Genealogical Foucault

Method considerations for the possibility of an analysis of power

Abstract

In an interview with Alexandre Fontana entitled “Truth and Power”, published, compiled and organized by Roberto Machado in Microfísica do poder [Microphysics of power], Michel Foucault clarifies that in his first writings, Madness and civilization (1961) and The birth of the clinic (1963), the analysis field about power was out of his league. Only after the revolutionary happenings of 1968, according to the philosopher, was fecundity possible in his analysis of power. The condition of possibility introduces itself in the genealogy as a GRADE of intelligibility to the study of power. This article, presented in the 19th Philosophy Week at UFG [Federal University of Goiás], intends to discourse about the text Nietzsche, genealogy, history (1971), considering that it is in this writing that the genealogical method, which one will find throughout Foucault’s work, is more mature in the 1970’s and, from the instrumentation of this method, the analysis of power will possibly be clarified, as the author proposes.