Genealogy, Critical Theory, History

arx was most likely far from the forefront of Michel Foucault’s mind when he wrote “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in 1971. Nonetheless, there is little reason to doubt that Foucault considered it as effective a critique ofMarx as of any other nineteenth-century historicist. Already in The Order of Things of 1966, Foucault had consigned Marx to a nineteenth-century epistemic order that he characterized in terms of the ultimate convergence of “historicity” with “the human essence.” It was in this context that he had made his famous remark that Marxism’s debates with bourgeois economics amounted to “no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool,” insofar as Marx’s thought “exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.” Given that Foucault would only grow more virulent in his antiMarxism as the years passed, there can be little doubt that his later genealogical critique was also presumed to encompass Marx in its embrace. This short article represents, as much as anything, the distillate of my experience as someone who came of age at the apex of Foucault’s anglophone influence in the late 1980s and 1990s, who taught works by both Foucault and Marx in the Social Sciences Core at theUniversity of Chicago, andwho thus had the opportunity to discuss themextensively inweekly instructormeetings under the leadership ofMoishe Postone, from 1998 to 2007. What, it asks, does Postone’s postfoundationalist and posthistoricist reading ofMarx look like when examined through the lens of Foucault’s case for Nietzschean genealogy? Foucault’s acute critique of historicism makes it possible to readMarx’s writings with a sharper eye to their conceptual distance from the variety of nineteenth-century historicism to which Foucault himself consigned them. Insofar as genealogy proves to have no critical purchase onMarx’s theoretical approach, however, Marx’s analysis of social form remains available to postfoundationalism as a framework that embraces categorial reflexivity as the basis for a radical critique of social domination from a standpoint immanent to social form.