Post-Structuralism and History Writing

Genealogy as a critique of subjectivity

Abstract

Far from being the foundation of history, the subject is the effect of the social practices that constitute it in the midst of a field of forces marked by relations of domination and practices of freedom. These are dense questions in relation to which the genealogy proposed by Michel Foucault, based on his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, presents elements for thinking about and carrying out historical research into the modes of constitution of the subject, that is, to carry out the critical history of subjectivity. This text aims to analyze Foucauldian genealogy within the scope of poststructuralist philosophy and the philosophy of difference, mapping the following theoretical-methodological aspects: a) the characterization of poststructuralism as a philosophical movement with radical propositions in relation to the history of western philosophy; b) the critique of the notion of subject in historiography; b) the problematization of the concept of power in Foucauldian genealogy from the concept of “force” inherited from Nietzsche, without reducing the relations of power/force to the notion of violence. In this way, the study aims to contribute to a mapping that introduces, in theoretical and methodological terms, the central aspects of Foucauldian genealogy – in the articulation and differentiation with interlocutors such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Judith Butler, for example – characterizing terminologies and procedures that, in the within the scope of the theory and methodology of history, allow (re)design objects of study, forms of problematization and criticism of modernity, subjectivity and historiography as a field of knowledge.