Foucault’s ‘philosophy of the event’: Genealogical Method and the Deployment of the Abnormal

Abstract

This chapter can be read in at least two ways. It is first and foremost a close-text exposition of Foucault’s approach to genealogy, undertaken so as to avoid the shortcomings of many standard forms of discourse analysis as practiced within psychology.¹ It is also, more generally, a commentary on the strategic value of ‘effective history’ as it might inform qualitative research as a mode of critique. Foucault offers us less than a structured ‘methodology’ of genealogy; his late genealogical works create a methodological rhythm of their own, as Tamboukou (1999) puts it, ensuring no certain procedures of analysis. What Foucault does offer is a set of profound philosophical and methodological suspicions towards the objects of knowledge that we confront, a set of suspicions that stretch to our relationships to such objects, and to the uses to which such related knowledges are put. Foucault’s genealogical method, in short, is a methodology of suspicion and critique, an array of de-familiarizing procedures and re-conceptualizations that pertain not just to any object of human science knowledge, but to any procedure (or position) of human science knowledge-production.

And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.

(Foucault, 1980b, p. 117)