problematizing, subversive, and vindicatory genealogies, each of which uses different means on different objects for different aims. Genealogists with even the slightest speck of Nietzschean sympathies should rejoice and appreciate the irony that the philosophical hammer supposed to crush the idea of a singular origin has turned into an assorted toolbox. For there is, naturally, no true genealogy.
Yet something is lost by severing genealogy from some of its bitterer roots, namely (a) the destruction of the origin, (b) the emphasis on conflicts out of which ideas, concepts and practices emerge, as well as (c) the spotlight on the bodies on which this violent history leaves its mark. We witness a form of sweetening, as genealogy is stripped from those features that once held the promise for an alternative way of doing philosophy.