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The companion piece to an article on the shortcomings of much discourse analysis in psychology, this paper offers an exposition of Foucault's genealogical method as a mode of critique better able to accommodate those dimensions of discourse (history, materiality, the conditions of possibility underwriting ‘knowledge’) less facilitated by more textually focused or less historically sensitive models. Opening with a discussion of Foucault's ‘epistemology of critique’ and moving to a close reading of his Nietzsche, genealogy history (1977a) this paper both extends Foucault's analytical principles for the analysis of discourse (reversal, discontinuity, specificity, exteriority) and develops, through a series of methodological injunctions (the category of the ‘event’, the dissipation of the object, the effacement of the self-constituting subject, the prioritization of the procedures of ‘emergence’ and ‘descent’), an account of genealogy as a mode of effective critique.
Derek Hook (2005) studied this question.