Writing genealogies: an exploration of Foucault's strategies for doing research

Abstract

In following Foucault, I think that I have become passionately interested in a wider shift in the European intellectual landscape: the return of ethics as a primary issue in the philosophical agenda, after so many years of the primary position of politics. I think that far from abandoning politics, this shift has been working towards redefining the subject(s) of politics and the very notion of P/politics itself. Following Foucault's intellectual paths, and especially his suggestion for writing genealogies, turned out to be an exciting adventure. There were a lot of things to be discovered. Foucault had used the term 'genealogy' to describe his work, but he insisted on not following any certain methodology to do that. On the contrary he was against all closed types of methodologies and instead he was continually slipping away from being committed to any of them. His intellectual work has been rather a move to go 'beyond' any existing theories and/or methodologies, yet he kept on referring again and again to his works as genealogies. This paper is therefore focusing on the very ontology of the Foucauldian genealogy, being aware of the vanity of any attempt to frame the Foucauldian genealogy as a closed method for research, but at the same time acknowledging the need to map the Foucauldian genealogy in a cartography of contemporary problematics upon social and historical research.