Foucault’s Genealogy of Power and Conception of Resistance: A Critique Onur Bilginer

Abstract

In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault portrays genealogy as the opposite of the methodology that searches for pure forms, a linear progress of morality, and a monotonous finality in history. His genealogical method gets rid of the constituent (transcendental) subject itself in order to “arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (Foucault, 1984, p. 59). Also, it relates the constitution of knowledge, power, ethics, and subjectivity to events instead of structures. As opposed to the structuralists who decry the concept of event as the site of the irrational, Foucault (1984) places the event at the center of his analysis on the belief that there exists “a whole order of levels of different types of events, differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects” (p. 56). And he defines the goal of genealogical studies as to differentiate the networks and levels of such events and to figure out the ways in which they are linked to one another. If, Foucault argues, what we have is but a history of events, history can be made intelligible to us only by making “a genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments and tactics” (1984, p. 56).