From obsession with origins to damaged individual lives.
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | By examining the intersections between Foucault's genealogical approach, Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of instrumental reason, and Nietzsche's concept of the damaged individual lives, this paper argues for an understanding of events that move beyond the naive faith in historical reason. For Michel Foucault, genealogy is about disrupting the teleological narrative about reason in history. The genealogical theoretical alternative consists of keeping up passing events' singularity released from the passion for origins. Interpretations oriented to disclosing coherence, rationality, and continuity, making historical events into elements in a configuration, are unmasked by genealogy as actualisations of the myth of descent. However, the endlessly repeated dramas of domination, in which mythologies of descent play a significant role, also link singular historical events into an arrangement. The paper focuses on the critical function of the categories of life and mortal body, which, along with the formal category of power, makes it possible for genealogy to articulate evaluative judgments about changes. In this line, this paper also explores how current, socially rationalised dispositifs demand the mythic sacrifice of individual lives, for instance, in wars and road violence events, and call for mundane experimentation on ourselves. |
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