The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History - Paperback

by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm (Author)

A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history.

The genealogical method--a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power--has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference.

Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.

Author Biography

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, both published by the University of Chicago Press.