Overview

A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities—and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history. The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference. Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.513kg
ISBN:  

9780226847313

ISBN 10:   0226847314
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   06 April 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Table of Contents

A Note on Texts and Translations Introduction: In the Coils of the Ouroboros Part 1: A History of the Genealogical Present 1: The Dominion of Genealogy History in Black Leather Foucault Ascendant The First Charge: The Hegemony of Genealogy 2: Genealogical Regimes Genealogy’s Bodies Genealogy’s Power Effects Genetic Genealogy The Second Charge: Genealogy as Power   Part 2: The Chimera of Origins 3: Nietzsche as Progenitor Against the Genealogists The Emergence of a Genealogical Polemic The Untimely Historian Dismantling “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 4: Genealogy’s Shadows: Bataille, Wahl, Deleuze Nietzsche Dismembered Monstrous Nietzsche Rhizomes The Third Charge: The Phantom of Origins   Part 3: Genealogy as Mask 5: Foucault: Confessions of a Structuralist The Black Monk and the Archaeology of Foucault’s Structuralism The Bonfire of Structuralism The Road to Genealogy 6: Foucault in the Coils of Genealogy Nietzschean Genealogy as Pedigree and Power Foucault’s Nietzsche Course and Notes “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Revisited Genealogy as Joyful Science The Fourth Charge: The Mask of Method   Conclusion: Beyond the Autodestruction of Genealogy Against Automatic Criticism Toward a Metamodern Historiography Acknowledgments Notes Index  

Reviews

“An evocative work of immanent critique, The Genealogy of Genealogy exposes the epistemic dangers, institutional hierarchies, racist filiation with eugenics, and moral hypocrisies embedded in ‘genealogy’ as critical method. Storm brilliantly foments ‘genealogical anxiety’ in this Foucauldian reader through a powerful call to meet critique with world-building, to recognize contingencies alongside continuities, and to displace genealogy’s hegemony with the urgent ethical and political needs of our present. Storm’s labyrinth is Foucauldian in ethos, fascinating in critical force, and disruptive of moralizing critique.” -- Niki Kasumi Clements, Rice University “Storm has confronted an evasive problem: What are we to do about genealogy once we understand it as a method of inquiry and a social worldview tied to racial hierarchies? His answer is historically and philosophically nuanced but clear about genealogy being used to advance the power of some while imperiling others. It is a book that will leave us talking about the genealogical method again—though this time not as a benign tool but as an orientation that disavows its own history.” -- Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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