Abstract

Michel Foucault is one of the most emblematic figures of postmodernism, who included a wide range of social-historical, philosophical-epistemological, cultural-anthropological issues through his numerous works. There is a rich assortment of matters in the works of Foucault: from his early interests in psychology and madness, through the birth of modern medicine and humanities, to the analysis of disciplining forms of the history of sexuality. By opposing modern views, he valorizes the peculiar effectiveness of the individual, discontinuous, and local critique compared to the driving effect of global and totalitarian theories, both on the theoretical and political level, although he acknowledges that theories such as Marxism and psychoanalysis created easier tools for local research, however he believed that they are reductionist and imposing in practice, and should be replaced by a plurality of forms of knowledge and microanalysis. Genealogy is one of the key notions in his philosophy, through which he aimed at problematizing the truth of our everydayness: our bodies (sexuality), our social institutions (prisons, schools, hospitals, families) and scientific norms (normality, madness, health and diseases) which are in fact objects produced in historically changeable relations of power. The genealogical analysis suggested by Foucault aims to destroy the unity of the well-known and natural objects of our experience, at the same time being aware that such a political will is not created in theory but it needs action and people who would operate in such a way. The purpose of this paper is to examine genealogy through the prism of Foucault’s thought and its relation to power.