GENEALOGICAL CRITIQUE IN THE LATER WORK OF MICHEL FOUCAULT
Open Access
- Author:
- Kurdys, Joshua
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 30, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Charles Edward Scott, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Charles Edward Scott, Committee Member
Dennis Schmidt, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Vincent M Colapietro, Committee Member
Nancy A Tuana, Committee Member
Jeffrey Nealon, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Enlightenment
Genealogy
Critique
Criticism
Political Philosophy
Michel Foucault
History of Philosophy - Abstract:
- “Genealogical Critique in the Later Work of Michel Foucault” attempts to explain the political stakes of Michel Foucault’s strategy of genealogical critique by examining genealogy as both an attempt to affect and an effect of biopolitics. In examining the critical, historical and political dimensions of genealogical critique, I show that Foucault situates his work between a set of critical requirements rooted in Enlightenment attempts to rationalize history and a network of institutional practices that discipline bodies and normalize populations. Since the nineteenth century these projects of critique, discipline and normalization have grown into a decentered apparatus of power and knowledge that resists systematic analysis. Rather than pursuing systematic theoretical closure, genealogy reveals both discursive and non-discursive biopolitical investments in systematic accounts of political practices and identifies the ways in which liberal discourses contribute to effects of domination that marginalize individuals on the basis of class, gender, race, sexuality and culture. One effect of this revelation is to momentarily paralyze the regular effects of biopower in order to mobilize previously ignored opportunities for critical practice. Characteristic of its questioning of systematic critique, the project proceeds through a series of episodic provocations. The first moment of provocation concerns attempts to render the theoretical underpinnings of genealogical critique. I show that Foucault highlights the historicity and contingency of genealogical criticism by first linking it to Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment critical traditions, before raising the question of this tradition’s practical political investments. The second moment of provocation examines Foucault’s refusal to construct a theory of power capable of articulating the enduring practical conditions linking knowledge and power before concluding with a discussion of the strategic commitments of that refusal. Finally, the third moment of provocation evaluates the political significance of Foucault’s strategic use of genealogical critique by examining the impact of genealogy on feminism, queer theory, critical philosophy of race and postcolonial theory. Within these discourses, genealogy effectively paralyzes existing standards of evaluation and thereby serves as a basis for experimenting with the possibility of inventing new critical practices.