Genealogy (n.) is a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness thoughout the course of history.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical approach which seeks to destroy the primacy of origins, of unchanging truths, or progress.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method predicated on the notion that the largest philosophical problem is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method which avoids the search for depth. Instead, it seeks the surfaces of events, which is to say small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method which brings dissenting opinions, illegitimate knowledge, local beliefs and local understandings into play against authoritative and unitary bodies of theory. It does so not in order to justify or undermine the present, but in order to clarify problem spaces.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method which is fundamentally against the idea of depth. Questions which were traditionally held to be the deepest and murkiest are truly and literally the most superficial.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method which seeks to reconstruct the function of a text not according to the rules of the formation of its concepts (i.e. Archaeology), but according to its objectives, the strategies that govern it, and the program of political action it proposes.
Genealogy (n.) is a historical method which sets out to record the singularity of events outside of finality.
Genealogy (n.) is a method concerned with objectives, strategies, and political action. Archaeology is concerned with rules of formation of its concepts.
Genealogy (n.) is a method of history which claims not that i'm right and the others are wrong, but merely that the others are wrong to claim that they are right.
Genealogy (n.) is a methodological restraint which refrains from making deductions based on the contingency that has made us what we are (which can never be known), and instead explores the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.
Genealogy (n.) is a non-theoretical form of investigation into a past that proceeds by problematizing one's own modern subject positions.
Genealogy (n.) is a way of remaining on the outside while being on the inside. It is problematization, which is not an attempt to survive the end in order to re-end... by going into the ground, it attempts to survive the beginning in order to re-begin.
Genealogy (n.) is an informalism in that it attempts to make us forget the form of the present in order to remember the 'non-place' (non-lieu ).
Genealogy (n.) is concerned with 'how that-which-is has not always been,' and 'why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is'.
Genealogy (n.) is concerned with discontinuities where others found continuous development. It finds recurrences and play where others found progress and seriousness.
Genealogy (n.) is concerned with historical situations where discursive practices are interwoven with social practices.
Genealogy (n.) is concerned with serious things which are taken as lighthearted whereas archaeology is concerned with meaningless things which are taken seriously.
Genealogy (n.) is concerned with the idea that there is no thing underlying appearances whereas archaeology is cerned with regularities of the discursive formation which are given a kind of post hoc independence.
Genealogy (n.) is distinguished from historicism. But it's opposite. It is not questioning universals by using history as a critical method, but rather, starting from the decision that universals do not exist, asking what kind of history we can do.