On the morals of genealogy

Abstract

The article describes how an intellectual community of those following French trends in the academy have, for the past forty years, been offering a mistaken reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of genealogy. The essay shows how Nietzsche mocks moral psychologists by calling them genealogists, contrasts Nietzsche's work with that of genealogists, and then documents how subsequent academics, encouraged by the work of Gilles Deleuze and, in turn, Michel Foucault, created a revaluation of genealogy's meaning, thereby fetishizing their own scholarly authority.