Genealogy as Critical Practice: Toward a Reading of Affective Genealogy

In this paper, I develop a reading of Foucauldian genealogy as a mode of critical political practice. I argue that the Anglo-American interpretation of Foucauldian genealogy has been dominated by a reading which I call conceptual genealogy. On this reading, genealogy—as a form of Kantian critique which seeks to uncover the conditions of possibility of a given social formation—is an intellectual-epistemic enterprise that is denunciatory and only ever preparatory for politics. I argue that this reading fails to account for the fundamentally felt worldmaking and we-making effects which Foucault's texts have on their readers, what I will call affective genealogy. The production of feelings, I argue, constitutes a positive political element of Foucauldian genealogy to the extent that it highlights aspects of our world that should matter and ties us to transhistorical and trans-geographical communities of resistance. In order to show that Foucault intended his genealogies to have this positive aspect, I argue, we should be more attentive to Nietzsche's modification of Kantian critique and the genealogy of critique, which is central to his understanding of critique as a transgressive social practice. I argue that the effect of worldmaking and we-making affects in making certain things matter over and above others means that they are normatively significant. In closing, I suggest a number of ways in which these insights into genealogy as a mode of critical political practice that functions through the production of worldmaking and we-making feelings can be elaborated in a broader theory of affective genealogy.