Genealogy, critical theory, history

Abstract

Marx was most likely far from the forefront of Michel Foucault’s mind when he wrote “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in 1971.1 Nonetheless, there is little reason to doubt that Foucault considered it as effective a critique of Marx as of any other nineteenth-century historicist. Already in The Order of Things of 1966, Foucault had consigned Marx to a nineteenth-century epistemic order that he characterized in terms of the ultimate convergence of “historicity” with “the human essence.” It was in this context that he had made his famous remark that Marxism’s debates with bourgeois economics amounted to “no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool,” insofar as Marx’s thought “exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: That is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.” 2 Given that Foucault would only grow more virulent in his anti- Marxism as the years passed, there can be little doubt that his later genealogical critique was also presumed to encompass Marx in its embrace.